0709

For minutes of previous meetings, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlatformTeam.

Present

Apologies

Agenda

  • Upcoming Sprint
  • 8.04.1 Feedback
  • Alpha 2
  • Milestones Report
  • Activity Reports

Outstanding actions from last meeting

None

Upcoming Sprint

No major blockers are known for the 8.10 roadmap, or issues inhibiting feature freeze.

Colin has begun fleshing out a loose agenda with some pairwork sessions, where pairs of people working in similar areas will be put together to mind-meld on solving remaining issues. Assignments will be posted at https://wiki.canonical.com/DistroTeam/Sprints/Intrepid/London.

8.04.1 Feedback

  • Wubi once again bit us right at the end. May be worth working with QA team to figure out how to get it tested more effectively.
  • Pulseaudio still has the hanging issue for some; might be the actual hardware driver
  • we will get a chance to remedy some things in six months' time

The biggest issue discussed was that we have woefully insufficient testers on the ISO pre-releases. For 8.04.1 it seemed less than 10 people. This means we have very limited hardware coverage, and doesn't permit getting into the thorough depth of testing on for each configuration and test scenario. This brought up an important question - how to attract more people to test stuff?

Reducing the barrier to entry for testers could be a key thing. Namely, downloading and burning the daily or proposed ISO images is a pain and probably weeds out a chunk of would-be testers. Simply finding the images in the first place can be a challenge itself. Spending hours downloading CD images (and more for DVDs) is very counter-productive. Jigdo or local mirrors could help - but this is specialty knowledge that many potential testers may not be aware of. Sending out test CDs/DVDs via mail would be ideal, except the post takes too long. Really, just fixing the interminably slow download speeds from cdimage.ubuntu.com would go a long way towards enabling more testers and thereby improve our test coverage.

Alpha 2

We have some rather infeasibly sized liveCDs right now, on both ubuntu and kubuntu; they're unlikely to get right-sized in time for alpha-2, so we should just expect to do DVD or VM testing for this round so that we start to get some feedback on the software on them, ignoring for the moment that the media is the wrong size.

Several people discussed currently known boot failure conditions, particularly in relation to vmware and kvm.

Milestones Report

Bryce plugged his new milestones report:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Milestones/milestones_current.html

Activity reports

Alexander Sack

Network Manager:

  • network manager 0.7 testing with help of forums; feedback promising; in turn I updated packages in PPA and was reminded of a few minor upgrade issues which I will fix before uploading to intrepid
  • resolvconf in NM 0.7 discussion upstream; send initial patch for resolvconf support to mailing list; considering resolvconf as a Recommends for NM 0.7 as it would allow us to better support use cases that require manual tweaking of resolv.conf by admin (e.g. buggy DNS for PPP or VPN)
  • tried to port vpnc plugin to NM 0.7; after fixing build errors it didnt work out of the box, but i didnt have time to investigate; next, see if I miss something on applet side, otherwise ask upstream.
  • fix a few more issues in eni/ifupdown plugin; with resolvconf patch I managed to support /etc/network/interfaces legacy configuration for wired use cases "static ip", "dhcp"; probably, wireless without secrets will work as well (not tested).

Mozilla Related:

  • firefox 3.0.1/2.0.0.16 security backports process initiated - again
  • nss/nspr hardy-proposed feedback/verification work and upstream discussion; nss/nspr appear to fix binary compatibility, but don't auto cure extensions with previously blacklisted binary components; i decided against taking measures to auto-cure in favour of simplicity and knowing that the next xulrunner/firefox update will automatically trigger the un-blacklisting anyways.
  • import new translation templates for xulrunner/firefox that finally open up maxVersion constraints; this means that 3.0.1 is supposed to be last update that requires in-sync lang-pack updates.
  • community work in #ubuntu-mozillateam
  • moderate bug triage

