Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

Development Update

We are only five weeks away from the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Next week we expect the Beta 2 release to go out and afterwards only important fixes will go in. 26th April will be the day when we all can celebrate our hard work and enjoy this fine piece of work which will be supported for five years on the desktop and on the server.

If you haven’t yet upgraded to 12.04 you might want to consider this and test the hell out of it.

For everyone who wants to get their hands dirty and fix bugs, you might want to consider if your bug in question is important enough to be fixed in this release or if it better waits until 12.10. The next release is still going under the code name of ‘Q’, although we all hope our favourite cosmonaut announces the new name soon.

Here is a list of task which might interesting to investigate over the next days. Feel free to jump in and help out (instructions and documentation are linked to below)

• investigate if the new version of fsprotect should go into 12.04
• investigate if a new version of phpladpadmin should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of stopmotion should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of ffmpeg-php should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of guile-gnome-platform should be merged from Debian
• investigate if the new version of heroes should go into 12.04
• investigate if a new version of icecc should be merged from Debian
• investigate if the new version of insighttoolkit should go into 12.04
• investigate if a new version of jifty should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of libloader should be imported from Debian
• investigate if a new version of libmail-imapclient-perl should be imported from Debian
• investigate if a new version of lsb-pkgchk3 should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of net-applet should be imported from Debian
• investigate if a new version of ossim should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of parcimonie should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of qtiplot should be merged from Debian
• investigate if a new version of scidavis should be imported from Debian
• investigate if a new version of sdlbasic should be imported from Debian
• investigate if a new version of sisu-ioc should be merged from Debian

If you are new to the docs and everything, consider joining our User testing effort (give feedback, get help).

Letting developers speak for themselves

• Jorge Castro a juju hacker talks about saving OMG! with a juju charm.
• Jonathan Riddell talks shop of the state of free consumer software.
• Jeremy Bicha of the Ubuntu Desktop Team makes a call for contributions for Documentation.

Events

Late today the release managers will announce Beta 2 Freeze.

Release Parties
The LoCo community is ramping up efforts to get more release parties up and running around the globe and 12 events have already been added to the LoCo Team Portal. On their list are: Palestine Territory, Australia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Switzerland, Canada and USA. If you can’t find your city or country in the list, check out our instructions for adding your own party.

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

• There are Merges which need to be done (main, restricted, universe, multiverse).
• Also the Ubuntu Mozilla team is looking for help, so if you’re excited about Mozilla and what’s happening there, join IRC, talk to the guys on #ubuntu-mozillateam on irc.freenode.net.
• And then there are Security bugs you can take a look at, the team is a friendly bunch and they’re incredibly helpful in getting your patch reviewed.
• There are bitesize bugs.

• Also did John Lea from the Ubuntu Design team talk to us and mentioned that there are bugs up for grabs, where the design has been decided on and the implementation might need YOUR help. If you want to help improve Ubuntu’s UI, have a look at these!

First timers!

We have three folks who managed to squeeze their first fixes into Ubuntu last week: JC Hulce synced apt-build from Debian, Aditya Vaidya fixed a bug in a manpage of vorbis-tools and Lars Duesing fixed a race condition in aiccu. Good work everyone!

Rohan Garg received upload rights to Kubuntu! Congratulations! Also on our list of applicants are: Adam Gandelman (server + MOTU), Bjoern Michaelsen (LibreOffice) and Kilian Krause (MOTU). Good luck and all the best to the three of you!

Spotlight/Interview

This week we reached out to Ubuntu Developer and Ubuntu Desktop Team Member Martin Pitt for a interview.

Benjamin Kerensa: What do you generally work on?
Martin Pitt: These days, mostly on improving pygobject and making libraries introspectable, and then GNOME/desktop related bug fixing all over the place. I have also done a fair share of work on power usage reduction in Precise, as well as some foundational work in PackageKit/aptdaemon for an upstream friendly way of installing missing language support and driver packages.

Benjamin Kerensa: Do you still remember how you got involved in open source?
Martin Pitt: That was during school, around ’96 or ’97. Our school got a new computer lab, and with it we set up a Linux (SuSE 5.0, as far as I remember) box to do the ISDN connection handling and routing and some other network services. A friend of mine was working on this, and the other day I sat on that machine and played around with it a bit. I was quite fascinated about real 32 bit support (so far I was only used to that clunky 16 bit programming under DOS), real multitasking, and the utter stability that Linux desktops provided back then, and really astonished when I learned about this “free as in freedom/beer” thing. So I took that SuSE box home with me, spent a week reading the manual and setup, and have fallen in love. From then on I booted back to DOS only for playing games, and were otherwise taking Linux apart.

It still took until 2001 before I got my first patch accepted into Debian, and shortly after I became a Debian developer.

Benjamin Kerensa: What do you like most about the new release?
Martin Pitt: That we finally got serious about quality. The automated Jenkins tests, the acceptance criteria, and most importantly the changed mindset of “never break precise” and taking much more time for bug fixing really changed things for the better. It shows, both for myself in daily use, as well as that we seem to have had at least one magnitude more precise users, even in early alpha-2 times.

Benjamin Kerensa: What do you like most about Ubuntu development?
Martin Pitt: The generally friendly and focused spirit in the community, and that both Canonical employees and volunteer contributors have the same rights, privileges, and processes to follow. I’m aware that we don’t always do this 100%, but at least from my perspective it generally works.

Get Involved

1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

• Help out with fixing packages which don’t build anymore.
• Help out with security bugs.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

• Be interactive and reach us immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
• Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
• Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Google+, Identi.ca or Twitter.