Ubuntu Wiki

Hi everybody!

The presentation will be about what ubuntu desktop team is, what we are doing, how we organize...

This one is largely inspired by seb128's lesson during last Developers'week (THANKS seb ;)).

Then, we will do a question-answer sessionm hope you will be interested in it! As usual, you can ask your question at #ubuntu-classroom-chat

The Ubuntu Desktop Team is the team working on most of the Ubuntu GNOME desktop applications.

The team is a mix of people working full time for canonical and contributors.

There is many ways to contact and find us, even if we try to get hidden :)
- #ubuntu-desktop for IRC on freenode
- ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com mailing list (low traffic)
- desktop-bugs and ubuntu-desktop launchpad teams
The first one is subscribed to every bug reported against a desktop related soft.

- The team has weekly IRC meeting on #ubuntu-desktop, they are at 16:00UTC on Tuesday, but regarding the timeframe, most of people there are Canonical guys ;)


We are working on the desktop packages, the rough list is on https://launchpad.net/~desktop-bugs/+packagebugs.
We are dealing mainly with two tasks: updating the desktop packages when new versions are available (especially GNOME ones) and trying to work on the corresponding bugs lists, triaging the bugs and work with upstream to get those resolved


Most of the packages are coming from the debian pkg-gnome team.

We try to keep those packages in sync as much as possible and send their our changes to them.
We do package unstable version earlier and carry ubuntu specific changes though. For instance, Debian generally doesn't upload unstable GNOME version.
The new GNOME release is generally out 3 days from ubuntu beta. Consequently, we have only very few time to update the bunch of GNOME packages. We mostly updates packages when GNOME roll new tarballs and backport upstream fixes from svn.

Just to notice, the packaging is mostly done using cdbs.


To organize those updates, we current have somebody looking at the new upstream tarballs and noting what upgrade we need to do in ubuntu. Tasks are usually splitted on IRC (ie, upgrade are assigned to people there) and people are free to claim tarballs they want to work on.

Contributors use bugs on launchpad to get their work reviewed (usually it's easy to get review since the team is quite active and you often find people to help on IRC)


Some issue with the current workflow is that "somebody" is mostly seb128 and this is a huge task. Even if he is some kind of superman, he can't be live 24h a days (what he can't? O_o).

So, the idea will be to do some kind of seb128-bot :)

More seriously, this is a domain we have to improve. Basically, we want a website to take some "lock" for updating packages, noticing general contributor to this package, unlocking after a period of time... I will try to put some work there to integrate it with bzr and debcheckout so that we don't have added administrative paper work and organize better :)

Some ideas are a website + an IRC bot, and enventually some tools to integrate with developper's tools.

We are also integrating more and more bzr for package. Have a look there for a step by step process: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Bzr. A lot of packages are there: https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/.
Using a VCS for packaging enables us to do a better tracking, for cherrypicking changes, making SRU, and so on. This is an on-going process and some workflows as yet to be decided (for instance, on merges).


On a technical side upgrades are usually standard version updates, some of them are very easy, so good low hanging fruits for new volonteers! Some are tricker with (soname changes, change to build system, new binaries added, new dependencies on libgda3 (takes that huats :p))

i gave a talk on "how to update a package" sumurizing the principles steps to check. You can find it at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Packaging/Training/Logs/2009-04-16 and I won't go into any further details :)

We also discuss desktop changes, new components to install by default or not, configuration changes, etc.

I think that's enough for presenting the team, we are friendly and it's surprisingly quite a small team for so many packages. So, don't be shy and come ;)

Also, do not hesitate to have a look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam

Now, rooms for questions , just fire up! :)


---------
GNOME has a mailing list which gets mails about all the tarballs uploaded so that's easy to keep track 

you can do a suggestion on the mailing list or during the weekly meetings

so let's 7-8 people doing active work (some of them being full time canonical employees) and double the number if you count people helping on bug triage, etc


https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Bugs
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/HowToTriage