Ubuntu Wiki

General

• Our focus is on lightweight apps. To give you a general idea, we're looking for the kind of apps that could be reviewed for functionality and security in about an hour reading through the code. We'll also do a licensing and packaging review.
• Submissions should be applications, not stand-alone documentation or media (image bundles, fonts, movies).

Content

• Content must be suitable under the terms of the Ubuntu Code Of Conduct

• Applications must be Free/Libre/Open Source software. We follow the Ubuntu Licensing Policy.

• Apps should be useful or interesting to a general audience.

Code

• You can include any libraries that are part of your app. For example, if you're writing a Python game, and you've written a Python library to store character data, it's fine to include that with your app.
• If your app depends on external libraries, please make sure that your app runs on the current versions shipped in Ubuntu.
• No other software can depend on the application being submitted (e.g. development libraries should be submitted to main/universe or upstream to Debian instead).
• Apps should not be forks of existing applications in the Ubuntu archive (main/universe/etc).

• Applications must be able to be built with tools & libraries in the Ubuntu archive. Apps may bundle additional libraries they depend on, but may not include new versions of already packaged libraries.

• Applications are allowed to write to an app-specific directory in the user's home directory and can use gconf/gsettings to affect desktop settings if that's the result of a user's direct action in the UI and is revertable.

• Unity Lenses should follow the guidelines at Unity Lense Guidelines

Packaging

• We greatly prefer source tarballs with a standard versioning scheme, such as foobar-1.2.3.tar.gz or foobar_1.2.3.orig.tar.gz, that unpacks into a directory named foobar-1.2.3. See Debian's Upstream Guide for more details.

• The version number for your package should use the format <upstream>-0extras<release>.<packagerev> where packagerev starts at 1 with the first upload. Example: 1.2.3-0extras11.10.1 for the first upload of a package with the upstream version 1.2.3.

• Don't include the full package history in debian/changelog, just one entry for the current release. [Note: This is different than usual Debian/Ubuntu archive requirements.]