The Meerkat wants to stick its head out to the world the first time! We haven’t really started landing new features from ourselves yet, but the first milestone is important for testing the new kernel on a variety of hardware, as
well as the result of the autosyncs from Debian and first wave of merges and package updates.
Alpha milestones in Ubuntu use a “soft freeze” for main, which means that developers are asked to refrain from uploading packages between Tuesday and Thursday which don’t bring us closer to releasing the alpha, so that these
days can be used for settling the archive and fixing any remaining showstoppers.
The list of bugs targeted for alpha-1 can be found here.
Per the policy described on the RC Bug Targetting Wiki, this list is used for tracking bugs that are blockers for the alpha 1 milestone – so as you can see, the list will be quite short (and is in fact empty right now).
If you know of bugs that should be considered blockers, please nominate them for release and set the milestone target for those bugs. If you have questions about whether a bug should be considered a blocker, please contact a member of the release team.
Beyond that short list of bugs that are blockers for Alpha 1, we have those bugs that are listed as release-critical for Maverick as a whole: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs
If you aren’t among the small group of people who have milestoned bugs assigned to you, please consider helping with those bugs, using your best judgement with regard to the alpha freeze when uploading fixes.
Please also help us to get the archive in a consistent state for the alpha, as described on
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PackageArchive#Consistency.
There’s also plenty that can be done to help packages that aren’t included on the CDs: https://merges.ubuntu.com/main.html shows over 300 package merges still outstanding in main for maverick, and
https://merges.ubuntu.com/universe.html shows close to 400.
Finally, if you know of new features in Maverick that you think should be highlighted for Alpha 1, let a member of the release team know so that they can be added to the technical overview.
[Discuss Maverick Alpha 1 Freeze Ahead on the Forums]
Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list by Martin Pitt on Mon May 31 07:07:41 BST 2010