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mloman
Asked: 2011-12-21 04:47:11 +0800 CST

How do programs make it into the Software center?

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Personally, I mostly trust downloading programs from the software center, and usually stay clear of PPAs.

Do programs go through a process of going from a ppa to becoming part of the universe repository in the software center?

In the software center, it says

Canonical does not provide updates for System Load Indicator. Some updates may be provided by the Ubuntu community. for some programs.

So if a bug is fixed for that program, do I have to wait until the next Ubuntu version, or will the bug be patched next time I run my Ubuntu update manager?

This may be related to the question (not sure if I should edit the original question)

I noticed, some PPAs have related projects.

For example

https://launchpad.net/~indicator-multiload

https://launchpad.net/indicator-multiload

They are both maintained by the same people.

Would the first one be a bleeding edge version of the application, where as the second one is related to the package that you can download from the software center?

software-center

1 Answers

  1. There are two ways for an app to get to the Software Center:

    1. It could be part of the normal repositories: Main, Restricted, Universe and Multiverse. The first two are maintained by Canonical. Universe and Multiverse are a community effort. The best way to land there is to either convince Canonical or Debian that your program is valuable.
    2. You can add it through the Canonical developer program. This works quite similar to Apple appstore. You will need to provide the source code and Canonical will review it. This is also the only way to add pay apps.

    PPA's are no way related to this, they are independent, they get no review but from the person who set it up. Sometimes, Canonical workers, or package maintainers (the members of the community responsible for some part of the Universe and Multiverse package) can setup a PPA (the Mozilla team does), then some packages from this PPA will likely become official packages. But most of the time complete independent people set a PPA, they have no review policy and their packages will never be part of the official repositories.

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