Arne Goetje

  • language-packs and language-support rebuild for Intrepid due to Recommends/Suggests change
  • preparation for sprint
  • responding to bugs on LP
  • CJK-Unifonts: spline debugging for UKai font

Bryce Harrington

Bugs / Packaging / Testing:

  • Debugged various Launchpad greasemonkey scripts which were broken by the new Launchpad UI changes.
  • Did a Hardy 8.04.1 reinstall on i965 system; went perfectly. Working on getting build environment set back up properly.
  • Did a Hardy 8.04 install on Intel Tylersburg system; went ok, except for network issue Tim already spotted and has workaround for.
  • X.org Bug Day (July 3rd) - answered Q's, triaged bunch of bugs
  • Created a new milestones page:
  • Filing sync requests following xserver 1.5 upload
  • Merged -nv, -vesa, and -intel

Blueprints:

  • x-testing-infrastructure:
    • Reviewed prototype and fleshed out todo list for new version
    • For the Historical Drivers Web interface, assembled javascript routines for sorting/filtering table data (shares code with milestones page above)
  • xorg-input-hotplug: All prerequisites are uploaded to Intrepid; waiting to switch on until August due to travel.
  • xorg-options-editor:
    • Coded up gnome-control-center modifications to integrate with Alberto's XKit code. Needs further discussion.

Other:

  • Wrote up Platform team meeting minutes
  • July 4th U.S. holiday
  • 401k setup

Chris Cheney

  • US National Holiday (July 4)
  • Attended OpenOffice.org Release Status meeting

  • OpenOffice.org bug triage

  • Working on OOo 3.0~beta2 packaging.
  • Evaluated various partial mirroring programs to speed up work, it seems only approx works, various others are broken in one way or another (eg apt-proxy doesn't work properly with more than one dist)

To do:

  • OOo 3.0 beta2 release pushed back until next week.

Evan Dandrea

Specifications:

  • ubiquity-visual-refresh Worked on implementing a new partition bar based off the one in Banshee. Good progress here, I hope to be done with it soon.

  • dvd-performance-hacks Blocked on the lack of Intrepid DVDs.

  • usb-installation-images Started looking at the different existing implementations for USB installations. As the existing implementations use Qt, I'll be reusing code at best.

Other:

James Westby

Distributed Development:

  • More work on changelog parsing. No known parsing errors, and I checked a large chunk of the changelogs from the archive. Almost all can be round-tripped with no changes, the others generally being small whitespace changes. As I don't need round-trip support to proceed this is good enough. I still need to clean the branch up and merge it to trunk.
  • Looked again at importing native packages. Almost completed this, which is the last barrier to a large-scale test import.

Intrepid:

  • Finished updates of devmapper and lvm2. Submitted them for review.
  • Continued discussion on debian-devel about what to do about not stopping daemons (Teardown/multiuser).

Lars Wirzenius

  • Attempted to upgrade a virtual machine from hardy to intrepid. Failed, but learned to use virsh to copy virtual machines instead.
  • Looked at and played with Michael Vogt's system-cleaner prototype. It doesn't run, but the design is sort-of similar to mine, which indicates that it's probably a reasonable design.
  • Discussed with Michael how system-cleaner should be worked on. We agreed that it should be separate from the update-manager source tree, but share/call stuff as appropriate.
  • Attempted to implement a real plugin for (my) system-cleaner, but aborted the attempt. I should learn python-apt first, there's no point in mucking about parsing apt-get output.
  • Provided Ara Pulido with my QA related files (about 20 gigabytes of them).
  • Looked for a command line Gobby client for test purposes, but didn't find one yet. Will either write one or stress test the server in other ways.

