Ubuntu Development Team Meeting: 2007-02-01

For archives of previous meetings, please see DevelTeamMeetings.

Agenda

1. Roll call
2. Review agenda
3. Review activity reports
4. Propose additional items
5. Accept agenda
6. New Archive Team
   • Membership
   • Responsibilities
   • "Archive Day" schedule
7. (pitti) Artwork procedure: Martin would like to get an official Icon for apport, how do we get these kinds of things done?
8. (BenC) Fate of udev. Will kernel team take it over, or will Ian? Admittedly, udev should work as-is for feisty, but I want to know if in the future we should expect to do changes ourselves, or be able to go to another person taking the responsibility. Trying to account for workload.
9. (sfllaw) Support for -commercial
10. Actions from previous meeting
    • Items from the sprint agenda not marked done:
      • udev, device-mapper, lvm, evms, mdadm, etc. finishing and testing (Ian, Fabio, Scott)
      • Device Driver Manager (Scott, Ben)
      • Automated testing deployment (Ian, Robert)
      • Integrate update-silo that's outside of SPARC installer scope (spec is already implemented). (Fabio, Ben)
      • Braille support and making access in GDM just work (Henrik, ?)
      • Python modules in main (Matthias, interested parties)
      • If InitialUbuntuCVETracking is implemented in time, work with Kees to start moving security vuln tracking to Malone (Martin, Kees, Bjorn)
      • Herd milestone progress (Tollef, Jonathan, Scott, Colin?, Matt?)
      • Mailing list moderation (20 minutes) (Colin, interested parties)
      • packaging-hints (30 minutes) (Matthias; requests morning session)
      • Kubuntu Dist Upgrader (Michael, Jonathan)
11. Other business

Apologies

• Alexander Sack (will be logging for later reading)
• Fabio Massimo Di Nitto (travelling to Montréal)
• Matthias Klose (ill)

New Starters

• Phillip Lougher (pkl/plougher) - kernel
• Alexander Sack (asac) - Mozilla

Activity Reports

Ben Collins (BenC)

• Work on kernel for Herd 3 release. Things of note:
  • Paravirt enabled by default
  • VMI (VMware) paravirt-ops enabled by default
  • The above two items are still under scrutiny for performance results compared to stock kernels. They will, however, allow for a much faster kernel under vmware paravirt-enabled host (Ubuntu guest).
• Work on d80211 (devicescape) integration. Patches from mjg59. Still working out issues with rt2x00 drivers using this stack instead of its old local d80211 stack.
• Kernel dev position:
  • Perusing lots of resumes.
  • Several phone screenings.
• Finished apport kernel integration. Uploaded for Herd 3.

Brian Murray (bdmurray)

Bug statistics:

• Started gathering rudimentary bug statistics

• Updated https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad/AdoptPackage with packages containing 100+ bugs

Bug triaging:

• Assigned packages to multiple bugs that had none i.e. were just filed against Ubuntu
• Read and updated wiki pages dealing with bug triaging and reporting
• Participated in hugs day on 2007-01-31
• Discovery and collection of useful bug queries

Bug helper:

• Wrote 2 clue files for apport duplicate bug reports as it seems that reporters aren't checking carefully for dupes
• Worked with dholbach regarding unquoted XML in searches

Other:

• Learned how to gather a trace via gdb and turn off kde crash handler
• Learned about installing packages with debug symbols
• Discovered that some packages have source in main but components in other repositories
• Noticed some triagers are marking bugs as Needs Info but not assigning them to themselves

Daniel Holbach (dholbach)

Bug Helper:

• splitted bughelper and bughelper-data
• local clues
• global clues
• --try and --try-only options
• quoting and unquoting of XML

• --format=<wiki|html|plain>

• reviewed a couple of patches
• packaging changes, so apport can make use of it
• lots of discussions

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bughelper/2007-January/thread.html

MOTU:

• Discussed MOTU Council in TB meeting
• updated spec
• discussions
• MOTU mentoring

Artwork Packaging:

• Lots of discussions and package reviews
• pending: oransoda-look (Iacopo Masi), ubuntustudio-look (Cory)

Telepathy:

• updated telepathy-idle, telepathy-gabble, telepathy-inspector
• upstream discussions

GNOME:

• BUG TRIAGE
• updated gtkmm
• updated gnome-web-photo
• investigated nemiver powerpc ftbfs
• updated kiwi
• looked into opal update (required for ekiga) again

