Issue20

Revision 2 as of 2006-10-30 16:09:39

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue ## for the week of Oct 22 - 28, 2006. In this issue we cover ...

You can always find older Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter issues at:: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

In This Issue

General Community News

Changes In Edgy

Launchpad News

Warning /!\ No idea what I'm doing.

This has been a great Launchpad rollout -- there are so many cool changes that I'm going to have a hard time summarizing the highlights; be sure to read the detailed changelog because it contains many interesting tidbits that won't make it here!

You can use Launchpad to track Specifications too

I'd like to start out by pointing out a Launchpad feature that users may not be as familiar with. Most people already know that Launchpad hosts a bug tracking system, and a web translation interface; did you know we also offer a complete specification management system?

The Launchpad spec tracker lets you track metadata related to a document: what product or distribution it's about, who is the drafter, who's going to implement it, and what the current status is. The document itself can live anywhere; for instance, an Ubuntu specification that talks about Accelerated X, is housed in Launchpad at:

The Launchpad page has a summary of the spec, a dependency graph and a breakout of the metadata. The actual specification text lives at:

Note that the specification text can be kept anywhere -- it's just a URL associated with the metadata. Any upstream product can register specifications and manage them through Launchpad. This system can be used to track any software-related text, ranging from implementation proposals (like the Python PEP process) to hardcore technical specifications.

Bazaar branching

James Henstridge delivers in this rollout a cool feature that I've always been wanting to announce: it's now possible to use launchpad.net URLs to check out software using bzr! To fetch the latest version of Bazaar itself, for instance, just issue:

This works for any product in Launchpad that has a bzr branch associated to it, including upstream SVN or CVS imports. So to fetch a Bazaar branch for Gaim, the instant messaging software:

Is that cool or what? James blogged about how this was done at:

I shouldn't tell you (but I will anyway) that these URLs will get even shorter and simpler Real Soon Now -- so stay tuned.

Bug Tracking Enhancements

On the Malone front, Bjorn landed a first change to the process of adding upstream bugwatches that will make a lot of users smile: you now register bug watches entering URLs instead of picking from a list of trackers and adding a bug id. This should make it a lot faster to register watches, and this is just a first step, because the next rollout will include more extensive bug forwarding improvements.

Brad fixed a long-standing bogosity in our subscription system: people implicitly subscribed (those that appear as Also Notified: in the subscriptions portlet) to duplicates are no longer implicitly subscribed to the main bug, and if you are receiving bugmail because of a duplicate subscription, you can unsubcribe anyway and Malone will just Do the Right Thing.

Other Improvements

Other work worth noting: for the first time we enabled build failure notifications for Soyuz, which means that uploaders now get emailed when packages they sent off fail to build. A Soyuz sprint was held out in Brazil and both cleanups and PPA work were furthered.

Matthew Thomas had an ingenious solution to the problem of those meta-characters in Rosetta to indicate whitespace (those dots and carriage return symbols), using images that conveniently behave as expected when cutting-and-pasting in the browser.

Guilherme Salgado implemented a feature that allows us to track why a person was first registered in Launchpad when it is done via an automatic process (such as a Rosetta translation import); this rationale is now recorded and displayed when visiting the person's page. Activating that page into a Launchpad account is now easier than ever, too.

The full set of Launchpad changes for this rollout is detailed at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/launchpad-users/2006-October/000747.html

Please register your Ubuntu Mirror!

Warning /!\ Added as its own section because I think it's worth keeping around, and separate. Warning /!\

Guilherme Salgado put a lot of hard work into getting the Launchpad mirror prober in shape, and this last rollout includes FTP support and some reliability enhancements, which were the last items necessary to allow us to start using the mirror management system in production.

If you are a mirror administrator, please help us out by registering your Ubuntu mirror in Launchpad:

The currently registered mirrors are at the following URLs:

Once registered, we'll include your mirror in our official listings, and it will be regularly probed for content and freshness. You'll also be automatically notified if something goes wrong with your mirror. With good listings, Ubuntu users will be properly directed to the nearest, fastest and most current mirror, improving accessibility throughout.

In The Press

Meetings and other similar events

Upcoming Events

Feature Of The Week - ???

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Bug Stats

New Bugs: # BR Closed Bugs: #

As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started, please see [WWW] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpingWithBugs

Check out the bug statistics: [WWW] http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~carthik/bugstats/

Infamous Bugs

Additional Ubuntu News

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Conclusion

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