0729

For minutes of previous meetings, please see FoundationsTeam.

NO MEETING THIS WEEK

Activity reports

Colin Watson

Evan Dandrea

usb-creator

  • Spent most of the week working on usb-creator for Windows. It's ready for inclusion in Ubuntu, and I've marked the specification as implemented. There is most certainly still work to do, but it's all bug fixing.
    • Improved the winui Tracker widget (range) by including a formatted current value next to it.
    • Started work on a dd implementation that I've sinced replaced with dd for Windows.
    • Added support for writing disk images, but disabled it in the UI until its working with disks, and not just partitions.
    • Refactored the main install module to use operating system agnostic code and moved it, and progress updating, into separate threads.
    • Created a build system, taking much inspiration from Wubi's making use of pypack and pylauncher from Wubi.
    • Added code to handle the user not being a Windows administrator.
    • Created a really ugly set of Windows icons for it, still based off the Ubiquity icon.
    • Added MD5 checksumming and file copy retrying to both the copy from ISO and copy from CD cases.
    • Created a progress dialog that makes use of liw's wonderful remaining time estimator.
    • Wrote code to handle cleanup when any of the threads fail.
    • Fixed a bug in my file open dialog code that was preventing the dialog from showing on Windows.
    • Tried to solve a visual bug whereby the Tracker widget's background is a darker grey than the rest of the interface, but none

of the workarounds I tried worked. I'll revisit this once we're in feature freeze.

  • Added internationalization support. However, I cannot test this beyond it working in WINE.
  • ISO images are now handled via 7-zip. I looked at using loop mounting to solve this, but while free drivers exist, they're not

signed, and that's a requirement in Windows Vista and 7. It would cost a fair amount of money for something I can ultimately work around by solving the problem in a different way. For the curious, a better explanation can be found at http://www.sysprogs.org/signing .

  • And lots of other probably-not-worth-mentioning changes.
  • Discussed including usb-creator for Windows on the live CD with slangasek. We agreed to keep it off the live CD to save space for

language packs, and include instructions for it in HEADER.html, like was previously done for the Mobile Team's image writing tool.

  • Merged seb128's GtkBuilder branch.

  • Finally released 0.2.0, which includes the KDE frontend from rgreening.
  • Merged a patch from Daniel Chen for 404553.
  • Looked into requiring a newer version of python-distutils-extra to build the package, to further simplify the packaging and translation handling for the KDE and GTK frontends.

ubiquity-slideshow

  • Cleaned up the packaging and continued discussing how we're going to get this into Ubuntu with Dylan. Waiting on a MIR approval for pywebkitgtk.

misc

  • Added Kubuntu Netbook Edition to Wubi with help from StevenK.
  • Started looking into 402733, but I so far cannot reproduce the problem.
  • Helped Chris Ashton debug a problem he was having with running the installer from the disk he intended to install to.

James Westby

Lars Wirzenius

Matthias Klose

  • OEM Rotational Assignment

Michael Vogt

update-manager

  • Test upgrade jaunty->karmic, got conffile prompt for /etc/gdm/custom.conf

  • Discuss/fix gdm custom.conf file prompt and upload new gdm
  • Port update-manager to use aptdaemon (if available)
  • Review/merge patch to workaround missing height-for-width manager in gtk (gnome bz #101968) - useful for small screens

AppCenter

  • rewrite update-app-install to use xapian

  • create AppListStore TreeModel that uses the xapian data

  • play with integrating the app-install xapian db with the x-a-i db (possible, but probably not worth the added complexity for now)
  • add weights to the different indexed fields (e.g. summary ranks height than long description)
  • add categories parser that dynamically builds the matching xapian query from the applications.menu xml file
  • pushed to lp:~mvo/+junk/python-xapian-app-install

apt

  • Review/merge apt apt.conf.xml patch into bzr
  • work on the apt libudev-dlopen branch, make mount detection work and add backend support for it in method/cdrom.cc
  • Experiment with better g++ -fvisibility support for libpat to make abi breaks less frequent
    • (lp:~mvo/apt/gcc-fvisibility)

  • Review/merge python-apt bugfix in InstallProgress (thanks to sp)

  • profiling and merging a patch from SLi

updates-on-shutdown

  • work on unattended-upgrades to make it suitable for the updates-on-shutdown spec
  • refactor to make adding new UIs easier
    • (lp:~mvo/unattended-upgrades/oo-refacotr)
  • add updates-on-shutdown-gtk package and script

  • make dialogs in the gtk UI to AutoCloseDialog to ensure we never block the shutdown

  • look into integration with gnome-session
    • (lp:~mvo/gnome-session/run-on-shutdown)

misc

  • Kernel crashdump testing, coordination with debian for a shared repository for makedumpfile
  • bug triage gdebi, upload new version
  • Update plymouth to current git and upload to ~plymouth-dev
  • Add cs_CZ to the apt-ddtp imoport blacklist
  • Review/commmit apt-ddtp-tools fixes/updates
  • Fix incorrect aptdaemon detection in update-manager and g-a-i

sponsoring

  • Review dia sponsor request (#343688)
  • Review/merge/upload new app-install-data-partnerl for jaunty
  • sponsor nvidia-common, brasero, transmission, pan
  • review wget

Mike Terry

Ubiquity Plugins

  • Plugins support is continuing apace. I'm so very close to having a mergable branch.
  • Half the built-in pages are full plugins now
  • I've begun to separate out the mythbuntu frontend into several plugins

=== Muharem Hrnjadovic ===

  • On vacation Thursday and Friday.

Distributed development

Scott James Remnant

Upstart

  • Applied a couple of patches from Michael Biebl to fix build issues found through the Debian packaging

sreadahead

  • Worked on an "HDD mode" option that makes sreadahead stay in the foreground, use a single thread and realtime I/O priority - on its own this is actually a net lose, and is only a win combined with a disk-order sorted pack
  • Did some work on a disk-order sorted pack. This is harder than it seems; since even doing path lookups defeats the disk order sort and makes it slower than just using the out-of-the-box SSD-optimised sreadahead
    • Plans include preloading ext2fs blocks and pre-caching file opens; will require a new pack format though
  • Added dpkg trigger so that the old pack file is removed if packages change /etc/init or /etc/init.d
  • Fixed upstart job to use fork following, expect a normal exit, and to wait a reasonable amount of time for the pack to be generated between SIGTERM and SIGKILL
  • Uploaded a new sreadhead package
  • Changed seeds so that sreadahead is used instead of readahead

Boot Performance

  • Received the SSD-based Dell Mini 10v (named "max")
  • Installed jaunty release, then installed jaunty updates, karmic alpha 2 and karmic alpha 3 onto it
  • For each release created bootcharts and kernel bootgraphs, before and after running "profile" and switching to sreadahead instead
  • Did the same for the Mini 9 to compare performance (the Mini 10v is a little faster, but I recall that the production Mini 9 I had was faster than the development model Mini 9 I did these tests with - better SSD throughput it seems)
  • Karmic alpha 3 tests on sam

  • Results on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance

initramfs

Steve Langasek

FoundationsTeam/Meetings/2009/0729 (last edited 2009-08-02 08:18:41 by 89)