UOS1505

General Info

  • More than 100 sessions
  • Over 4,000 users watching summit.ubuntu.com
  • Almost 25,000 page views on summit.ubuntu.com
  • Higher than last UOS
  • More than 300 people registered on summit.ubuntu.com
  • Higher than last UOS
  • Visitors from 143 countries to summit.ubuntu.com

App & Scope Development

Presenter: Alan Pope

  • Tuesday
  • Ubuntu Help App Planning

Reviewed the current state of the app.

Agreed to write up a plan regarding the next steps (in terms of content, design and functionality), to be presented to phone product managers. If approved, this will form the road to inclusion of the app by default.

  • Wednesday
  • Terminal App planning
  • Spent a lot of time talking about behaviours when terminal is run on desktop including lifting some of the limitations imposed on phone, consistency with existing terminal keyboard shortcuts and better tab handling
  • Planned out the minimal re-usable terminal component for other developers to use
  • App is overall in good shape, no critical bugs, favourable reviews
  • Weather App Planning
  • Discussed requirements for Weather reboot to land including:-
  • Autopilot tests
  • Coping better with empty states, or where no location data is available
  • Identified missing assets
  • Discussed option of adding more weather data providers
  • Identified need for desktop design
  • Identified need for snappy package for snappy desktop
  • Music App Planning
  • Made plans for landing code refactor in the store
  • Push back any changes dependant on new Ubuntu Components to align with next Vivid image
  • Discussed small feature requests including single song repeat, alternate theme, and lighter existing theme
  • Discussed larger features including track rating, dynamic playlist support, graphic equaliser and streaming services support
  • Getting the UI Toolkit ready for convergence
  • Benjamin from the design team shared some designs of the contacts app running in desktop mode.
  • SDK team will be focussing on converging components like the date/time picker, applications menus for this cycle.Keyboard navigation and focus handling will also be looked at.
  • Ubuntu SDK Gallery app will be properly converged as well
  • App & Scope Development Round Table

  • Discussed what’s good and bad about the ubuntu developer experience.

  • Identified the need for a About component similar to what is present in the desktop apps.
  • Work items to add cmake and qmake docs to the developer portal to help new developers. Will also show the developer portal blog feed in Qtcreator’s welcome screen.

  • Ubuntu Component Store
  • SDK team and the component store devs discussed in great detail what it would take to integrate UCS into the Ubuntu SDK.
  • Added support for the community channel where developers can upload components without any manual code review by just “ucs submit lp:branchname”!

  • Going forward UCS will support c++ components for only qmake projects.
  • Thursday
  • Calendar App Planning
  • Discussed syncing issues and plans to improve this in the short term with updates to sync evolution
  • Discussed longer term plan of evaluating other compatible sync platforms.
  • Got feedback from Canonical apps team for community developers to improve performance and user experience on the app
  • Docviewer App Planning
  • Mapped out improvements to the docviewer including:-
  • Improved content hub support - moving from unsupported C API to supported QML API
  • Better multithreaded performance for multi-page rendering
  • Fixes to page zooming
  • Adding syntax hilighting
  • Making URLs tappable / clickable
  • Also discussed at length the option of adding libreoffice as a backend for office format rendering - is a relatively significant piece of work so looking for contributors to help here
  • Reminders App Planning
  • Mapped out current priorities
  • Fix bugs uncovered by QA testing
  • App rename
  • Development of Scope
  • Implement converged design (when we get them)
  • SDK Roadmap
  • Reviewing the public [ roadmap]
  • Going thru the convergence story
  • Discussing about new components and new behaviour
  • Talking about decoupling the SDK tools from distro Qt dependencies
  • Discussion about upstreaming SDK bits

Cloud

Presenter: Jorge Castro

Community

Presenter: Svetlana

  • Tuesday
  • User documentation for Unity 8
  • Bring docs team and QA teams closer into Unity development
  • Use Autopilot to automate taking screenshots for user docs
  • Use Autopilot to verify accuracy of docs and detect breakage early
  • Membership discussion
  • Getting all teams to promote Membership among their contributors
  • Looking at new areas of community growth as a path for new members
  • Providing more documentation in more places about how to become a member
  • Reminding existing members of the importance of their role in the community
  • Wednesday
  • Community events in the W cycle
  • Proposed dates for the next Online Summit
  • Proposed dates for the next Global Jam
  • Plans to help LoCo teams promote their release parties and global jams

