ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Matthew Fischer <matthew.fischer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

tl;dr - We are testing mechanisms for downstreams to be able to customize
Ubuntu.

I'm part of a team that's working on Ubuntu image customization.  Image
customization is the process by which a downstream[1] can add things or
change default values for a device.

Some examples of what could be customized are:

   - Default wallpaper
   - Default ringtones
   - Additional applications
   - Additional scopes
   - Sample content
   - Additional fonts
   - Launcher icons reordering, added, removed, etc

The customization tarball that we build is the mechanism that we will use
to do this. Customization does not entail modifying the core OS bundle,
although we do have some hooks in the core bundle that enable
customization. All customization files live in /custom and are installed
using the same process that the rest of the system is installed.
Customization will only work on ubuntu-system (system-image update) images,
not the legacy builds.

In order to begin testing customization we've made a fake carrier called
"RingTel". You can make your Ubuntu phone look like a device from RingTel
by installing the saucy-customized or saucy-proposed-customized channels.
Everything we have in that bundle is sample stuff, just for us to test the
customization methods and it's not intended to resemble anything like a
shipping device. We expect things in there to frequently change and
probably break as we continue experimenting, but if you find a problem,
please file a bug against
sevilerow<https://bugs.launchpad.net/sevilerow/+filebug> or
ping mfisch, cwayne, or ssweeny in #ubuntu-touch.

1: A common downstream use case would be an OEM or carrier, but really,
anyone wanting to do a respin would use the same mechanism