Download Ubuntu Packaging Guide (PDF, Epub, HTML In A Single .deb)

Daniel Holbach maintains a daily builds PPA for a project called "Ubuntu Packaging Guide" which aims to provide a set of articles for working with debian packages and Launchpad, uploading your GPG key to Launchpad (required to create a PPA), fixing bugs, getting the code via BZR, working with a PPA and so on. The guide is in its early stages (currently version 0.1.0) so it's not complete but it's already quite useful.

The guide is not meant to replace the Debian documentation but to provide Ubuntu-specific instructions:

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide is a set of articles that should help you to get involved with packaging and development of Ubuntu. It's not meant to replace other great documentation like the Debian New Maintainer's Guide or the Debian policy, but serve as a starting point with easy and simple to understand articles.

The package provides PDF, Epub and single / multiple HTML files but to get these you'll need to either add the PPA or download the .deb.

The PPA currently provides Ubuntu Packaging Guide packages for Ubuntu 11.04 only but it might get packages for older Ubuntu versions too (there was some bug which prevented the packages from building on older Ubuntu versions and then the packages were deleted). Add the PPA and install Ubuntu Packaging Guide in Ubuntu 11.04 using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-packaging-guide-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide

If you're not using Ubuntu 11.04, you can download the Ubuntu Packaging Guide .deb from HERE. But remember: the guide is constantly updated so to get the latest changes you should add the PPA!

Once installed, open Nautilus and navigate to /usr/share/doc/ubuntu-packaging-guide and you should find a file called "ubuntu-packaging-guide.pdf.gz" - you can open this with Evince. You'll also find a folder called "epub" in which you'll find an epub format for the Ubuntu Packaging guide (look for ubuntu-packaging-guide.epub.gz), as well as two folders which provide the Ubuntu Packaging Guide in HTML format.

Also see: An Introduction To Debian Pagaging PDF guide