jonathan carter » Ubuntu

The “Software Packages” Meta-Track at UDS

jonathan — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:31:31 +0000

Meta Track?

I’m glad you asked! At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, sessions are arranged by track. There are some topics that don’t have official tracks, but you end up seeing the same people in the same kind of sessions and it ends up being a track for all practical intents and purposes. One of these “meta-tracks” that emerged at this UDS was about software packages in Ubuntu. These were discussions related to how packages are organised in Ubuntu, how they’re maintained and synced with Debian, how to get upstream software developers excited about Ubuntu and more.

These were the sessions where I could walk in and be sure to find some combination of Stefano Rivera, Allison Randal, Asheesh Laroia, Evan Broder, Iain Lane, Andrew Starr-Bochiccio, Daniel Holbach, Andrew Mitchell, Micah Gersten, Bhavani Shankar and more in there

These sessions included:

I couldn’t attend all of them, many sessions were in the same slot or I were required in another session at the time. I marked the ones I couldn’t attend in italics.

Archive Re-organisation

I’ll jump in with the big and controversial topic. When Ubuntu was founded, Canonical and the Ubuntu community was small and could only support a subset of the Debian archives. This supported subset became known as main. Initially it was less than 1GB large, the rest of what you’d usually find in the Debian main archive became known as Universe, and a group of people, named in jest after a he-man series, became known as the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) team.

Main was maintained mostly by Canonical staff and the universe archive was maintained by Canonical staff and community members. Over time, more and more community members started to maintain packages in main. Flavours such as Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu were later allowed to install from universe and it was later enabled by default. In the initial LTS release, only main packages were supported long-term. These days, there are many packages in universe that are supported for the full 5 years on LTS releases. Previously, only packages in main had translations shipped for them. This is also no longer true. The lines between main and universe have become so blurred that having the separation no longer made any sense. Around the last LTS release (10.04), the topic of an archive re-organisation emerged. It was a big discussion, and when the Developer Membership Board was formed the MOTU Council was disbanded (which in my opinion was a bad idea) in part of that and also in anticipation for the archive re-organisation. Some people took that as meaning that MOTU is dead or that it would stop to exist. That is certainly not the case.

Unfortunately, the archive re-organisation became very complicated very quickly. There still needs to be a way for Canonical to identify packages that they officially support if someone wants to throw money at them for supporting it. We can’t have everything translated because the language packs would just grow too big. How would we deal with managing build-dependencies and make sure that people depend on high-quality tools and libraries? Soon after the initial archive re-organisation was started, it stalled. In my opinion this caused lots of confusion and did damage to the Ubuntu project.

Having said that, I’m glad to report that the discussion at this UDS was extremely positive and it seems like the archive re-organisation might actually be completed over the next two releases. Other benefits will include how support meta-data is stored. The tools that currently use the support fields (update-manager, ubuntu-support-status, software-center, etc) will now get the support metadata from an external file, which means that packages in Ubuntu wouldn’t need a diff with Debian’s packages anymore for support meta-data. Also, the archive layout will be simpler and easier to understand. MOTU would probably change from “Masters of the Universe” to “Masters of the Unseeded”. Packages that are seeded are packages that are provided on standard Ubuntu flavours (Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc). The rest of the archive that are unseeded would then still be maintained by a newly defined MOTU group.

It’s a big hairy issue and I’ve just touched on some of the areas, but what’s great is that progress is being made again and that people are serious about making it happen. Colin Watson has a work item to take the discussion further on the Ubuntu development mailing list. I’m positive that things will be moving forward on that front for this cycle, even if it ends up taking another cycle to iron out some of the smaller kinks.

Application Review Board

In a previous cycle, Canonical put together a process by which application developers could get their non-free, commercial applications in to the Software Center via authenticated PPA. It seemed unfair to have a process where non-free software could make it into the Ubuntu software center but free software couldn’t, so a process was formed to let apps in the software center via an extras repository. This process is overseen by the Application Review Board. I joined this board right about 6 months ago. We’ve had the usual problems that Ubuntu teams have (because, in reality the ARB is more of a team than a board, the name is a misnomer, I wish less Ubuntu teams had this issue), like lack of time, getting sporadically distracted by other work, but on top of that, we didn’t have our process quite smoothed out yet. The web interface that we used to manage apps had some huge issues (like making apps completely disappear from the interface when requesting feedback from the developer).

