How to add wallpapers for a new Ubuntu release

Before starting

It is good practice to file a bug in Launchpad to track the addition of the wallpapers for a new Ubuntu release, against the ubuntu-wallpapers source package. This bug will be referenced in the changelog entry as well as in the VCS revision history. See e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-wallpapers/+bug/1921139.

Sources

Wallpapers typically come from two sources:

the Canonical design team will provide the official wallpaper (and a greyscale variant)
a selection of community-provided pictures (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase for details)

Scripts and pre-requisites

There are scripts in the scripts/ directory that partially automate the task of adding wallpapers for a new Ubuntu release. Some of these scripts assume they are being run on the target release (they call lsb_release), so make sure you fulfill that requirement, or you will need to hand-edit generated files (alternatively export $LSB_OS_RELEASE to point to a file that overwrites your host system's /usr/lib/os-release with the values corresponding to the new release that wallpapers are being generated for − that file is installed by the base-files package).

Some of these scripts assume that the community-provided wallpapers are named following this convention:

SUBJECT_by_AUTHOR.EXTENSION

where SUBJECT and AUTHOR may be made up several words, either dash (-) or underscore (_) separated, and EXTENSION may either be "jpg" or "png".

Disclaimer

At the time of writing, this is still largely a manual (and as such, error-prone) process. A good goal would be to automate it as much as possible.

Step-by-step instructions

export CODENAME=$(lsb_release -cs)

1a) get the new official wallpaper and replace the existing warty-final-ubuntu.png with it 1b) get the new greyscale official wallpaper and copy it at the root of this branch 1c) get the community wallpapers for the upcoming Ubuntu release (codenamed $CODENAME) and unpack them in a staging subfolder (e.g. named staging/) inside this branch

create $CODENAME-wallpapers.xml.in (which references only the community wallpapers):
```
cd staging
../scripts/generate-xml.sh > ../$CODENAME-wallpapers.xml.in
cd ..
```
now copy the greyscale official wallpaper to the staging/ directory
create contest/$CODENAME.xml (which references both the community wallpapers and the greyscale official one):
```
cd staging
../scripts/update-background.py > ../contest/$CODENAME.xml
cd ..
```

create debian/ubuntu-wallpapers-$CODENAME.install listing all relevant files:

INSTALL_FILE=debian/ubuntu-wallpapers-$CODENAME.install
for i in $(ls staging); do echo usr/share/backgrounds/$i >> $INSTALL_FILE; done
echo usr/share/gnome-background-properties/$CODENAME-wallpapers.xml >> $INSTALL_FILE
echo usr/share/backgrounds/contest/$CODENAME.xml >> $INSTALL_FILE

move all the files from the staging folder to the root of the branch, and delete the empty folder:
```
mv staging/* ./
rmdir staging
```

update po/POTFILES.in:

echo $CODENAME-wallpapers.xml.in | sort -m po/POTFILES.in - > po/POTFILES.in.new
mv po/POTFILES.in.new po/POTFILES.in

update the translation template (po/ubuntu-wallpapers.pot):
```
cd po
intltool-update -p -g ubuntu-wallpapers
cd ..
```
update debian/ubuntu-wallpapers.links to change the target of the ubuntu-default-greyscale-wallpaper.png symlink
update debian/control:
- add a new package at the end of the file named ubuntu-wallpapers-$CODENAME
- make ubuntu-wallpapers depend on ubuntu-wallpapers-$CODENAME (and remove the dependency on the previous version)
- add the previous version to the Suggests section
update debian/copyright to add all the new wallpapers (community and greyscale official background) and their authors under the corresponding License block
update the AUTHORS file, adding a new section at the top listing all the community wallpapers and their authors for the new release
add a new debian/changelog entry referencing the Launchpad bug number by running dch -v $(lsb_release -sr).1-0ubuntu1

Once this is done, don't forget to add new files to the VCS and commit using the debian/changelog entry and linking to the Launchpad bug (use bzr commit --fixes="lp:NNNNNN").

twinysam / ubuntu-wallpapers