This page keeps track of the current release status of the Desktop Team.

What was done engineering wise?

• Finished the new extensive pre-release testing for Unity, packages landing today. This showed that the manual testing is useful and comprehensive (we found some minor regressions) and rises our confidence in the new version.
• dnsmasq server fixes landed (part of the IPv6 robustification).
• Power usage improvements: Integrated Colin King's pm-utils script changes, fixed unnecessary wakeups in network-manager, debugged unnecessary wakeups in notify-osd, triaged/debugged some other power issues.
• Libreoffice 3.5 beta 2 landed in precise, but currently causes archive uninstallability due to missing -l10n packages. Sorting this out ASAP.
• Went through our work items, adjusted some priorities, and deferred/dropped a few. Closer to the trend line now, and enough fodder for dropping if necessary.

What's about to land that might impact the other teams?

• Nothing planned right now.

Dependencies on other teams, blocking items

• Help from Kubuntu team to move soprano-daemon to unixodbc would be greatly appreciated. (901638)

Blueprints

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+specs?searchtext=desktop-p-

Burndown and spec completion levels:

• For alpha-2: http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/canonical-desktop-team-precise-alpha-2.html

• Entire cycle: http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/canonical-desktop-team.html

Release targetted bugs being worked on/monitored

triaged/in progress:

• 805136 [accounts window doesn't fit on screen and no scrollbar to show hidden fields]: No progress this week.

• 810721 [at-spi-registryd crashed with SIGSEGV in gconf_client_get_default()]: No progress this week.

• 828623 [gnome control centre does not allow you to disable the laptop screen while leaving an external DisplayPort connected screen working]: Only affects some systems; no progress this week

• 790240 [at-spi needs demotion for precise]: We need to flip openjdk-6/7 to the new at-spi2 adapter, blocker here is just to test whether this actually works. Once that's done, we can move the dependency and demote the rest.

• 712677 [Does not report crashes during "Install Ubuntu" installs]: No progress this week.

• 901638 [Remove iodbc2 (causes upgrade failure from Oneiric to Precise)]: We have a patch to fix the upgrade, but needed to revert it because soprano-daemon still needs the obsolete iodbc2 driver. Help appreciated.

• 868400 [Synaptics touchpad stops working - two syndaemon instances running]: No progress this week

Fix committed to bzr, but not uploaded yet:

• 857153 [Needs to get accessibility settings from GSettings]

• 850264 [given a foreign architecture of i386 on amd64 machine, and an outdated libc, apt tries to remove libc-bin]

fixed since last report:

Cumulative Desktop Release Notes

• Until Ubuntu 11.10, the Unix group for administrators with root privileges through sudo had been admin. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it is now sudo, for compatibility with Debian and sudo itself. However, for backwards compatibility, admin group members are still recognized as administrators.
• Automatic Apport crash reporting has been enabled by default again to catch problems early on. It now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.

• The default music player has been switched to Rhythmbox. There is no UbuntuOne Music Store yet, this still needs to be ported to GTK 3.

• LibreOffice has been updated to 3.5 beta 2. Please report any regressions that you notice.

Archive of previous weekly summaries

2011-11-18

Done:

• Blueprint drafting and approval almost complete (our target was today); work items are almost complete, and everyone individually as well as the total number of work items are below or at the computed/agreed limit.
• Fixed a couple of bugs in autopkgtest, it's now possible to use for our purposes. Converted the first two packages to DEP-8/autopkgtest for continuous QA integration: upower, apport; more to come. Discussed with Jean-Baptiste how to run these on data center QA machines.
• Worked on getting Unity test harness and tarmac setup ready to go. Also got 51 manual test cases for Unity acceptance criteria written as a draft, covering panel and launcher for now.
• Cleanup of GNOME packages, we were able to coordinate with Debian, do a few updates there, and sync a lot.
• Landed client-side crash signature/duplicate detection in Apport trunk, and discussed integration into Cassandra server with Evan.

About to land:

• By next Monday we decide about Banshee vs. Rhythmbox. That particularly affects U1. But porting U1 to GTK3 is already unblocked, as we won't go with a GTK2 Banshee in precise.

Blockers:

• Waiting for IS to put Unity tarmac setup into production.