For the last weeks, quite a few people have worked hard to help fix the issues in the process and in the web app. There were *many* sessions at this UDS regarding upstream developers, the ARB, the MyApps web interface, etc. At times I thought that there were too many, but it was just right. A lot of issues were discussed, problems were solved, and while I felt like the ARB process was in an alpha stage during the last cycle, I think it’s more like a beta-state process now. I think we’re very close to having a process that’s smooth and easy for both the people that submit these apps, and the people who review them.

Currently the ARB has some backlog that we need to sort through, we’ll probably use that to help improve the process further and make Ubuntu a fun and welcoming platform to develop for.

We also absolutely want people to contribute their software to the right place. If a package belongs in Debian, Ubuntu, a PPA or any other archive instead, we’d like to advise the user properly. I took a work item to put together a flowchart to help people decide where to submit their app, because there’s way to many guides and howtos and someone could read the entire New Maintainers Guide and still won’t know where to submit their app

I know I’m a bit thin on the details on the sessions here, but I’ll do more blog posts on that. I just wanted to provide some background and explain that good progress is made, and that things are greatly improving with the ARB process. In the ARB, many of us are aspiring to becoming Debian Developers so that we can help sponsor packages there when it’s appropriate.

Debian Health Check

The Debian Health Check session as become a regular session at UDS. We had a bunch of DD’s in the room that could comment on the Debian-Ubuntu relationship, but we didn’t have someone who specifically represented Debian. Some of the issues I’ve mentioned previously (like the ARB) were discussed. Also the Ayatana patches from Ubuntu that are hard to get into Debian (which includes Unity).

What is nice is that we have quite a few people who started out with Ubuntu that became Debian Developers. The relationship between Debian and Ubuntu seems quite healthy and it seems that both projects gain great benefit from each other.

MOTU Birds of a Feather

The archive-reorg was discussed, and MOTUs future role was discussed in anticipation of it. There was some discussion about things that have worked well in the last few cycles that should be revitalised. MOTU needs some more announcements of what it’s doing to cause some buzz around its activities. Too few people know what MOTU does and how it does it. Evan Broder and I plan to try some experiments with Facebook ads to see what kind of people/interest they bring in MOTU

The MOTU team is also very eager to get long-term ARB apps into the archive. Having apps in universe would mean less work and restrictions than having them in extras.

As MOTU we’re very committed to it and its goals, but there needs to be some restructuring/updating of the current documentation. It might also need a new vision/mission-statement, etc. This cycle is going to be a revitalisation cycle for MOTU in whatever form it will continue to exist. We hope that many people will get excited about packaging and quality in the Ubuntu archive and help contribute to that

Getting it all down is impossible

I wish I could do a better job at this blog post, but I’m still somewhat suffering from information overload from last week, and if I try to get it perfect and get everything in there then this post will never get finished. If you have questions, feel free to give a poke on #ubuntu-motu on freenode, there’s bound to be someone who could answer questions on any of these topics if you’re willing to hang around a bit. I still haven’t even touched on Backports, APT improvements, SRU streamlining, etc, but you should be able to find most of the information from those sessions in their blueprints. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!

Ubuntu Trending on Google+

jonathan — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:54:35 +0000

Happy Ubuntu 12.04, release day!

I just noticed that Ubuntu (and Precise) is trending on Google+! As far as I can tell this is the first time that Ubuntu is trending there. That’s just awesome.

Following the stream is pretty nice, there’s currently a new post with every automatic refresh (about once a second).

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this and also the release team who did an outstanding job delivering Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) to the masses!

Well, I guess it’s time to prepare for UDS for 12.10 and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at UDS in California in a bit more than a week! I’ll be posting some updates on Google+ as well, please follow me!

My Unity 5.0 Experience

jonathan — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:29:16 +0000

Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

LTSP By The Sea 2011

jonathan — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:53:45 +0000

Last weekend I spent some time with the LTSP folks at the annual LTSP hackfest called “By The Sea” (or BTS for short). This was my second BTS. It was well attended and these were some of the items that were covered:

Migration to new NBD
Bootable chroots
libpam-ssh
Epoptis
Local window manager
Improvements to ltsp-build-client
Migrate LDM to GTK+3
LDM login speedup
Try to do something about the default LDM theme

Other than that it was a great time for LTSP enthusiasts to get together and socialize a bit. For the next few months, the focus is on fixing bugs and getting LTSP in a good shape for when Ubuntu 12.04 LTS arrives, since everything that is done now should be supportable for 5 years. After that there will most likely be some push to move from LDM to LightDM, which will allow us to have much nicer (and more useful) login screens for all kinds of remote sessions. It was great seeing everyone there and I hope to be there again next year!

