Ubuntu Wiki

MOTU Meeting Minutes for 2009-05-05

Present

• Andrew Mitchell
• Nathan Handler
• Scott Kitterman
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort
• Siegfried Gevatter
• James Westby

Notification System

The first topic suggested was the notification system. It was pointed out that a lot of the issues people had with this weren't really about "MOTU", but about lack of discussion and communication.

James and Scott discussed a brief incident between them where Scott, as part of motu-release was holding-up uploads for notification changes that James wanted to do. All parties agreed there was little to discuss about this in a MOTU meeting.

Python Transition

Scott said that the main issue here was the lateness of the change, despite everyone knowing that it was coming. In addition it was felt that the transition wasn't co-ordinated well, and there was a lack of information about the issues and the fixes.

Suggestions for improving the next python transition were:

• Get the change uploaded as early as possible
• Not making a new python the default in the same release it is
  • introduced.
• Draft a companion spec about transitioning the modules/applications,
  • including information on what changes are needed, how to find the packages that need changing, specific things to test, ways to raise issues caused by the transition with the developers.

James suggested creating a document on "Best practices for transitions", but there was little interest shown.

Multiply-Versioned Libraries

(Library packages that have different versions in different source packages, rather than more typical organisation)

Scott suggested that working with main and defining targets for these libraries would be useful: choosing a desired version, and any versions to drop, and then attempting to make the necessary changes across the archive.

The only two candidates anyone could list were boost and libdb, so it was suggested starting by listing all such packages in a wiki page would be useful. James suggested that a meeting could be arranged at the start of each cycle to look at the list and choose targets.

Date of Final Freeze

Scott said that he thought the final freeze for universe could be much later. He said that he would take this up with ubuntu-release at UDS.

REVU and new packages

Nathan said that he was pleased with the REVU days that Siegfried had organised, and that he intended to continue these.

Nathan also talked about a proposal that had been discussed for a new interface to REVU that would lead to a changed workflow.

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/REVUWorkflowProposal

After some explanation of the proposal it was decided that the proposal was at a stage where a discussion on the mailing list to attempt to gather consensus for the change would be more valuable. Nathan said that he would try to coordinate to get the ball rolling again.

Siegfried also asked whether anyone thought it would be worthwhile to have uploads processed as soon as they are finished, rather than by a cron job that runs every 3 minutes. Most people thought the existing system was frequent enough.

The meeting finished with a brief discussion of the merits of building the source packages on REVU, but was cut short by the start of the next meeting.