For minutes of previous meetings, please see DesktopTeam/DevelopmentMeeting.
Present
- Scott James Remnant (Keybuk) - chair
- Martin Pitt (pitti)
- Michael Vogt (mvo)
Mirco Müller (MacSlow)
- Ted Gould (tedg)
- Sebastien Bacher (seb128)
- Colin Watson (cjwatson)
- Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
- Matthew Zimmerman (mdz)
Apologies
- Jonathan Riddell (Riddell) - attending KDE 4.0 Release Event
- Kenneth Wimer (kwwii) - ill
Agenda
- Outstanding actions from last meeting
- MIR for main promotions
- Keep tracker enabled for LTS?
- Sprint planning
- Usplash
- LTS status
- Review activity reports
- Any other business
Outstanding actions from last meeting
ACTION: pitti/seb128 to investigate seahorse package size and reduce it so it can be seeded.
- A mere rebuild reduces the size by 2MB by enabling fdups to symlink duplicate files together, the remaining issue is the use of a static libseahorse.a by all of the programs which is large enough to need to be a shared library. Added to sprint agenda to be solved there.
ACTION: GUADEC and LCA attendance requests
- Two requests for GUADEC and one for LCA received so far; deadline for LCA is now, and nobody else volunteered - deadline for GUADEC requests are next week.
MIR for main promotions
seb128 asked whether the main promotions discussed last week should have MIR, pitti felt they should at least have bugs and that he checked the packages himself and they were ok.
ACTION: seb128 to file necessary bugs
Keep tracker enabled for LTS?
mdz has asked whether we should keep tracker enabled by default for the LTS release given that the user experience is currently not ideal. seb128 indicated that user feedback has been generally good, and after a short discussion of mdz's problems, it could have been that he had at some point during gutsy development opened deskbar-applet's preferences before the switch was made to live search by default (thus saving the preferences so they wouldn't be migrated).
The desktop search experience will be reviewed at the sprint to ensure that we're not using a lot of the user's computer power for something that does not give them a benefit.
Sprint planning
Reminder was issued to ensure any plans for the sprint are added to the agenda. Time will be taken to speak to each team member about spec progress and 8.10 plans.
Usplash
Previous calls for volunteers to maintain this had been met with silence, so a further call was made. Pitti indicated that he had touched it last, and MacSlow expressed some interest in the graphics parts and in future development. Looking through it added to the sprint agenda.
ACTION: pitti and MacSlow to add themselves as usplash bug contacts.
LTS status
seb128 confirmed that the new gdm will not be ready in time for 8.04 LTS, and MacSlow concurred that the specs were targeted for 8.10 now.
seb128 also mentioned that the gvfs-enabled nautilus is on shaky ground at the moment (discussed in this week's platform team meeting) and asked whether it would impact any of the desktop team's work.
Activity reports
Jonathan Riddell (Riddell)
Kenneth Wimer (kwwii)
- tweaked color palette a bit more
- created window mockups (different colors, amounts of transaparence, window buttons, etc). Will be ready for sprint
- worked on icon for Sparkle plugin
- led art team meeting
- compiling list of icons needing improvement, missing, etc.
Martin Pitt (pitti)
Hardy spec assignments
policykit-integration: ConsokeKit now writes /var/run/consoe/<user> tags (like pam_console), libpam-foreground demoted; spec is now implemented
- restricted-manager-rewrite: currently at porting the smaller features; code is reaching maturity, expected first upload next week during the sprint; still no progress from Martin Bohm with the KDE port
- hardy-reducing-duplication: db4.5 and neon26 removal pending on build success of OO.o on sparc (gcc segfaulted, I retried it on another buildd); removed postgresql-8.1, rebuilt a couple of packages against libpq5
- partition-management: not started; low-prio spec, scheduled for after sprint
Unfixed milestoned bugs
172835 (dapper->hardy upgrade dbus reload fails, beta): no time yet
- 177141 (no restricted-manager on Hardy CDs, alpha-4): no time yet, will fix while I upload first version of driver-manager
- 174128 (dhcp3 debconf question during upgrade, beta): no time yet
- 22623 (CD-ROMs not mounted with UTF-8, beta): not started
- 177072 (AUDIODEV should be exported when using pulseaudio, final): no time yet
Dapper.2
testing & certification finished, CD images prepublished
- needs someone with quagga experience to check the version in -proposed (#48848), contacted \sh and infinity; no feedback so far
- release currently planned for Monday afternoon London time
Other
Updated PolicyKit to 0.7, spent some hours on debugging and fixing it
- some bug fixing in python-distutils-extra
- cut a large dent into my bugs folder, started major bug triage
- cleared my sponsoring queue (I am now doing about three per day; seems that the number of contributors starts to rise faster now, which is a great thing!)