On the road again

jonathan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:53:11 +0000

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!

Ubuntu Global Jam Montréal

jonathan — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 19:57:31 +0000

I’m spending my day at the Ubuntu Global Jam in Montréal. What surprised me most is that after all these years, it’s the first global jam I’ve actually attended. Canonical provided the venue and some yummy refreshments. I managed to be somewhat productive, but even better was being able to put some more names to faces with the local Ubuntu crowd.

Looking forward to the next one already!

Why I love Debian

jonathan — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 02:53:55 +0000

Now and again, someone asks me “Why do you use Debian?” or “What’s so great about it? Why don’t you use (insert any other Linux distribution here)? I never quite know what to say. I’ve gotten so wrapped up in why Debian is great that it has become hard to imagine how someone else couldn’t see what I admire in it.

So.. what IS so great about it?

It’s great for similar reasons as Wikipedia. Wikipedia builds this huge collection of free articles, pictures and videos and assimilate it by making sure the content is free, that statements are properly backed, that there are proper links between articles and probably a few dozen really big things I haven’t even ever thought about.

Great community. Debian has some parallels to Wikipedia. It’s almost like a Wikipedia but for software instead of articles. It assimilates free software and makes it easy to use on a very wide variety of systems. It does so better than any other system that exists (at least IMHO, I list just some of the reasons for saying that below). Packagers are like editors on Wikipedia. They integrate all kinds of free software into the system, making sure it meets the project’s quality standards and that the licensing is sound.

Operating system support. You can run Debian with a Linux, FreeBSD or GNU/Hurd kernel. FreeBSD and GNU/Hurd is admittedly not as rounded as Linux in all situations, but just the fact that you have a choice of operating system kernel and that the project supports 3 of the most well known ones is amazing. I can’t even think of one other system that actively works on supported different kernels.

Desktop support. Some systems focus on Gnome, KDE or in the case of Ubuntu, Unity. Debian supports a really wide variety of desktop environments. Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox and more are all fully supported and in the main archive.

Architectures. It runs on a really amazingly wide range of hardware. It runs officially on i386, amd64, armel, sparc, powerpc, ia64, mips, mipsel, and IBM/s390, but you can also run it unsupported on alpha, armhf, avr32, hppa, m68k, powerpcspe, sh4 and sparc64 architectures. Debian scales from some of the tiniest computers that can run an operating system to the world’s most powerful super computers.

The Debian Social contract. Many distributions exist to make profit. There’s nothing wrong with that and I fully support that people use free software to make a living (I’d be a hypocrite if I said otherwise). Unfortunately, many distributions also base their choices on their profit motives. Decisions are often made based on “What’s going to make us profit right now” as apposed to “What will be best for our users now and in the long term?” (I’ll stay away from specific examples for now because this blog post is about Debian and not Oracle, Novell and similar companies). Debian exists for its users. It’s mission is defined in the Debian Social Contract. Decisions are made based on what’s best for the user and not to maximize benefits of the project sponsors.

If I don’t stop here I’ll go on all night. And I haven’t even started talking about how great APT is yet or that Debian has pretty much the largest collection of high quality packages available. Or how reliable upgrades are. But this blog entry isn’t about convincing people to use Debian, it’s about expressing why I like it so much and I’ve probably expressed that sufficiently already.

But.. But…

Oh yeah, I get some uphill from people for liking Debian, I can deal with it.

