All About Ubuntu Flavor Development

What Makes Up A Ubuntu Flavor Operative System?

In order to create a full Ubuntu flavor, you will need to create a seeds file, a flavor meta package and at least a default settings package for that flavor, and also, set up

The Flavor Meta

The flavor meta source is a single package source, which, when built, may result in a multitude of binary meta packages. The metas themselves are always empty, but depends on a set of packages, which form what you could call a package set - the list of packages that make up that flavor.

Seeds

When building a meta package, it looks for the dependencies from what we call seeds. The seeds are basically a set of text files, where all the package dependencies are listed.

Install Tasks (correct term?)

The seeds are also used for creating "install tasks", which are selectable from a expert install medium, such as the Ubuntu netinstall.

Other Flavor Packages

At the very least, each flavor will have a package called <flavor>-default-settings. This is not an empty package, like the meta, and includes some specific system settings for that flavor.

Some flavors will have additional special packages, such as theming packages, or flavor specific applications.

The ISO

There may be several build systems. One is for the live ISO.

Ubiquity is the Live installer, and contains instructions for each flavor.

What makes up the OS

• The Packages
  • Seeds - the Flavor package set
  • The flavor Meta
  • task-installs
• Debian Packaging - uploading, syncing, merging, PPA, bzr, etc
• Strategy/Policy for package selection (flavor dependent)
• How ISOs are built (the build server)

Updates

• Bug Fixes
  • Setting Up Notification of bugs
  • Fixing bugs upstream in Debian and orig source
• SRU - Stable Release Update
• Backports

Quality Assurance

• Testing ISOs (Pre Release)
• Testing new uploads of packages
  • Setting Up Notification of changes
• Using Testing Tools - Autopilot, UTAH, scripts

Feature Development

• Software Development
• Pushing for changes upstream

Artwork

• Development Process

Tools

• The Launchpad Server
• Additional Website Services
• Development tools
  • bzr
  • git