Ubuntu Development Update

Today is not a day of long blog entries, but it’s a day of celebrating everybody’s hard work in Ubuntu 11.10. It’s released. So check out what’s new! Two pages that did a great job explaining and visualising what’s new are the ubuntu.com tour and the other one being “the new Ubuntu“. Beautiful work!

For the more video-inclined, I suggest this, this or this.

Funnily enough some got so excited, that they registered http://www.thisisthecountdown.com/, http://www.thisisntthecountdown.com/ and http://thisisthefinalcountdown.com/. Let’s hope they will be reused next cycle. 😉

While celebrations have started around the globe, Ubuntu 12.04 ‘precise‘ has already been set up in Launchpad. Ubuntu developers never stop, never stop, never stop.

Events

Ubuntu Release Parties
If you are very good at organising parties on short-notice, here’s some tip to organise it and here’s how to register it. There’s 51 events listed right now, these cities are participating:

• Asia: Mumbai (India), Hyderabad (India), Nilai (Malaysia), Santa Rosa (Philippines), Bangkok (Thailand), Khon Kaen (Thailand)
• Africa: Capetown (South Africa)
• Australia/Oceania: Brisbane (Australia), Sydney (Australia)
• Europe: Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), 2*Paris (France), 2*Toulouse (France), Lyon (France), La Celle Saint-Cloud (France), Romorantin-Lanthenay (France), Budapest (Hungary), Dublin (Ireland), Šiauliai (Lithuania), Vilnius (Lithuania), Podgorica (Montenegro), Belgrade (Serbia), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Lloret de Mar (Spain), Göteborg (Sweden), Blackpool (UK), 2*London (UK), Leeds (UK)
• North America: Kitchener (Canada), Toronto (Canada), Montréal (Canada), San José (Costa Rica), Mexico (Mexico), SeaTac (USA), Lakeland (USA), Melbourne/Viera (USA) and Philadelphia (USA), Tempe (USA), Plymouth (MI, USA), Nashville (USA), Jenison (USA), Portland (USA). (Also there’s the Panama team still looking for a venue.)
• South America: Capital Federal (Argentina), Lima (Peru), Maldonado (Uruguay), Caracas (Venezuela), Merida (Venezuela), Maracaibo (Venezuela).

It’s just amazing to see how distributed the parties are and how excited folks get together to have a great time together and celebrate this great release.

Ubuntu Open Week
The schedule of Ubuntu Open Week is finalised and every single session of this is going to be great, but as this blog post is about Ubuntu development, keep the following date in your diary: Tuesday 18 Oct, 14.00-16.00 UTC – there’ll be a double-session about getting started with Ubuntu development!

Survey

You were always interested in Ubuntu Development and gave it a try already? Perfect! With Ubuntu 11.10 out of the door, we started the planning of the 12.04 (precise) development cycle and we would love to know how well our documentation is known and working today, so we can see what we can improve.

Please give us your feedback in this short survey – it just takes a few minutes (if you’re not trying to write a novel in reply). Have your say and help Ubuntu improve!

Celebrating good work!

I’m very glad, Iain Lane did some statistics:

This has now passed, so the whole archive is in hard freeze now for the
release. Thanks to everyone who contributed to Oneiric!

For fun, I ran some stats using UDD. This was the 7th most active development
cycle by uploads to the release pocket.

    distribution     | uploads | rank
---------------------+---------+------
 breezy              |   12834 |    1
 karmic              |   11950 |    2
 dapper              |   11791 |    3
 natty               |   11780 |    4
 hardy               |   11459 |    5
 lucid               |   11246 |    6
 oneiric             |   10889 |    7
 gutsy               |    9949 |    8
 jaunty              |    9722 |    9
 intrepid            |    9397 |   10
 maverick            |    8879 |   11
 feisty              |    8522 |   12
 edgy                |    7953 |   13
 hoary               |    4552 |   14
 warty               |    1617 |   15

413 different people uploaded packages to the archive (using
Changed-By).

The source package uploaded the most times was … drumroll …
gnome-settings-daemon with 46 uploads! Followed closely by livecd-rootfs
with 45.

:-)

To better illustrate how many different people uploaded packages to Ubuntu, here’s a little collage I cobbled together.

It shows every single person who uploaded a package to Ubuntu during the 11.10 cycle. (Of course only those are shown who had a profile picture set.)

Thanks a lot everybody – you all are rockstars!

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 that don’t build anymore.
• Help out with security bugs.
• Help out with NBS (a more advanced task).

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 most 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, Identi.ca or Twitter.