HUG DAY

Random:

• tried to get my new scanner working (succeeded in the end)
• debugged radeon hard-lockup (with gnash)

TODO:

• GNOME 2.18.0 Beta 2 (2.17.91)
• do more Bug Triage - I'll try doing at least 3h a day
• bootstrapping MOTU Council
• finish remaining artwork builder bits
• upload bughelper to the archive and raise awareness

Fabio Massimo Di Nitto (fabbione)

• Work and coordination for hw-certification/support test round / bug triaging.
• glibc disaster recovery. quick fix for feisty/edgy. dapper is in full SRU procedure again.
• udev-* work with Ian. Started as a normal 20 minutes hack, ended up in 2 days LVM2 hacking, spotting a critical issue on big endian machines and possible local DoS attack vector (PoC to be done yet). SRU the above twice after deeper investigation on raid crack.

• participated in different BoFs / meetings / conf calls.

Henrik Omma (heno)

Accessibility work:

• Spoke with Orca maintainer Will Walker at length about where we are for Feisty, the Karlsruhe effort, etc. Multilingual speech looks good. eSpeak should be seeded for main when Herd 3 is out. We agreed that we would remove the silly 2-button window that Orca now throws up from the Ubuntu version (simple setting to remove; it was imposed by the Gnome HIG squad).
• braille-support -- USB support suffers from bug 80892. Looking at it with the reporter Mike Petersen and brltty maintainer Dave Mielke. Serial and bluetooth support at boot depends on completion of the script (being worked on now by myself and Dave). When those two items are fixed, we'll need help placing it in the boot sequence.
• color-filters -- The main code is in place in gnome-mag but Orca doesn't want to add official UI support for it, preferring to add better support for magnification through Compiz/Beryl later. We could add our own keybindings.
• UNCERTAIN: access-gdm -- ATM selecting the accessible login option in the setup GUI completely breaks GDM. This can likely be fixed with some love, but even then it's only in the non-themed interface, not our default.
• DROPPED: common-at-conf - upstream has gone in different directions on this (and returned to start). Agreed with Colin not to pursue this for Feisty. We'll keep our patches as now.

Scalable ISO testing:

• Rewrote the documentation here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/ReportingResults

• When the first candidate ISOs appear I will try to mobilise the forum testing team. Tollef, please ping me. We should probably have a mailing list for this purpose.

Bughelper:

• Just watched in amazement this week

• Plan to contribute more to the documentation, at least tutorial-type material

Ian Jackson (iwj)

• dpkg triggers: in pre-feisty+1-spec discussion
  • Discussion: see my message on debian-*, ubuntu-*.

  • Please participate on debian-dpkg@lists.d.o if you have opinions.

• udev-*,: unblocked
  • Not much more work needed here now I think.
  • I will try to polish this off tomorrow.
• automated-testing: unblocked
  • Xen on feisty is working again (modulo existing X bug).
  • Unfortunately the 2.6.19 kernel has an oops bug in dm-snapshot which would be critical for datacentre installation. I'm hoping this problem will have magically gone away by the time the rest of it is debugged and deployable in the DC.
  • This is ready to start debugging my new functionality in autopkgtest.
• winmodem-support: unblocked
  • I have fetched a laptop from Matthew Garrett's collection, which he is pretty confident will work with the sl-modem* packages from universe. We will treat this spec as "make AC97-based winmodems which require sl-modem-daemon work".
• consistent-login-screen: some progress, now on hold
  • Main replumbing of gdm implemented and compiles but not executed.
  • This is now on hold in favour of higher-priority secs.

Suggestion:

• It would have been nice if the udev with watershed, and the gdebi split, had made it into the archive before herd 3 freeze. In general I think it would be nice in future if we had this ordering:
  • last day of sprint
  • archive maintenance including main promotions, NEW processing
  • publish
  • freeze
  rather than this one:
  • last day of sprint
    • publish
    • freeze
    • archive maintenance including main promotions, NEW processing

Other things:

• Scott and I had a user experience (login screen etc.) conference call with mdz and a couple of external people.

Jonathan Riddell (Riddell)

Done:

• kubuntu-update-manager: coding all done, waiting on mvo to upload after Herd 3 and then backport to Edgy
• kubuntu-feisty-adept-changes: working on software-properties for sources.list editor, good progress. Merged a couple of patches from community too.
• also: kubuntu meeting, some CD testing for Herd 3

Other Specs:

• kubuntu-feisty-ubiquity: waiting on gtk side to do advanced partitioner and slideshow

• kubuntu-feisty-oem-installer: abattoir's port to Qt 4 seems complete apart from some minor layout issues, new UI is quite a change , will poke him to get it uploaded once freeze is over.

