Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: mobile-team-seed-management

• Created: 2008-12-10

• Contributors: Steve Kowalik, Emmet Hikory

• Packages affected: mobile-meta, livecd-rootfs, tasksel, debian-cd

Summary

The seeds for the Mobile flavours reflect the concepts inherent midway through the intrepid development cycle, and management thereof has not been adjusted to reflect changes in 8.10 final, those expected as part of jaunty, or those expected in preparation for ArchiveReorganisation. The Mobile seeds shall be adjusted to match a model expected to be stable for the next few cycles.

Release Note

No release note is required: these changes are not user-visible.

Rationale

The current set of seeds do not match the distributed flavour naming, are missing required seeds, have extra useless seeds, and are not managed in a location suitable for delegation. This forces a subset of mobile developers to be responsible for seed management, and increases support efforts for users wishing to experiment with mobile flavours post-install.

Use Cases

• Alice, a Mobile developer, wishes to modify the seeds for the MID flavour. She checks out the bzr branch, makes the necessary changes, and commits.
• Bob, providing user support, uses a consistent set of names for mobile metapackages and flavours to effectively communicate with users.
• Chris, with no experience of the mobile flavours, can easily see a mapping between flavour and task when working on core packages.

Assumptions

• It is worthwhile to prepare for ArchiveReorganisation while performing other seed cleanup

• Nobody uses the mobile-dev seed for anything

Design

• The mobile-dev seed will be dropped entirely, as unused
• The "mobile" seed will be renamed "netbook-remix" to better reflect expected use

• All seeds will be moved to lp:~mobile-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/mobile.<RELEASE>

• Tasks will be updated to be "mobile-mid" and "mobile-netbook-remix".
• The mobile seeds will continue to inherit from the platform seeds, for customisability

Implementation

UI Changes

There are no significant UI changes.

Code Changes

• The ./update script in mobile-meta will be updated with the new seed location
• tasksel will be updated with new names, and new seed locations
• mobile-meta will be updated to reflect new metapackage names
• The target names in livecd-rootfs and debian-cd will be updated to reflect new task names
• The image building code responsible for running germinate will be taught the new seed location

Migration

Need to coordinate with the Soyuz developers to ensure that Soyuz understands the changes in seed location.

Test/Demo Plan

1. Install the ubuntu-mid metapackage
2. Install the ubuntu-netbook-remix metapackage
3. Netinstall with the mobile-mid task
4. Netinstall with the mobile-netbook-remix task
5. Test live images

Unresolved issues

None.

BoF agenda and discussion

Actions planned:

• Drop mobile-dev
• Inhereit from ubuntu.seeds to be able to reuse desktop ship
• rename mobile to netbook

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