I just finished attending the Ubuntu OpenWeek Session: Packaging 101, presented by dholbach, King of the MOTU! ;). It was a great presentation and I learned quite a bit. I have studied packaging before and I always ran into issues. I think his presentation made things very clear and he was great in answering the questions we ran into.
We packaged ed, a standard Unix line editor that nobody (except for one of my co-workers) actually uses, but it was a good practice run. Even with such a simple package we learned how the basic principle works, which should carry over to more real-world packages.
If you’ve been interested in packaging this is a great time to dive in. We’ve got a small window before Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid” starts and there will be help needed in merging everything and getting that release ready. I would *love* to be a part of the actual packaging for that release so you may hear more about my journey toward MOTU during this release cycle. I invite you to attend the remaining packaging related sessions at Ubuntu OpenWeek and pickup what you can. Ubuntu’s success is very much based on the strength of the MOTU and the number of quality packages it offers.
If you haven’t yet, go check out OpenWeek. Drop by #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net and join the fun!