What about Ubuntu? There are some shortcomings in Debian that can’t really be fixed due to its public commitments, or at least, fixing them would break things in Debian. Apple has created a huge eco-system around the Apple App Store. It’s how people buy applications now on most Apple systems. It’s been so successful that Google has used the same concept on the Android Marketplace. Many other systems are doing it too, Ubuntu is promoting free software and non-free software alike in it’s Software Center. Ubuntu will be making it easier for people to buy and install non-free software. Some critics might say that Ubuntu is promoting non-free software that way, but it’s a good experiment and it’s great that it can happen without having to be part of the Debian project. There are more things that Ubuntu does that would be really difficult to get into Debian, but I don’t want to focus on that because Ubuntu is really a *great* Debian derivative. It has delivered Debian (in some form) to more users than Debian itself has by relentlessly working on making it as easy to install and maintain as possible. On top of that, Ubuntu does a great job of submitting their fixes and improvements back to upstreams and to Debian itself. I use Ubuntu on my home desktop and some servers and support it at clients on a daily basis. I think it’s a worthy project and it’s great that it exists. So why do I sometimes use Debian instead of Ubuntu? On servers, stable releases of Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases are quite close to each other. Debian provides more testing before releasing and only releases when the system is ready, where Ubuntu sticks to a committed release time. Ubuntu’s release cycle also has it’s own benefits, but recently I’ve come to prefer Debian Squeeze on my own machines (I don’t even have to use Plymouth!) and I know many people feel differently about it and that’s fine. On my laptop I’m a bit more risky.. I want new, cutting edge, I don’t mind if there’s some problems now and again and I’m happy to fix it when it does pop up. I run Debian Unstable on my laptop with packages from Experimental. It works great for me. I’ve been running it again (used to do it before Ubuntu started) since late last year and besides a transition to /run that caused dbus to break and gdm not to start for one evening, I haven’t any problems worth mentioning. On development versions of Ubuntu the ride is typically much more bumpy. That’s not a problem for most Ubuntu users since users usually stick with with stable releases, and Ubuntu releases often enough (way more than Debian) so that they could still have newest software on a regular basis. There are many views on Debian and Ubuntu, in my opinion Ubuntu is an important and relevant derivative and even though it’s goals are somewhat different, it compliments and promotes many of the Debian ideals.

It’s old! Debian’s release cycle isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. I’ve mentioned some of the benefits of releasing when ready above. On top of that, Debian has also made its backports repository an official resource, which makes it easier to get newer software on stable releases. There are also micro-sites like mozilla.debian.net where users can get some specific backports for certain types of packages. I guess Debian could really benefit from something similar to PPAs for this. Unfortunately Launchpad.net doesn’t support Debian builders (understandably so since waiting times on Ubuntu packages can already be quite high). The concept of another PPA implementation has been bought up on the Debian lists before and I have a lot to say about it, but that will be another blog entry. Also, Debian has something in between stable releases (which can get quite old on desktops) and unstable/experimental (where all the active development is taking place). When a package has been in unstable for a while and doesn’t do harm to your system, it’s promoted to an repository called ‘testing’. In testing you get a good combination of stability and new software. Admittedly you probably don’t want to deploy testing in large corporate environments since it’s officially unsupported, but for personal machines and for the typical hacker, it’s known to work great.

Choose 10 completely random numbers! 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. (I never claimed that Debian is perfect)

In Summary

Debian has a large and vibrant community with a big eco-system around it. It has many derivatives, some of them extremely high-profile and special in their own right. The whole effort is spectacular and awesome- and it’s all from a completely distributed world-wide self-governed community project. Sure, it’s not perfect, but I can’t help to look at it and admire it as one of the wonders of the age of information.

And now I have something to point to when people ask me, “Why do you like Debian?”

Ubuntu Membership

jonathan — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 22:12:32 +0000

This is a blog entry about Ubuntu membership, and some tips for applicants.

The Membership Concept

The Ubuntu project accepts many kinds of contributions from people all over the world. After time, many contributors develop a sense of belonging and ownership of the project. When someone has been with the project for a long time and have made significant contributions to the project, then they may apply for membership. When you become an Ubuntu member, you become an official part of the project. You become a representative. You get an @ubuntu.com email address, an Ubuntu cloak on Freenode. You even get to vote on who serves on the Ubuntu Community Council, the top-level community governance committee in Ubuntu. For people who are serious about Ubuntu, membership is a big deal. Many people consider Ubuntu membership one of their biggest achievements.

Technical and non-technical contributions

People who become involved on a technical level will typically get membership based on their packaging and bug fixing/triaging work. If you’ve done a significant amount of technical work, you can apply to become an Ubuntu contributing developer via the Developers Membership Board (DMB) . The expectation is that an Ubuntu contributing developer will eventually grow into bigger Ubuntu developer roles (PPU/MOTU/Core-Dev) after time.All MOTUs and Ubuntu Core Developers are Ubuntu members. A technical contributor who contributes significantly to Kubuntu or to Edubuntu can also become members via the membership boards of those projects.

Technical contributions are greatly appreciated, but in Ubuntu we also recognise many other type of contributions equally. Work done inside your LoCo team (organising install fests, Ubuntu hours, setting up booths at local conferences, marketing, release parties, etc), support (on IRC, forums, askubuntu.com, etc), doing translation work, documentation (wiki, yelp, help.ubuntu.com, etc) are just some of the other type of contributions that are also recognised.

