Caution

The Packaging and Development guide is currently undergoing a major overhaul to bring it up to date. The current state you are seeing now is a preview of this effort.

The current version is unstable (changing URLs can occur at any time) and most content is not in properly reviewed yet. Proceed with caution and be aware of technical inaccuracies.

If you are an experienced packager and would like to contribute, we would love for you to be involved! See our contribution page for details of how to join in.

Main Inclusion Review (MIR)

Important

Do not confuse the abbreviation MIR with the display server Mir.

Packages in Main and Restricted are officially maintained, supported and recommended by the Ubuntu project. Canonical’s support services applies to these packages, which include security updates and certain SLA guarantees when bugs are reported and technical support is requested.

Therefore, special consideration is necessary before adding new packages to Main or Restricted. The Ubuntu MIR Team reviews packages for promotion:

This review process is called Main Inclusion Review (MIR).

Submit a package for Main Inclusion Review

The Main Inclusion Review documentation by the MIR team provides instructions on how to apply for Main Inclusion Review for a package. The documentation even contains details of how the application gets reviewed by the MIR team.

Note

The guidelines and review process is constantly evolving. Therefore you should re-read the MIR documentation even if you have submitted a package for Main Inclusion Review in the past.

The MIR documentation is also a living document. External contributions, suggestions, discussions or questions about the process are always welcome.

MIR team weekly meeting

The MIR team holds weekly meetings every Tuesday at 16:30 CET on the IRC server irc.libera.chat in the #ubuntu-meeting channel. You can follow these instructions on how to connect to irc.libera.chat.

The purpose of the meeting is:

  • to distribute the workload fairly between the members of the MIR team

  • to provide a timely response to reporters of MIR applications

  • detection and discussion of any current or complex cases

You should attend these meetings if you submit an MIR request until it is approved or rejected.

Usually, the amount of MIR requests increases during the six-month development period of a new Ubuntu release. Especially right before the various feature freezes (see Ubuntu development process), Ubuntu developers submit MIR requests they have been working on before they have to submit an exception request. As a result, the meetings tend to be quieter, and response times to MIR requests are, on average, faster after the release of a new Ubuntu version.

Resources