Canonical to offer personal Launchpad

Canonical continues to push the envelope for ease of development, announcing that it will release its Personal Package Archive (PPA) service. As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports, PPA makes it easy for developers to modify and publish a package for Ubuntu without a committee group hug to bless the decision. It also means it will be much easier to get software into the hands of users/testers to glean their feedback:

PPA, which has been in beta since July, is a major part of Ubuntu's own development system, Launchpad. Launchpad is a set of integrated tools that support collaboration and community formation. These include a team management tool, a bug tracker, code hosting, translations, a blueprint tracker and an answer tracker. Its best feature, the bug-tracker, works by trying to track separate conversations about the same bug in external project bug trackers, such as Bugzilla, Roundup, SourceForge and the Debian Bug Tracking System.

PPA enables solo and small groups of open-source software developers to collaborate on sets of packages and publish their own versions of their own or other free software programs. In PPA, developers can upload Ubuntu source packages to be built and published as an apt repository by Launchpad. The end results are programs that ordinary users can download and run on Ubuntu on any Ubuntu-supported architecture. In addition, PPA can create binary Ubuntu Linux compatible files for the x86 and AMD64 architectures.

Ease of deployment and development into complex systems...sounds like a winner. One more sign that Ubuntu is leading the industry in innovation and ease of Linux development.