Patch Day, May 5th 2010

The Ubuntu Reviewers Team would like to announce the first Patch Day, which will take place on May 5, 2010. For those of you not familiar with the problem we are trying to solve, I have blogged about it.

Patch Day is a concept similar to Hug Days, where we will test patches and forward working patches upstream. If the bug is critical enough, we will try to get the patch applied in Ubuntu immediately. We'd like your help to get these submissions reviewed and if necessary sent upstream so that they don't bitrot and to encourage people to continue helping us improve open source software.

We will be following the Review Guide for reviewing patches. Reviewer Leaders can sign up to be contacts on an hourly basis. Contact responsibilties include helping to answer questions from new contributors, unsubscribing the ~ubuntu-reviewers team when required, and answering development-related questions.

If you're a newbie looking for a way to start getting involved with Ubuntu development? Patch review is where we need your help.

With that we leave you with an anecdote from Bryce Harrington on why we should try to get a handle on these patches:

“Yesterday, I looked through the 'audacious' bugs (a music player I use which has been quite buggy). I saw half a dozen patches posted, and thought, “Wow, someone's been active, I should sponsor these!” Then, I looked and saw they were all patches I had made and posted 1.5 yrs ago hoping someone would sponsor them :-/”

[Discuss the May 5th Patch Day on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-devel mailing list by Nigel Babu on Tue Apr 6 19:40:19 BST 2010

Announcing the mobile phone contacts sync public alpha & Sync Ubuntu One Contacts with your iPhone

We’re excited to finally make this announcement. For over a year now, the Ubuntu One team has been working on an address book contacts synchronization service that will raise the bar for what’s currently available on Linux desktops.

Getting contacts on CouchDB and replicating between desktops and the cloud was the first big step. The second, and much bigger step, is to actually get those contacts from and to mobile phones. To achieve this, we have partnered with a company called Funambol, who share our views on open source, and have an established a proven software stack that synchronizes thousands of mobile phones and other devices. Funambol has built a community around different client plugins, virtually supporting the majority of the existing software on all platforms that have contacts (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, etc). We are excited to be working with them.

Due to the costs of implementing the Funambol server, the phone synchronization service will only be part of Ubuntu One paid plans. But everyone (free and paid users) will have the opportunity to try the service and get all of their contacts onto their desktop for free with a 30-day trial!. The 30 days will only start counting once Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is released at the end of April.

More information about the mobile contacts synchronization service can be found at the Phone Sync FAQ.

Right now we’re at a stage where we feel confident opening up the service for wider testing. Before joining the test, we strongly recommend that you backup your contacts since we’ve only tested with a hand-full of phone models at this point.

We’re still ramping up our servers to support new record level loads, so we expect the next week or two to be a bit bumpy. We should have these infrastructure improvements ready before the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release.

All of the information to start testing is available at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/. No matter how successful or unsuccessful the mobile contacts synchronization is for you, we would like to ask everyone to please fill out the test cases. They are critical to improving this new service for everyone.

At this point of testing, we favor IRC chats (freenode, #ubuntuone) rather than creating new bugs in Launchpad. We would feel better if the developers filed the bugs with the proper debugging information rather than having dozens of bugs we can’t act on. This will change in the near future, but for this stage, it’s easier for us.

Thank you! We look forward to getting your testing results.

Along with the start of the mobile contacts sync public alpha test, we’re also happy to announce the availability of the Ubuntu One Contacts sync application in the iTunes App Store. iPhone users can join the public alpha by downloading the application for free and adding their phone sync username and password. The other sync configuration settings are pre-populated in the app.

Again, since this is a test, we encourage you to backup your contacts before synchronizing. Please review the Phone Sync FAQ and report all testing results (the good and the bad) at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/.

Originally posted on the Ubuntu One Blog as two articles Announcing the mobile phone contacts sync public alpha on April 5th, 2010 at 10:41 PM and Sync Ubuntu One Contacts with your iPhone on April 5th, 2010 at 11:47 PM

[Discuss Ubuntu One mobile phone contacts sync public alpha & syncing with your iPhone on the Forum]

The Fridge Tops 2,000 Posts and Counting

A check into recent Fridge records shows that this news reporting service for the Ubuntu Community has been posting news related articles since September of 2005, and now has over 2,000 posts to its credit. The Fridge strives to bring the latest in news, advocacy, team collaboration, and grassroots marketing to the Ubuntu Community.

Just like the family fridge at home, this is where we – the Ubuntu family – can put our best work on display for everyone to see. Whether you’re working on advocacy and local marketing for a LoCo team, creating wonderful new worlds of Ubuntu in a derivative team, or building the freedom and technology of the future in a development team, we want to help you tell the community about your success.