  • Supporting UbuCons worldwide

  • Creating a single, featureful UbuCon.org website

  • Gathering documentation & resources to help others run an UbuCon

  • Provided advice on recruiting speakers to an event
  • Lubuntu Community Planning Session
  • Discussed how to engage and retain contributors. From there, we kind of developed an initial plan to get some things going. As part of the session39s purpose, we also discussed some other underlying topics, such as how will the community react if we change to LXQt
  • Ubuntu Women 15.10 Blueprint
  • Talked about starting a joint project with Debian39s developers on having a package review system
  • Thursday
  • Community roundtable
  • Continued discussion about membership - bringing documentation to community.ubuntu.com and making the proces to apply for membership more visible
  • Leadership Within the Community
  • Talked about problems that our leaders face, such as lack of mentoring, leaders burning out or stepping down and what solutions that the leadership team can do help leaders.
  • Community Council Q&A

  • The Ubuntu Community Council answered questions from the audience.  
  • Le french UOS summary
  • This was the track summaries from this UOS in French.

Convergence

Presenter: Will

  • Tuesday
  • Snappy Desktop
  • Discussed items in Blueprint
  • Explained the goals for 15.10 cycle, how we will support legacy applications, how we will bundle default apps,
  • U7/deb based desktop will still be available
  • Lots of questions still to answer but we have a plan for the next cycle which will get us to an installable and usable Snappy based desktop at 15.10
  • Snappy phone
  • Systemd has been tested on the phone and its generally working.  Work in progress for the remaining issues.
  • Discussions about if a phone could do AB partitioning, which could use a lot of disk space.
  • Making one single partition and flashing/updating via recovery a supported use case for Snappy
  • Conversion of custom and device tarballs into a snappy gadget. Work also required to switch from click to snaps (and create snaps for the deb applications).
  • Phone Roadmap
  • A thorough run through of new features landing soon
  • Explained that the current phone image will continue to be developed while the snappy one matures
  • Wifi hotspot features in testing now!
  • Wednesday
  • U8 as the default desktop
  • Discussion around what features are needed in Mir and Unity 8 in order to get a full featured desktop for 15.10
  • Things like switcher, window management,
  • Lots of Q&A from IRC

  • Converged desktop apps
  • Working through the types of applications which will be required to make a usable desktop for most users.
  • Covered typical apps like calculator, office, terminal, the SDK, image editing and viewing
  • A lot of the requirements are met by existing U8 apps from the phone, so work will be needed to make them suited to a desktop environment as well
  • Browser convergence
  • Discussion about features which will be added to the browser to make it work really well in a desktop environment
  • as well as new features being added generally
  • Developing U8
  • A detailed run through of the code and what each part does
  • This will be a great resource for anyone who wants to understand the U8 code
  • Some good ideas for people who want to start making a contribution to U8
  • There are bugs on U8 which should be small and bite sized and so are an ideal place to start if you want to learn some of the code base
  • Thursday
  • Q&A

  • Good Q&A session.

  • Lots of questions for Olli, Victor, Will around convergence
  • Lively session
  • Phone feedback and ports
  • Some questions about docs which were resolved during the session by simply providing new links
  • Explanation on common issues when porting to a new device, for example why Bluetooth sometimes doesn39t work
  • Discussion about how to improve the user feedback at the store, and how to better manage bug reports for application owners
  • Legacy App support
  • Good session with talk about Xmir mainly
  • How applications would be launched and connected to Xmir
  • How we might handle window management within Xmir for now
  • How we might be able to avoid having an entire gsettings d running by setting some specific keys  
  • App lifecycle management
  • Discussion about how lifecycle management would be implemented on a desktop
  • We talked about a lot of different use cases where applications need to keep running in the background, and it was generally decided that this is fine
  • But we need to make sure that we don39t fragment the overall lifecycle management concepts - so we don39t end up with a special “desktop only” case - we need to be smart about it

  • Still going on now….