Ubuntu greatly benefits from upstream contributions, however, Ubuntu membership is only granted when a person is active within the Ubuntu project itself. If you’ve contributed to upstreams such as the Linux kernel, Gnome or even in Debian significantly but have never done any work in Ubuntu, then it’s probably unlikely that you’ll qualify for Ubuntu membership. Upstream contributions are certainly counted as a positive, it’s just that it’s not enough on its own.

Things to keep in mind when applying

The type of contributions that someone can provide is vast and is sometimes hard to quantify, because of that there’s no simple checklist that someone could just tick off and provide someone with membership. Because of this, a candidate will apply to a board which typically consists of at least 5 people. Board members are often community members themselves. Some boards consist of members with many varying views on many different things, this is often beneficial to candidates since board members can challenge and question each other on decisions that were made. I serve on the EMEA Regional Membership Board. Sometimes after a meeting we ask each other “Why did you give that -1? Wasn’t that a bit unfair?” or “Why did you give a +1 vote for this applicant and a +0 for a similar one last time?”. Discussing this after meetings (outside of the ubuntu-meeting channel) sometimes helps us in being more consistent on the voting process in the future.

Having said all of the above, it’s important to also realise that a membership board *wants* to give you membership. However, the Ubuntu community is ever growing with now thousands of contributors. It’s impossible for the board members to know all the people who contribute.

When applying, a candidate must prepare a wiki page listing their work in the Ubuntu project to date. Even a terse description of future plans is usually not a bad idea (but don’t let it dominate your wiki page, it’s past and current contributions that count). Some work are really easy to quantify and list. It’s easy to point to a launchpad package summary page and say “Here are 128 uploads I’ve made to Ubuntu in the last year!” or a forum page or launchpad questions or askubuntu.com page summarizing how many support questions you’ve helped getting resolves. Or saying how many release parties you’ve organised, how many translation strings you’ve provided and so on.

Gray areas with upstreams

Some contributions are much harder to quantify. IRC support is one of them. Improving documentation or doing marketing as well. Because of this, we don’t rely purely on numbers to judge membership. On your membership application page, you should have the people you have worked with comment on it and let the membership board you are applying to know about the great work that you have done. If someone is well known and respected in the community already, then their comments on your wiki page will go a long way. I’ve seen many members get approved just on reputation and good feedback by existing Ubuntu members alone. Comments from lesser well known contributors also count, but comments from people who are already trusted just counts so much more. Feedback from peers are also invaluable when we encounter gray areas. Above I mentioned that upstream contributions on their own don’t count. Recently things have become more complicated. There has been membership applications where an applicants main contributions were to upstream contributions such as Unity or Launchpad. These are tough because they’re tightly integrated in Ubuntu. An even tougher situation would be if someone who is a contributor to mainly Landscape or Ubuntu One would apply. These are also tightly integrated in Ubuntu but are seperate upstream projects. On top of that they are also non-free. Since membership was originally defined the lines between Ubuntu and what an upstream is has certainly become more complicated, and there are a lot of apposing views covering all the shades ranging from “Give all Debian Developers Ubuntu Membership” all the way down to “Only give membership to people who have strictly contributed to projects that are managed as part of the Ubuntu project!”. Because this has been a tricky issue, I’ve added it to the next Community Council meeting so that we can perhaps have some guidelines regarding upstreams, how we view them and how we look at contributions to those projects.

Closing words

I was only planning on a two paragraph blog entry and I haven’t said everything I want to yet. But… if you’re thinking of applying for membership:

Read this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership
Maintain your Ubuntu wiki page as you contribute. It’s like a resume, it’s easier to keep it up to date than to update it when you actually need it. Get the people who have worked with you to comment on your work. If they can attend the IRC session when your application is reviewed, even better.
Be patient. It might be a good idea to attend a membership meeting first before you apply just to get a general idea of how its run. Also, if you don’t get membership the first time, don’t stress. It happens. Many Ubuntu members got it only on their second time. The membership board will also give you advice on what’s lacking or things you can improve on for the next time you apply. Don’t waste that valuable advice, use it!
The process isn’t perfect (like anything), but it’s evolving and improving. If you have an issue, don’t be disgruntled about it. Bring it up in the right forum, I assure you that the right people will pay attention to the issue and work towards a solution.
If you’re still with me, wow, thanks. I’ve probably made a lot of typos and grammar mistakes. If I tried to get it right before posting it would just end up with my 50+ other blog drafts. Thanks for reading

It’s okay

jonathan — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:17:56 +0000

Something I’ve heard way too much this week at UDS is something like “Sorry for not being able to contribute to [insert some subproject of Ubuntu here] over the past development cycle! I feel horrible and I hope there’s no resentment!”