You may have noticed that you can’t comment on articles posted to The Fridge – that’s because they are linked with the Ubuntu forums, so every story published on the front page has its very own post on the forum!

If you would like to contribute to The Fridge, by sending us your suggestions for new features, ideas for articles, or an original work (such as an article, photo or event review), please email The Ubuntu News Team.

If you would like to add an event to the calendar, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fridge/Calendar.

Canonical, Upgrading GNOME Bugzilla, and Commercial Sponsorship

Authored by: Sumana Harihareswara

You may have noticed the spiffy new GNOME Bugzilla. Sumana Harihareswara presents the story of how and why it came to be.

GNOME is asking for donations to hire a sysadmin. That’s because GNOME’s technological infrastructure—like source control, bug tracking, web and mail servers—make the rest of GNOME possible. Recently, Canonical found its efforts blocked by deficiencies in GNOME’s infrastructure. Specifically, our bugtracking software was too obsolete for them to programmatically interface with. So Canonical recently spent tens of thousands of USD to upgrade the GNOME Bugzilla instance from 2.20 to 3.4—including porting forward several beloved customizations.

The story started with Launchpad, Canonical’s collaborative development tool and the Ubuntu development hub. Launchpad has included a Remote Bug Watch feature from the start. Launchpad users could use this to associate Launchpad bugs with bugs in several external trackers. As Max Kanat-Alexander of consulting firm Everything Solved explains, “the most popular bug-tracker that Launchpad projects were interfacing without outside of Launchpad itself were Bugzilla installations.”

Canonical’s Christian Robottom Reis had previously worked on Bugzilla upstream, and appreciated it: “I know how cool a tool it is. We know organizations are invested in the tools they’ve chosen; we don’t expect them to come across to Launchpad for our primary benefit. So we’ve put work into making sure Launchpad plugs well into their infrastructure. All the work around bug watches, branch synchronization and translations emphasizes our coexistence with other tools.”

Kanat-Alexander had worked with Bugzilla upstream to add Launchpad integration capabilities to Bugzilla 3.4. As FLOSS projects upgrade to Bugzilla 3.4 and up, this may reduce bug duplication across the entire Linux ecosystem.

But a big part of the equation was missing. “In particular,” Kanat-Alexander continues, “the single most popular bug-tracker for Launchpad projects outside of Launchpad itself was the GNOME Bugzilla.” Since Ubuntu depends heavily on GNOME, Launchpad bugs often related to (or were duplicates of) GNOME bugs. As you can see from the list of remote bug trackers, GNOME has (at the time of writing) 15761 associated watches, as compared to the next highest bugtrackers, Debian at 12231 (followed by KDE, freedesktop.org, SourceForge.net, and Mozilla, all in the thousands).

But the remote watch didn’t work with GNOME’s fairly ancient Bugzilla. As Bugzilla development passed its 3.4 release and worked on 3.6, GNOME’s instance was still on 2.20, originally released in September 2005. And the age was showing. As Kanat-Alexander notes, “There were productivity issues, many needed new features, and serious, serious performance problems. Bugzilla 2.20 was WAY slower than version 3.0 or above, and it was on a old, slow server to boot.” Bugzilla 2.20 had been end-of-lifed in November 2008, so GNOME’s installation was also barred from getting security fixes.

Because of the disconnect, Ubuntu developers were wasting substantial time manually associating Launchpad and GNOME bugs. That bottleneck made Reis unhappy. “It’s hard to measure efficiency financially, but our view of engineering process is that it’s absolutely strategic to us. If engineers are spending time doing chores instead of engineering, we try hard to find tools to assist them,” Reis explains.

Canonical considered asking GNOME sysadmins to install a plugin that older bugtrackers, such as Bugzilla 3.0, can use to integrate better with Launchpad’s remote bug watch. “That plugin offers the same kind of API as Max’s additions to Bugzilla 3.4,” says Canonical engineer Graham Binns. “But the GNOME Bugzilla was, at the time, too out-of-date to be able to work with the plugin.”

GNOME Bugzilla had so many modifications that upgrading it would be arduous. “The GNOME resources available to upgrade Bugzilla to any version after 2.20 were basically nonexistent. Though Olav [Vitters] and the other system administrators had tried for many years to find the time and assistance to port forward the massive GNOME Bugzilla customizations (or even better, contribute them upstream), since everybody was operating on a volunteer basis, the time for such a massive project just couldn’t be found,” says Kanat-Alexander.

