After 3 weeks of hard work, where experienced app developers have been writing some really awesome apps, and in which new developers have not only started from scratch but also produced equally awesome software, we’re nearing the end of the contest. Here are some heads up notes to get your apps in shape and submitted by next Monday.
Live countdown banner by Brandon Holtsclaw
Get your submissions ready
Just a quick reminder to send your apps by next Monday: you’ve got the full weekend to finish off the final touches, but your app should be readily packaged in a proper PPA and submitted to MyApps by Monday, including the participation details file. Quoting step 4 on the main Ubuntu App Showdown page:
As the final step, you’ll get to publish your app in the Software Centre to be distributed to millions and rated and reviewed for the community vote. We ask all participants to package their apps in a Personal Package Archive (PPA), which Quickly makes really easy:
- Set up a PPA on Launchpad
- Run the following command to package and upload your app:
quickly submitubuntu - Your application (1) must be published to a PPA (2) run out of /opt, (3) only have dependencies in the Ubuntu 12.04 archive, and (4) must work correctly. Fortunately Quickly eases this with the above command. If you choose not to use Quickly and you are manually packaging it, if your application does not adhere to the above points, it will be rejected.
- IMPORTANT! While submitting your app, fill in the App Showdown Participation Details and upload it in the ‘Your application‘ field in MyApps
Troubleshooting
One of the good things about the contest, is that it’s also helped us to road test and stress out the app developer process. As such, we’ve confirmed that some parts work very well, and we’ve also uncovered some bugs along the way. If you are using Quickly, and you are affected by any of these bugs, here’s a small troubleshooting guide to help you out.
Submitted apps package fine, but fail to build on a PPA
You’ve probably hit this bug in Quickly, which means that the quickly submitubuntu command does not work as expected and fails to produce a valid package. But don’t worry, there is a fix queued up that you can install straight away. Just follow these steps:
- Open the Ubuntu Software Centre
- Click on the Edit > Software Sources… menu entry
- Ensure the Pre-released updates (precise-proposed) entry is checked (see image below)
- Click on the Close button to save changes
- You can quit the Software Center now
Then:
- Open a terminal
- Type the sudo apt-get update command, followed by Enter
- Type the sudo apt-get install quickly-ubuntu-template command, followed by Enter
This will install the fixed Quickly package, which will enable you to use the quickly submitubuntu command as usual.
After I package my app, static Quicklist entries or command-line parameters are gone from the desktop file
If you are using static quicklist entries or command-line arguments in your desktop file (the latter is not very common), you’ve hit another bug in Quickly.
As a workaround, you can do the following:
- Open a terminal
- Run quickly package --extras
- Edit the rules file in the debian folder of your project and fix that sed line
- Now run: debuild -S
- And finally run: dput ppa:yourusername/ppa ../projectname_*_source.changes
Troubleshooting
If you are getting signature errors, ensure you’ve added the following at the end of the ~/.bashrc file:
export DEBFULLNAME='Your name' export DEBEMAIL='your.email@example.com'
Note that:
- The values of DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL should match those of your GPG key.
- You’ll need to restart the terminal for the changes to have effect, or alternatively run source ~/.bashrc to reload the file
- You should check that the debian/changelog file has got a valid e-mail that matches DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL too
- You might need to update the version number in the debian/changelog file. In any case, ensure that there is no -public suffix, or anything else with -
I’ve got another issue!
In that case, use Ask Ubuntu! The site has been exploding with questions during the contest, and we’re getting lots of good answers for them too – Ask your question on Ask Ubuntu ›
Looking forward to start voting next week on all of your cool apps!
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