2011-11-25

Done:

• Blueprint drafting and approval fully complete last Monday; work items for everyone individually as well as the total number of work items are below or at the computed/agreed limit.
• Unity (and related projects) tarmac/branch autolanding is now in effect. First actual tests are in place, although not a lot yet, and the Unity ones are currently failing.

• Unity manual test plan started, making good progress. (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityTests)

• Landed Apport client-side crash signature/duplicate detection.
• It has been decided to go with Rhythmbox as default music player now, and reevaluate the state of Banshee-GTK3 between alpha-3 and beta-1. Seed changes were applied and uploaded.
• Ported session-installer to GTK 3 and dropped gnome-codec-install, getting rid of some old libraries.
• Landed new Zeitgeist, now written in Vala instead of Python. Brings some nice speedups.

About to land:

• For alpha-1 we'll switch to Rhythmbox and drop Tomboy/gbrainy from the CDs.

Blockers:

• Nothing right now.

2011-12-02

Done:

• Switched precise over to Rhythmbox, dropped banshee/gbrainy/totem/Mono from CDs.
• More packages got DEP-8 autopkgtest control files now. We now have apport, jockey, upower, postgresql-common now.
• Update our desktop packages (polkit, accountsservice, jockey, language-selector, etc.) for the admin → sudo group migration. This is now the new preferred "administrator" group, but admin should still be recognized for backwards compatibility (for eternity).
• Multi-arch-ified GTK 3, so you can start multiarching plugins and dependencies.
• Started looking into the LightDM KDE greeter: fixed build of the new liblightdm-qt, currently packaging the KDE greeter.

• Wrote 107 manual Unity tests (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityTests), fully functionally covering panel, launcher, dash and alt + tab. Some window management interaction is covered as well.

About to land:

• We will soon switch to a GLib/Gtk development version (2.31.x / 3.3.x). We'll test this thoroughly, but it might cause some disruption.

Blockers:

• Nothing right now.

2012-12-09

Done:

• Landed new glib development release 2.31. This caused some dozen packages to FTBFS, but was worked around. No other regressions known right now.

• Set up http://ddebs.ubuntu.com for armhf.

• Failsafe-X works again.
• Improved archive consistency reports (component-mismatches, uninstallability, priority-mismatches) and drove uninstallable packages, priority-mismatches, and architecture-mismatches to zero. Let's keep it that way! All three are now integrated into Jenkins.

• All unity projects now have working tests and are autolanding gracefully and pushed to the staging PPA (https://launchpad.net/~unity-team/+archive/staging).

About to land:

• Nothing planned right now.

Blockers:

• Nothing right now, but help greatly appreciated for 850264

2012-12-16

Done:

• Landed GTK 3.3 development release, no major problems known.

• Fixed several bugs which caused lucid->precise or oneiric->precise upgrades to fail. We had to revert 901638 until soprano-daemon gets fixed (a first attempt was made to build soprano against unixodbc, but that fails at runtime).

• Fixed remaining long-standing uninstallability in main.
• poppler ABI transition/porting now fully done in main and universe. That took quite some porting work and reiterated a discussion how much mandays we should really spend on fixing every bit of universe, but it's done now.
• Started improving accessibility functionality of the Unity greeter, adding keyboard shortcuts for screen reader, high contrast, and accessing the indicator menu bar.

About to land:

• Nothing planned right now.

Blockers:

• Help from Kubuntu team to move soprano-daemon to unixodbc would be greatly appreciated. (901638)

2012-01-06

Done:

• Staging PPA for X.org 1.11 is available; still needs a new Unity release for the new multi-touch stack, and has a nasty touchpad regression.
• Completed work to make indicator menus more accessible.

• Major multi-monitor bug review/triage of > 100 bugs: 1/3 reproduced, 1/3 now closed as resolved, 1/3 need more information.

• Started working on boot speed improvements.
• We lag behind alpha-2 work items after the holiday break more than anticipated, will clean up at the rally.

About to land:

• Nothing planned right now.

Blockers:

• Help from Kubuntu team to move soprano-daemon to unixodbc would be greatly appreciated. (901638)

CategoryDesktopTeam