Random whine/straw poll of the day: I spent more than 9 hours this week on email, and this is not excessively above the average (and I still have a backlog). Is that as bad for other people, or am I doing something wrong?
Michael Vogt (mvo)
Compiz
- Rename compizconfig-backend-{gconf,kconfig} to match debians names
- upload some new git snapshots
- looked into a workaround for the problem that 3d DRI windows draw over anything on the screen, the idea that we (amaranth, onestone, me) came up with was to add regular XWindow/XShapes on top of the glx window bit that is hidden
- created testcode to see if glx window worksaround would work and indeed it does
- test glxclip plugin that does the above (written by onestone)
- the missing piece now is a way to detect creation and deletion of glx windows, I have a patch for libmesa that can detect creation just fine, but deletion is a problem. doing it one the xserver is probably the right answer, but the code is not exactly easy to follow (especially the DRI bits)
Apt
discussed with dburrows about porting aptitude to the ListUpdate interface in libapt
- debug mirror method failure with salgado
- review/test/upload aut-authentication reliability
work on the AptArchiveKeySignatures and add the master key checking, for the next steps I need a export of the current signing key to a stable location on archive.u.c (RT ticket filed for this)
- discuss a way to store private authentication tokens in apt (with cprov for private PPAs), test reported problem about https simple auth handling
Upgrades
- better duplicate detection in apport integration on install failures
- better fallback behavior if sources.list contains unreachable entries
Misc
- upload new apturl (description+http proxy support)
- ported update-notifier to the new glib/gio interface and created a branch for it
- sponsoring
Mirco Müller (MacSlow)
spec-related work (sparkle)
getting cover-image of currently played song finally works...
, 
the cube is only a stand-in for the real layout until remaining boilerplate-issues are fixed - learned that current design of rhythmbox is unable to retrieve non-played songs/URIs, that needs additional work outside of sparkle itself (likely artdisplay-plugin needs to be extended, but upstream is a bit slow to provide helpful hints what best suggested practice would be)
- sparkle is able to work with any source in rhythmbox (e.g. local songs, podcasts, internet-radio)
identified bug in artdisplay-plugin not preserving alpha-channel of dropped/assigned cover-image (filed upstream-bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509880)
spec-related work (gdm-face-browser)
- wrote countdown-widget to help polish cheese before feature-freeze (sent upstream and accepted)
http://home.cs.tum.edu/~siegel/index.php?page=news#20080114
misc
patch for rhythmbox to enable browser by default for external player sources (e.g. iPod) turned out to not work, although even upstream rb-developers thought it should work (upstream bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508555)
Ted Gould (tedg)
Specs
screensaver-review : Discussed with Scott, looking at bringing more preferences out for advanced users. Allow for people to "trick their desktop."
Misc
Created a basis for capturing current user experiences in the Wiki. Hopefully the instructions and template will allow for outside contribution. Still beta, announce shortly. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Experiences/Current
- Working on submission for Ubuntu Live
- Starting to bring together Ubuntu SCALE talk
- Misc prep for sprint
- Martin, yes I spend a crazy amount of time on e-mail also. I thought I lost my virtual folders in Evolution this week with the Hardy upgrade -- major stress. Fortunately was an apt thing.
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