Core

Presenter: Steve Langasek

  • Tuesday
  • A tour of the system-image client
  • Barry gave a talk on how the system-image client works, the D-Bus vs command line interfaces, etc.   [ Slides online].
  • Python plans for LTS
  • Ongoing discussion about moving to Python 3 by default.   [ Slides].  Mostly just aligning with Debian goals, though there are some Ubuntu specifics.  JFDI.
  • Installer work status, bugs and requests
  • We talked about how we could modernize the installer, among other things, to properly handle snappy installs, graphical installs with Mir, and having a text-based installer for ubuntu-core.
  • There was discussion about some experience bugfixes (dealing with the lack of slideshow, debugging)
  • Ubuntu Snappy: next steps
  • Discussion around the gaps in the testing/CI story, missing parts in the snappification story, external dependencies which are going to be removed, “deduplication” of content in snaps, and a general “Ubuntu Core” cleanup.

  • Work items to flesh out the user stores, and follow up with stakeholders to build up the feature plans for the following months
  • Wednesday
  • Snappy roundtable
  • In the roundtable we were able to collect a lot of feedback from early adopters: missing documentation regarding enablement or development procedures, that it’s hard to figure out the diff between two images and how to trace back the sources of components used in the image.

  • We also covered topics around networking (which networking scenarios do we need to support, which routing middleware, etc.).
  • The subject of a snappy installer came up as well (multiboot support, flashing on usb/emmc, netboot installs)?
  • Snappy development tools
  • Snappy development tools are in a pretty raw state still; the developer of a snap is currently on his own for everything but the final packaging steps. One big priority now that 15.04 is out will be to change that. During the session we reiterated the areas that will be looked at in non-prioritized order:
  • make it easy for developers of big language communities such as pypi, node/npm and java maven to snap up the app they developed using the primary packaging tools of those communities; goal is to make natural extension of the already established developer workflow rather than imposing any new tools that are not compatible with what those communities already do
  • we have to systematically identify the primitives and elements of what make up a development environment in snappy land and come up with a smart building block approach that will allow everyone to compose general purpose and stack specific development kits. how to make native cross compilation easy for everyone is part of this as well as how 3rd parties can distribute artifacts such as headers and libraries through the store are topic on this
  • we have to invest in documentation and practices so that all the major developer types find a good entry point into snappy development
  • to ensure that IDEs can interface with snappy systems and allow use of snappy development kits we need to identify the primitives how to manage and interact with snappy systems during development
  • while doing all this we should remember that in the end snappy does not only want to attract developers that use ubuntu or other linux distributions as their host. hence we have to always cross check when inventing the developer story how this could be done on windows and mac hosts.
  • another point identified to lack attention is documentation and practices around how to develop the ubuntu-core OS snap itself. the team agreed that this is important to allow contributors to help developing the core operating itself
  • further tools around how to produce kernel snaps are not well developed and we should make the tools from our infrastructure available in a form that developers can use them to produce enablement for not yet officially supported boards and hardware
  • GCC 5 update for 15.10
  • Aiming for gcc 5 to be the default compiler in 15.10, in preparation for the 16.04 LTS.  Good discussion about how to get the substantial ABI transition staged, we will work with Debian to check timelines and analyze the results of package rebuilds to determine which library packages will need to have name changes
  • Snappy docs review
  • Lots of discussion about how to integrate snappy internal docs into the developer site.
  • We also want to list existing ports on the site and make it easy to discover community contributed kernel snaps. our CLI tools should also make finding and using those kernels easy
  • Shortcomings in current docs were discussed as well: how to create a gadget/kernel/device tarball snap, how to hack on the core os itself.
  • Linking tutorials and blog posts into the official documentation
  • Improve the general documentation around application development (snapifying apps) as we improve the development tools. We want examples for the main core languages and use cases we currently know.
  • Improve documentation management by making it part of the snappy code, and trying to automatically generate them as we change the code (APIs, command line interfaces, etc).
  • Kubuntu Kickoff
  • Thursday
  • Ubuntu Snappy Brainstorm
  • We discussed random ideas on what snappy could be useful for, lots of them in the IoT space.
  • We identified a number of pieces of software which would be useful to have snapified. We want to set up a place on the wiki so folks can collaborate on this more easily.
  • We also figured a bunch of things which might serve as useful demos (game emulators, media solutions, etc.)
  • Create a shell that can simulate the application environment, to facilitate debugging and development
  • Need a way to centrally list suggestions and projects that are currently in progress, so we can engage community and avoid duplication
  • Systemd and Ubuntu to 16.04
  • some show&tell about systemd debugging tools for boot/shutdown hangs and boot speed

  • big target for 15.10 is to get Touch working with systemd (requirement for moving to snappy)
  • on desktop/server the state is “working, but lots of ugliness”, and we don’t use more advanced features yet (e. g. socket activation or privilege restrictions); no big new features, but lots of bug fixing work