Luke Yelavich

Accessibility:

  • Dicussions with upstream for a package in universe, relating to when they will make a new release.
  • Started implementing an idea I've had for making the live CD accessibility experience better for accessibility users. Thanks to laptop-detect, I hope to select the correct keyboard layout for Orca based on whether a laptop is being used.
  • Look at ways to possibly consolidate accessibility code in casper, for live CD bootup, and ubiquity hook. It's common to make a change to a profile for CD boot up for example, and forget to do it for ubiquity.
  • Look into enabling accessibility login for users when accessibility is enabled at install time, although this will likely have to wait due to the gdm rework going on upstream.
  • Learn of a memory leak in one part of the GNOME a11y stack. This leak exists in intrepid and hardy. Testing the fix from svn locally makes a world of difference, and has also caused my mysterious segfaulting/memory corruption issues to vanish. Need to investigate whether this is possible to get into hardy.

Audio:

  • Look into why the PC speaker is being used by default over a sound card on an intrepid install. Alsa has the PC speaker at card 2, but pulse didn't want to use it. Trying to force pulse to use it, and play a

file causes an error. More investigation needed.

dmraid:

  • Merge with a recently updated Debian package, breaking out all changes into patches. Created a bzr branch on Launchpad for easier development work on the debian packaging. Intend to file bugs tomorrow to give Debian all the patches I originally obtained from Mandriva's package.
  • Start putting together a custom CD to test dmraid and intrepid installation.
  • Started working out a plan of attack for the dmraid spec. First thing is to read and understand the code.

Misc:

  • Came up with a possible fix to ensure all error messages are displayed to the user when the initramfs boot process fails. At the moment, if usplash is used, one only sees the busybox/initramfs prompt, and one can only see the error messages if they switch to tty1. I need to discuss this fix before uploading to intrepid/hardy. Agostino Russo brought this to my attention, as wubi users were not seeing the message given if an NTFS/FAT32 filesystem is dirty.

Matthias Klose

  • Worked with Sun and IcedTea on the cleanup of the openjdk tarball to get it DFSG clean. So hopefully we will get all this stuff resolved with the next code drop.

  • A lot of IcedTea/OpenJDK (upstream) work; investigated and fixed problems newly introduced in IcedTea.

  • OpenJDK package updates
  • Handle MIRs
  • OOo ESC meeting (3h on Thu 03, all day Thu 04), report sent, Ubuntu meta report updated.
  • Preparing promotion of OpenJDK to main, including main inclusion reports for OpenJDK and depending packages.
  • twisted updates and bug triage
  • toolchain update (binutils will branch soon, gcc-4.3 updates from the branch)
  • Syncs and merges, down to nearly empty list (for main).
  • Phone call with Colin

Oliver Grawert

  • classmate image building:
    • revert the whole lpia stuff for now until the new SoW is signed
    • build an 8.04.1 i386 image instead
    • needs new -generic kernel (currently building) in the cmpc PPA
    • struggling with the ancient hacked up i810 driver needed for the screen resize tool (theirs is 1.6.0, we have 1.7.4), trying to extract the hacks into a patch to be able to apply it properly to our version...
    • reshuffle the complete app selection; the client wants us to use openoffice but the image can't be bigger than 750M on a 2G disk, achieved to get down to ~730M by dropping a lot (including dropping of evolution and pulling in thunderbird)
  • various classmate related discussions and meetings
  • mobile discussions and meetings
  • worked with Johan Kiviniemi (ion) to implement the compcache spec (initramfs done, casper changes done locally but uncommitted and untested)
  • reviewed some ldm patches upstream that will enable us to drop keyboard configuration from the ugly scripts and do it dynamically at ldm startup.

specs:

  • compcache: implemented
  • parental control: drafting
  • edubuntu-menus: drafting

Steve Langasek

short week, due to July 4 holiday in the US and a vacation day on Monday

Release work:

  • Ubuntu 8.04.1 released, to much rejoicing; now to focus on Intrepid!
  • Mythbuntu 8.04.1 released with a brief delay
  • Begin preparing for intrepid alpha2

Archive admin:

  • NEW processing of informix partner packages

FoundationsTeam/Meetings/2008/0709 (last edited 2009-01-06 22:01:57 by ppp-70-246-95-66)