Everyone goes through stuff sometimes, and no one will hold it against you if you need to take some time to sort out stuff. Just be careful not to block anything and if someone steps up to run with something, let them! Have fun kids!

UDS for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) in Budapest

jonathan — Sat, 07 May 2011 14:24:39 +0000

Last month was the first month in 6 years that I haven’t blogged. It’s been a busy period but I’m taking a few days to relax with family in Switzerland and get psyched for the Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place in Budapest next week.

I’m checking the schedule to see what’s interesting and started writing it down, but thought that I might as well post it publicly, since I’ll be writing some summaries from my perspective and posting them to Planet Ubuntu.

Sessions marked in bold are sessions I 100% want or have to be at, either because they affect things we work with at Révolution Linux, Edubuntu, Debian collaboration or otherwise packaging things and membership. I’m flexible on other sessions and might change my mind, especially if someone would like me to attend anothe session for whatever reason.

Monday

Monday’s Schedule: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-09/

09:00 - Plenary - Introduction and Keynote 10:00 - Kazincy - Community Roundtable 11:00 - Petofi - Feedback on Natty cycle 12:00 - Krudy - Improvements and ideas for WebLive 14:00 - Plenary - Qt 14:15 - Plenary - Ubuntu Server motivations 14:30 - Plenary - Linaro Topic (TBD) 14:45 - Plenary - The future of the universe, continued 15:00 - Undecided 16:15 - Mikszath - NGO Team Oneiric plans 17:05 - Jokai - Network boot prototype for Linaro

Tuesday

Tuesday’s schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-10/

09:00 - Kazincy - Community Roundtable 10:00 - TAS - Server Install Experience 11:00 - Kond - Edubuntu Plans for Oneiric 12:00 - Dery - Debian Health Check 14:00 - Plenary - Linaro Platform Challenges 14:15 - Plenary - Linaro Validation - LAVA 14:30 - Plenary - Linaro and Android 15:00 - Dery - DEX - Improving cross-distribution collaboration with Debian 16:15 - Dery - GTK 3 / Gnome 3 in Oneiric 17:05 - Undecided

Wednesday

Wednesday’s schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-11/

09:00 - Dery - Maintenance of the Mozilla packages in the new world 10:00 - Dery - Natty Tech Board, DX, Desktop, and Release Team retrospective 11:00 - Kazincy - Possible use for application sandboxing with containers 12:00 - Kond - LibreOffice Packaging for Oneiric 14:00 - Plenary - The Magic Behind WebLive 14:15 - Plenary - Delicious Recipes 14:30 - Plenary - Wine as a Performance Metric 14:45 - Plenary - Building Applications with Ubuntu One 15:00 - Undecided 16:15 - Mikszath - Ubuntu Development Bottlenecks 17:05 - TAS - Ask Mark (Q+A with sabdfl)

Thursday

Thursday’s schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-12/

09:00 - Kazincy - Community Thursday Roundtable 10:00 - Kond - Ubuntu Membership behavior and Code of Conduct outside Ubuntu.com community 11:00 - Arany - Main inclusion requests from Canonical's corporate partners 12:00 - Dery - LightDM for Display Management 14:00 - Plenary - Linaro showcase and prizes 14:15 - Plenary - Intro to Openstack, LXC 14:30 - Plenary - What's wrong with UDS and how we can fix it 14:45 - Plenary - Group Photo 15:00 - Huba - Summit development plans from UDS-O 16:15 - Petofi - Ubuntu Server Puppet Integration 17:05 - Kond - Collaboration between Debian-Edu and Edubuntu

Friday

Friday’s Schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-13/

09:00 - Kazincy - Community Friday Roundtable 10:00 - Krudy - App Review Board Review and Assessment 11:00 - Jozsef - debdelta support 12:00 - Jozsef - Redefine membership policy for Ubuntu Bug Control 14:00 - Plenary - Lightning talks 15:00 - Krudy - LXC improvements 16:15 - Kazincy - Governance Roundtable 17:05 - Plenary - UDS Wrapup

It’s going to be a big week! I’m excited to see everyone who will be attending!