  • migrating session upstart jobs to systemd units will be considered after the system side works everywhere; can be done one by one, both are running for the session
  • Snappy Q&A

  • Lots of great questions and answers. Check out the video!
  • Replace ifupdown with networkd on snappy / cloud / server for 16.04
  • networkd = small and shell-free service for configuring real (eth, wifi with wpa_supplicant) and virtual (bonds, bridges, vlans, tunnels, more) interfaces; DNS resolution (through resolved); declarative text files for configuration like ifupdown
  • biggest points for investigation and work for us: (1) integrating if-up.d and if-pre-up.d/ scripts (networkd does not support hooks), (2) providing compatibility with resolvconf, (3) translating ifupdown config to networkd
  • maas, snappy etc. should generate both ifupdown and networkd configs, then the image can choose which one to use
  • networkd opt-in for 15.10, then revisit for 16.04
  • NOT a NetworkManager replacement (and not planned to become one)

Show & Tell

Presenter: Allan LeSage

  • Tuesday
  • Internationalize your QML app in minutes
  • David Callé worked through a full example of making your application translatable using the Ubuntu SDK
  • My app testing setup
  • Rick Spencer the director of Ubuntu Engineering showed off his very much work in progress application called Flash Smile :) .

  • Rick went into a totally live TDD session via screnshare!  (Brave man.)  Demonstrated the traditional “write a test, watch it fail, fix the code” iteration pattern.

  • To help, Rick had a gallery of community app developers and testers including Nekelesh, Leo, and Svetlana pointing out new useful tools and conveying ideas and thoughts about autopilot and the native SDK Qt tests.
  • This would be a good session to visit for those interested in getting involved in app development and testing.
  • Attending SDK with Autopilot Plugin
  • Akiva Abraham showed off a novel way of running autopilot tests from inside the SDK directly, lots of questions about enhancements and interpretation of results for grokking; we’ll be looking for this plugin in the SDK ASAP!

  • Wednesday
  • Sosreport for troubleshooting
  • Bryan Quigley showed off a plugin-based tool used by Canonical support to gather logs for troubleshooting.
  • A tool to bundle dependencies for a package for offline installation
  • Daniel Manrique showed off a new tool allowing easy installation of packages on remote or non-networked systems
  • Demo: Unity 8 in Desktop mode
  • Michael Zanetti Some WIP unity8 features we demoed, including windowed mode, application switching, and even running the ubuntu SDK in unity8 under Mir!
  • Also a tablet was demonstrated briefly, lots of exciting developments for what your Ubuntu desktop might look like in the future Smile :) .

  • Plasma 5 Demo
  • The Kubuntu team showed off lots of new features to be found in plasma5, a really impressive set of features, very pretty demo.
  • Demo: upcoming content-hub features
  • Ken demoed some improvements to content hub and then answered many questions--a lot of interest in mapping traditional desktop functionality to the phone--including copy and paste support via content hub, a developer application for debugging content hub, and other goodies,
  • Thursday
  • Presenting TokenTube as an easy-to-use full-disk-encryption solution

  • Juergen Pabel presented; I think this was lightly attended due to a scheduling quirk, would be worth going back to review this Smile :) .

  • Physalis Build Cloud: Create apps with Apache Cordova
  • Daniel covered using physalis.io, a new cloud webservice for building apache cordova applications for ubuntu and firefox os at the same time
  • The service is open source, can be self-hosted if you wish
  • Simply submit your git branch, and it will produce compiled builds
  • LXD Basic Usage
  • Tycho Andersen presented some very basic use cases for this LXC management tool, which used websockets to manipulate containers.
  • LxQT; next generation of lubuntu
  • Walter demonstrated the next version of lubuntu, based on qt instead of gtk
  • bq Aquaris E4.5 Q&A

  • BQ founder Rodrigo del Prado gave us a view into his business and answered questions about the launch of the first ubuntu phone and took some questions from the community.
  • Ubuntu MATE Show and Tell
  • Martin Wimpress demoed the newest member of ubuntu, ubuntu MATE.
  • Classic GNOME 2 desktop which has been called “The little black dress that never goes out of style”, but with an avalanche of improvements and updates to adapt to the current state of Ubuntu

UDS/Summaries/UOS1505 (last edited 2015-11-10 20:07:58 by 1)