unity7maintainers team mailing list archive

[Martin Wimpress <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I noticed some work has started on creating meta packages for Ubuntu Unity
[1] Here comes a brain dump ;-)


## What are seeds and meta packages?

TL;DR Seeds are a list of packages that define what you ship in your
flavour. Meta packages are built from seeds using `germinate`. The iso is
built from meta packages. AFAIK seeds have to use Bazaar.

Within seeds there is provision for what should be installed by default and
any additional packages that are specific to the live image, the one that
is used for the installer.

Here are the Ubuntu MATE seeds for bionic as a reference:

  *
https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mate-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu-mate.bionic

This document goes some way to explaining seeds and meta packages in more
detail:

  *
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RPPF14h1Sw2gQjGTuZjUIlNHnGrafS8ekhFjJM9MT00/edit

I suggest you start by creating seeds for ubuntu-unity.bionic using
https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.zesty as a
reference. In particular the following will be useful:

  *
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.zesty/view/head:/desktop
  *
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.zesty/view/head:/ship
  *
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.zesty/view/head:/ship-live

Zesty is a good starting point since it was the last release to ship Unity
but some changes will be required.


## meta packages

The meta packages for flavours are not kept under source control. It is
fine to do this for now, but when you become an official flavour you'll
find that various Ubuntu contributors will update and upload the Ubuntu
Unity meta packages (on your behalf) when important underlying platform
changes require it. This is handled is by pushing changes to your seeds and
using `dget -u -x uri://to/ubuntu-unity-meta.dsc`, running `./update` and
uploading the resulting package to the archive.


## Using Launchpad

For the projects you are hosting on Lauchpad I recommend you use Bazaar.
AFAIK, Git on Launchpad doesn't support merge proposals. I can see some
changes that need making to the current ubuntu-unity-meta package and I can
push directly, but that's a bit rude ;-)


## Supported architectures

I advise that you don't support i386. Release images for this architecture
have been dropped by Ubuntu and I intend to do the same for Ubuntu MATE
18.10. I hitched to the i386 wagon for 18.04.


That's enough for now. I think getting the seeds and meta packages in order
is a good starting point, then we can look at live-build :-)


[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-unity-meta

-- 
Regards, Martin.