• kubuntu-feisty-laptop and kubuntu-feisty-networking on target to get implmented by community for feature freeze.

Todo:

• Herd 3
• finish kubuntu-feisty-adept-changes
• get kubuntu-update-manager backported

Kenneth Wimer (kwwii)

SPRINT and LAST WEEK:

• Together with Daniel, I worked on artwork processes, therefore:
  • wrapping my head around the whole concept. Need to learn more about debian/ubuntu packaging and bazaar.
  • going to write documentation as I learn so that even artists can understand
  • created my first package on launchpad, example-look
• Talked with Henrik a bit about accessibility themes and an icon that needs to be improved in the GUI. I'll work on that once we have a solid base for Feisty artwork in general.
• Talked with Ogra a bit about finding the best solution for his login manager. Need to set up a time to do this, it shouldn't take long or be too hard.
• Simon brought up an idea to change the default font for UI usage (not in documents). Checked into that, started the discussion. Looks like we will be testing it out to see how people react.
• Looked into the artwork available from the Edgy process. Trying to find SVGs for everything that was used in the final artwork - I think I have everything except the wallpaper.
• Began working on creating several wallpaper proposals. Turned out pretty well.
• Worked on basic logo ideas.

• In addition to the Ubuntu stuff, I've been thinking about a general plan for Kubuntu as well. I proposed a widget-style change but it seems I need to learn to write an InclusionReport for this to happen. I tweaked the color scheme a bit and plan on propagating that through the other pieces (kdm, desktop-splash, wallpaper). The window decoration gradients need slight tweaking as well. Since this is mainly minor stuff I'll take care of it between the bigger projects.

NEXT WEEK:

• I think should be creating GDM and desktop-splash mockups while still cranking out ideas for the wallpaper. These seem to be the main projects currently.
• Evolving the Kubuntu theme

• Both Kubuntu and Ubuntu need improved Usplash pics. Both need work on the progress bars. I guess it might be neat to get this done early for a change

Kyle McMartin (kylem)

• More {edgy,dapper}-security work, up to date with CVEs now
• Discussions with Fabio, Matt, Ben, Colin about Hardware Support
• kvm userspace update
• xserver-xorg-video-ati bug fix for feisty
• Tracking upstream xf86-video-intel for Intel graphics support
• Bug triaging/driver support for -proposed and updates to out of tree drivers for feisty.

Martin Pitt (pitti)

Spec status:

• bug-reporting-tool: mostly done; only bit that is still missing is help menu entry: apport ships the necessary .desktop file in bzr head now, and Seb kindly offered to add the two-line patch to gnome-panel to actually use it.
• increase-hwdb-participation: not started yet, will do this week

• apport-improvements: new kernel<->apport interface tested and implemented; the only part that's still missing is changing Mono to work better with apport, but I don't intend to do this myself; I will split the spec instead (as discussed with Scott)

Other work:

• lots of SRU and sync processing
• prepared new dapper langpacks with -base refreshment (to fix lost translations due to bad coordination with Rosetta); need to be uploaded
• started working on a redesign of apport-retrace to work with fake chroots without any root privileges, so that we can set up an automatic retracing service on the porter's machines; I did this mainly in my free time for now, since it's not an official spec so far; but the devs ask for it and need it

Matthias Klose (doko)

• Change the interpreter to build and install python extensions built with the python-dbg interpreter with a different name into the same path (by appending `_d' to the extension name). Allows using these extensions from the same paths, so that no changes in the python infratstructure tools are needed. To be uploaded after Herd3.
• Debug the gcj eclipse-compiler/classpath generics backport to make it regression-free compared to the current 4.1 gcj. Will allow us to have java5 compatibility in main before the sun java is released as free software.
• Discuss with Henrik about g77/gfortran changes, re-targeted for for feisty+1
• Participate on the archive-admin and MoM tutorials.

• Update the PackagingHints/UbuntuPackagingChanges in the wiki as part of the developer documentation.

