Activity Team/Packaging

Packaging is the making of a software package for use by a package manager in Linux distributions such as Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu.

Common issues

Publish source tarballs for each release

Some packagers prefer to work from tarballs rather than the activity bundles. This is because activity bundles contain built components instead of only source code.

If your activity is part of Fructose follow Module Release instead.

Make a source tarball as follows. It will be placed inside the dist/ directory.

python setup.py dist_source

Upload it on the web. If you need a server to upload it to, ask for a shell account. When you have access, create a directory under /upload/sources/honey for your activity and copy the tarball to it.
Update the Honey table on the Source Code page with a link to the latest version. Add an entry if your activity is not yet listed.

Create a trac component for your activity

Users or packagers may report problems with your activity, either;

enable the Issues feature in the GitHub repository, or;
open a ticket on http://bugs.sugarlabs.org, under the trac component, to request a component for your activity.

Check copyright and licensing

Many translations lack copyright and licensing info completely or they provide just a boilerplate.The package maintainer should edit the .pot file to replace these:

SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE
THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
PACKAGE

When that is done, they should get in contact with each translator to make them adopt that improved boilerplate and themselves replace these:

FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>
YEAR

When doing above, it makes good sense to also tidy the gettext hints to have proper info too, but that is just nice-to-have for semi-automated processing, not crucial as the licensing problem.