Learning about PPAs for fun and profit

I have been investigating some of the ways people can use launchpad to do cool stuff. About a month ago my friend Flavio daCosta inquired about Novell's kickass clock, intlclock:

Neat huh? He had to apply some changes to get it to build in gutsy, and we decided that we should go through the entire process together to try to understand how bzr and launchpad work together.

So we registered it on launchpad, we designated my bzr branch as "trunk", and then Flav registered his own branch to do some feature work. We even managed to pry Ken VanDine away from hg for a few minutes, and then he too had a branch, this time with some de-yastification patches (We need to call the Ubuntu time config thing, not yast.)

* time passes *

Today I realized "Oh, I better set up that ppa so we can have binaries for people" Three more people had registered bzr branches on launchpad. I was able to inspect their branches, which were packaging fixes mostly, and merge them right into my branch. Then I pushed it back out, and now ppa is building the binaries.

I have no idea who those three people are, I had never met them in my life. Yet while Flav, Ken and I were busy doing other stuff, people stumbled across this on launchpad and just fixed stuff up.

Why I think this is cool:

Ever look for something and you end up with a .deb package attached to a 45 page thread on the forums? Then it ends up it's from 2 years ago or something and whoever made the deb left it around? Or the guy built it for amd64 and you're running i386 or something?

I can get hit by a truck tomorrow and the community can continue to maintain the package and then publish them to a PPA. Users can follow their favorite PPAs for software that they want, and no more out-of-date attachments on the internet! And this is just a clock, wait until you see the other stuff!

You can play with the clock by adding this url to your software sources, the package name is "intlclock":

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jorge/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

There's an issue with not being able to set the time right now (doh!), but top men are looking into it. This ppa will only be around for gutsy because our friendly neighborhood GNOME developers will be putting this upstream by default for 2.22!

Link: PPA Quickstart Guide

Comments

[emmanuel]

nice! just a question: which font are you using on those screenshots? it really looks nice :-)

[Joe Smith]

I've been really busy lately, so I haven't been able to set up a PPA yet. But I can tell that it's going to help a lot of people start creating and contributing to different projects. Thanks for the Launchpad PPA link, I'm going to look through and see how many cool things I can find. :)

[acidx]

I'd like also to know which font you're using on those screenshots :)

[Sander D]

The font looks like Corbel from Windows Vista / Office 2007. Try to get those fonts (also Calibri, Segoe, Candara, Constantia and Consolas), they're great.

[Ravan]

ok, followed your instructions and put the clock on one of the panels... nice! and it works on AMD64 too :)

one thing i noticed: many menu and settings options like 'Change Date or Time' aren't localized/translated. can i help out for the dutch translation?