Michael Vogt (mvo)

Spec status:

• AutomaticDistUpgradeTesting: waiting for deployment in the data-center

• CommonCustomizations: done

• DistUpgraderImprovements: needs to be cut down for FF

• AlwaysEnableUniverseMultiverse: the ubuntu side is done

• AptHttps: done

• DynamicMirrorDecisions: a solution will make it for feisty, but it should not be abled by default. also needs some server bits ready first

• ServerUpgradeTool: Needs to be cut down for FF

• DistUpgraderArchAny: feisty+1, but I would like to get feedback on the presented approach

Other work:

• popularity-contest SRU for dapper/edgy prepared that should fix all outstanding issues, fixes on the server, better usage of the data in gnome-app-install
• apt, python-apt SRU prepared (thanks to Martin for processing the SRU queue)

• EasyCodecInstallation: polish and bugfixing with seb128

• gdebi hacking and some fixes in virtual P/C/R handling
• Spec updates, Bug triage and Mail backlog fighting

• merged the kde DistUpgrader frontend and fixed some bugs in the dist-upgrader

Sebastien Bacher (seb128)

Mail backlog:

• caught up with mails after sprint

Bugs backlog:

• lot of bug triage, managed to took my desktop bugs backlog under 200 unread mails again (did 349 bug changes according to my launchpad mail box)

Easy Codec Installation:

• played with the current feisty packages, noted some problem with gnome-app-install and talked with mvo about them (who fixed most of them really quickly, Michael you rock!)
• sent "call for testing" mail

Desktop packages work:

• fixed serpentine Build-Depends on muine from universe
• packaged new libgpod
• merged rhythmbox, gnome-vfs, gaim, pan with new revisions from Debian
• new sound-juicer version
• new libwnck version and merge with Debian
• made gnome-applets deb use bzip2 (asked by Colin)
• fixed control-center bug which could lead to wipe the user directory

TODO:

• keep bug triage
• desktop bugs fixing

• watch Daniel package the new GNOME 2.17.91 one week before than the upstream tarballs are rolled

Simon Law (sfllaw)

• Talked with Fabio about hardware certification escalation procedures. He'll be arriving in Montréal tomorrow to negotiate with Jeff and Marc.
• Talked with Henrik about some accessibility testing in Ubuntu. We agreed that an accessible installation will be a first-class test case, even though it may not be release critical.
• Sat down with Matt, Henrik, and Robert to talk about bug workflow.
• Discussed with Robert and Henrik about how to get forums people involved in bug triaging. We'll be testing out some of our theories in the coming weeks.
• Henrik and I refined his method of using Malone for ISO testing. We got dubious looks from Bjorn who didn't actually object (yay) and support from Tollef.
• Had some brief chats with Brian about how bug triaging worked.
• Did some SRUs and tracked down some bugs.
• Brainstormed some ideas about bughelper with Daniel and Henrik. They have suckered me into actually checking out the bzr tree and reading some code.
• Worked with Ken on some artwork-related problems and unborked a code repository.
• Kept an eye on the interns from afar. They were mostly hijacked by support at this time, which led to some interesting learning experiences for them.

Tollef Fog Heen (tfheen)

Specs:

• no further progress, but I'll get to the one (changelog-closes-bugs) remaining after Herd 3.

Other work:

• Herd 3 preparations, including some of the usual hiccups (ubiquity bugs found at the last minute, space issues on CDs) as well as a late kernel upload causing delays.

Oliver Grawert (ogra)

• ltsp-fat-clients - lakely to be deferred
• edubuntu-network-auth-server - good progress
• edubuntu-network-auth-client - good progress
• edgy-plusone-thinclient-sound - ltsp side implemented, alsa plugins missing
• ltsp-management-gui - good progess on python modules, gui work planned for this weekend
• student-control-panel-upgrade - mostly done, small changes for vnc required
• edubuntu-on-two-cds - cd side done, gnome-app-install hook missing
• ltsp-persistent-home - ... sbalneav

Actions

• cjwatson to train pitti in langpack upload procedure
• followup meeting for archive team to discuss archive days
• archive team to ensure that at least one further member is trained in source NEW
• pitti and kwwii discuss apport artwork
• keybuk to summarise a "how to maintain udev" for the kernel team, and "how to debug problems" for all interested parties (run by sfllaw and bdmurray)
• kernel-team to investigate packages that fit into their work
• sfllaw will e-mail distro-team@ about commerical package support
• cjwatson to re-review and incorporate braille-setup into installer
• doko to mail ubuntu-devel about which Python modules should be in main
• mdz to codify mailing list guidelines
• cjwatson to chase up the set of core-devs who can help moderate ubuntu-devel and arrange for clear documentation