Episode: 855
Title: HPR0855: Packaging for your distro
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0855/hpr0855.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:35:15

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Hello, my name is Mike Kingley and you may recognise me from previous HPR episodes such
as HPR episodes 797 how I got into Linux by Mike Kingley.
Now today's episode is about a topic I gave a talk about at OckCamp, back in October
and I wanted to revisit this topic with the HPR listener community and that topic is content
packaging for your Linux distro.
So when I explained my idea of content packaging at OckCamp I wasn't entirely sure it was
as well understood as it could have been, I think that was a failing on my part and I'd
like to try again to explain the idea behind content packaging.
So all the points I want to raise now are related to Ubuntu but the principles apply
equally to almost any other distro.
So what is content packaging?
So content packaging is the process by which content and by content I'm thinking about
things like video, music, e-books and artwork are packaged, allowing that content to be installed
using the distro's mechanism for installing software.
This sort of raises content at the same level as applications.
So the question is why bother packaging your content for your distro and it's a good
question because you could just pop your content onto a web server or pop it onto bits
or something but I think it gives us a number of advantages.
So for the producer packaging your content for your distro provides a safety net for your
content so if your site falls off the net or you stop paying your bills or for whatever
reason your website falls over, that's okay because the content still exists in the distro.
It also provides a packaging platform to push your content forward.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that he wants to get 200 million users on Ubuntu next four
years and maybe three years now.
All your content would be automatically available to those users.
You can update your content and you can push updates out through the standard update process.
So if you've written a book and you think it's great but you get some bug reports from
people saying you've got a few spelling mistakes or a few grammatical errors, that's okay
because you can push the updates out to everybody who's downloaded the package and just
increment the version, just increase it, push the new version of the book out, everyone
gets the vixies, everyone's happy.
It's a potential revenue stream for producers as well.
The software sender now allows you to sell content, sell games and that same sale mechanism
could be used to provide a revenue stream for people who can't produce content.
You can use it to distribute your content in a continuous manner through the update system
we talked about earlier.
This is ideal for cereals.
So if you're recording an audio book chapter by chapter, ideal, you can push each chapter
out as an update.
For the consumer, content is easy to consume, it's the same mechanism we use for store applications
but we just use it to install content.
Content also becomes discoverable because all of the packages are indexed.
You may well find content that you didn't know existed by searching for things.
So the example I've got for that is I packaged up all the podcast episodes for Linux reality.
So if you go to Linux reality.com, there's a placeholder site saying that all the audio
recordings for it are available on archive.org, which is great, except none of the tags
or none of the index information goes with that recordings or we get this 100 MP3 files.
What I did was package that for Ubuntu in a PPA.
Then when I search for things like other DNS mask, yes, it shows me that I can store DNS
mask and repository, but it also shows me that I can download episode 13 of Linux reality
where they were discussing DNS mask.
Content is safe to go for the release process for Ubuntu, accuracy and licenses are checked.
We can't use the system to push copyright material out now and we wouldn't be able to do
that with content.
And content could be rolled into a distribution, making it part of the DVD or CD.
So if you're a university and you want to roll out desktops with copies of Shakespeare
or copies of literature on them, you totally can.
And your students can take that CD home, put it on their machine and have the same experience
at home as they would have at university or college or weather.
So in a distribution, content offers an opportunity to compete against other distros.
In the same way they couldn't do with applications or support or services.
So it's another mechanism by which Ubuntu or Fedora or OpenSUSA or whatever your distro
might be can differentiate itself from the other distros.
As said earlier, content can be sold and software centre offers support for selling content,
but also provides a certain financial benefit to those distros.
And when distros start supporting more and more hardware devices, I'm thinking here about
Ubuntu and perhaps tablets, then content consumption is going to become more and more important
because you're not going to be able to necessarily create the content on a tablet if you get
that content safely and securely and legally, it's much better for you.
So I think that I've broken this down and I've identified some benefits for both for
the producer, the consumer and the distribution.
What I'd like to do is to explore these further with the community.
So if I've said something during this podcast and you thought, yeah, it's not a bad idea
and it intrigued you or you're interested in it or perhaps you write books, perhaps you
write tutorials, perhaps you do screencasts, perhaps you do podcasts recordings like this.
If the idea of taking content and putting it into a distro making it easy for people
to get hold of is interesting.
And what I've done is create a content packaging team and launch pad for Ubuntu.
So if you're interested, join a team.
It's open membership, just come and join up.
Take part in the poll, it'll be a poll on there until the end of the year, asking whether
or not content packaging is a good idea and you can find me on my website, titaniumbunker.com
or you can mail me, micatitaniumbunker.com, and perhaps we can have a discussion about
the relative pros and cons for packaging content for distros.
Thanks a lot.
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