Canonical then offered to pay for Everything Solved to port forward key custom features (such as the Bug-Buddy interface, CSS customizations, and browse.cgi) as Bugzilla 3.4 features or extensions, and then upgrade GNOME’s bugtracker. Everything Solved’s initial estimate (for porting all customizations) had proven prohibitively expensive and lengthy for Canonical’s tastes, so Vitters, GNOME sysadmins and developers, and Everything Solved developed a list of key features to keep. They left some low-priority ones out, such as canned responses and the points system. The GNOME Foundation accepted this offer, acknowledging a tradeoff in some functional regressions just after the upgrade. Stormy Peters, GNOME Foundation Executive Director, was especially pleased to see improvements in GNOME infrastructure coming from a company, a consultant, and the GNOME Foundation working together.

Kanat-Alexander and Peters worked out an agreement, and in April 2009, the development work began. Graham Binns updated Launchpad’s bug syncing code to work with the API that Kanat-Alexander was adding to Bugzilla.

In August 2009, Everything Solved delivered the final customizations to GNOME’s volunteer sysadmins. The consultant and sysadmins moved Bugzilla to new servers donated by Red Hat, optimized MySQL performance, tested the new customizations, and then did the final rollout. To minimize downtime, Everything Solved also added upstream fixes to speed up the Bugzilla upgrade process.

GNOME bug-wranglers can now enjoy Bugzilla’s per-product permissions, duplicate prevention, localization, and myriad enhancements from the last few years. And Bugzilla users will get to enjoy several features that started with GNOME’s modifications. The browse.cgi view gives you a dashboard view of a project’s outstanding bugs and patches. Users can indicate the status of an attachment to a bug (e.g., “accepted-commit_now” or “needs-work”). Everything Solved also developed a stack-trace parsing extension, traceparser, for Bugzilla 3.6. All in all, Everything Solved upstreamed more than forty features or bugfixes.

GNOME-related Bugzilla contributions are still necessary, Vitters reminds us: we need to port Bugzilla 3.4 extensions to 3.6, and some customizations still haven’t gotten ported at all. But according to Kanat-Alexander:

“The community (particularly Frédéric Peters) stepped up to develop the most important of the ‘missing’ features that hadn’t been ported forward! Though before the upgrade it was almost impossible to get a review or any code assistance with developing customizations for Bugzilla, after the upgrade, with a ‘finished’ product in place, the contributions really started rolling in.”

Launchpad remote bug watch developers still have a lot of work to do from their end. Canonical is eager to see Mozilla, KDE, and Freedesktop.org upgrade their bugtrackers to improve Launchpad integration. GNOME was Canonical’s highest priority, though; “we haven’t worked officially with any other organization to get this installed,” says Reis, confirming GNOME’s critical importance to Ubuntu.

In short, the makers of Launchpad paid for improvements to Bugzilla, a competing product—not to mention that Ubuntu’s competitors will benefit from improvements to GNOME. As Reis notes, Canonical views this as “bridging the gap” from Ubuntu to upstream.

In the open source community we’re generally skeptical of bug bounties. We worry that paying for development work crowds out volunteer labor instead of adding to it, and degrades intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic rewards. And while branded parties and swag feel nice, it’s debatable how much they really contribute to FLOSS. But Canonical, GNOME, and Everything Solved have gone another route, using commercial sponsorship to address longstanding infrastructure rot. Canonical, Google, Collabora, and Nokia recently donated to aid in hiring a fulltime GNOME sysadmin, continuing in (hopefully) corporate/community partnership, not displacement.

Discuss this story with other readers on the GNOME forums.

This article originated in The GNOME Journal

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #187

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is Issue #187 for the week March 28th – April 3rd, 2010 and is available here.

In this issue we cover:

* Mark Shuttleworth: Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat
* Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2 freeze now in effect
* Ubuntu 8.10 reaches End-Of-Life April, 30, 2010
* Call for Session Leaders for Ubuntu Open Week
* Ubuntu Manual Team call for help
* Ubuntu Stats
* LoCo Directory: Team Events app Rocks!
* Ubuntu Ireland Global Jam Review
* Help Translate the main LoCo Council page
* Ubuntu One contacts, now with merging!
* Kubuntu Netbook Edition ScreenKast
* At Home With Jono Bacon Podcast
* Better sounding music with Rhythmbox
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* Ubuntu-UK Podcasts
* Upcoming Meetings & Events
* Updates & Security
* And much, much more!

This issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

* John Crawford
* Craig Eddy
* Amber Graner
* Dave Bush
* Nathan Handler
* And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License