It’s just great how easily you can make friends in the Ubuntu world. When I first entered the IRC channels, it took me a few minutes to get to know people, some of them I’m still in touch with, even 7 years later.

The belief that we can make the world a better place together and the excitement about what we’re doing clearly bonds us together. Over the years, I met many of my Ubuntu friends in other places, was it at conferences, holidays or elsewhere – it was always big fun. Even if you can’t travel, the good thing is that there is loads of additional Ubuntu-unrelated places (like social networks, etc.) where you can easily get in touch and keep up with what’s happening in their part of the world.

Yesterday I set up https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Social to make it easier to spot where all your Ubuntu friends are hanging out elsewhere. Please feel free add your team or group to it.

You were always interested in Ubuntu Development and gave it a try already? Perfect!

With Ubuntu 11.10 almost out the door, we started the planning of the 12.04 (precise) development cycle and we would love to know how well our documentation is known and working today, so we can see what we can improve.

Please give us your feedback in this short survey – it just takes a few minutes (if you’re not trying to write a novel in reply). Have your say and help us improve!

Thanks a bunch in advance!

Community Council member terms expire next month, we are going to have an election in a few weeks. All Ubuntu Members are eligible to vote.

We will announce the details of the election soon. What we want from you now is nominations.

If you know somebody in the Ubuntu community, who

• has been an Ubuntu member for a while
• is dedicated to the project
• is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership
• has a good overview over various aspects of the project
• is organised and has some organisation talent

(or you know that this all applies to you), please send an email to the Community Council (community-council at lists.ubuntu.com) with the subject “[CC Nomination]” through Thursday, September 29th, 16:00 UTC. If you are nominating someone else, please confirm that the person is willing to stand for election and make note of this in the nomination email.

Originally sent to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Elizabeth Krumbach on Thu Sep 15 16:10:12 UTC 2011

See you in two weeks! I’m off to the North of Norway from tomorrow on, so if you have anything urgent you want to discuss, I’m sure one of these fine gentlemen should be able to help you out.

Picture by Oddbjørn Steffensen (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

You don’t see me blogging about things outside the Ubuntu world very often. OK, an occasional mixtape every now and then or some holiday pictures, but I generally try to stay away from topics such as politics or things that happen in the world elsewhere. This is not because I don’t care or don’t have an opinion – it’s quite the opposite. I just prefer to not get drawn into huge arguments about who’s right and I try to avoid writing about and singling out particular events and miss to mention others.

By now most of you will have heard about the horrible events in Oslo. As my girlfriend is from Norway, I paid even more attention to the news. The reason I’m writing about this is that among all the usual suspicions and noise in the news a few people stood out and truly impressed me.

“We will stand by our democracy. The answer to violence is more democracy, more humanity.“

Jens Stoltenberg, Norwegian PM

“I don’t think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect.”

Oslo Mayor Stang when asked whether Oslo needs greater security

“We had been discussing on the island, how to tackle extremism and racism. We will continue this.“

Youth leader who escaped Utøya

If you haven’t read much about Oslo and Utøya in the last days, read these two chilling first-hand accounts of people who survived Utøya: from Khamshajiny Gunaratnam and Debian contributor Tore Sinding Bekkedal.

After all of this, it would have been very much understandable to show any signs of knee-jerk reactions. The people I mentioned above reacted remarkably to the situation. It’s very inspiring how they chose to stand with their humanitarian values. It’s unfortunately very uncommon nowadays, especially for politicians, who in situations like this are under a lot of pressure. These leaders have my deep respect for choosing to do otherwise.

From left to right: Jorge, me, Jono, Ahmed, David

(Picture by the unstoppable Graham Binns.)

Update: there’s more pictures.

To talk about Ubuntu development and what’s going on, I used ustream.tv and was actually quite happy with how it worked without any kind of configuration or meddling. Still it’s not really ideal as it’s hard to show your desktop or a command line to properly how Ubuntu development works.

What I like about it:

• no configuration
• social aspect of it and seeing somebody’s face
• followers will be informed of upcoming videocasts
• functionality to record and store video sessions
• chat window available

What I’m missing is:

• chat logs are not available afterwards
• not possible to share your desktop to show examples of Ubuntu development

Does anybody have an idea how we could solve this problem?

I have written about our sponsorship process loads of times already. When new contributors have no upload rights to Ubuntu yet, this process ensures that we get the code reviewed and included in Ubuntu. In the cases you branch a source package, make changes, push to Launchpad and propose a merge. The other alternative is to add a patch to a bug report and subscribe the sponsors team.

Over the last few releases we improved documentation, tools and processes and got more people involved.

I’d like to have your comment as a contributor or as a reviewer: how well does it work for you? What are you remaining gripes? What do you love about it?

Barry just spilled the beans about it: we are going to have a dh_python2 porting jam on 23rd June. Here’s what he says:

This Thursday, June 23rd, we are going to have a dh_python2 porting jam. If you know about packaging, and have meddled with Python packaging before, we invite you to hang out and port a load of packages with us.

We have some documentation to explain better what exactly we’re going to be doing, and why:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BarryWarsaw/PythonHelpers

You are of course welcome to start working on these, fixing them and getting them included in Ubuntu, but if you wait for the 23rd, we will offer this for you:

• IRC Training sessions in #ubuntu-pyjam at 1300 and 1800 UTC
• Lots of fun and good atmosphere
• Reviewers who can check and upload your code for you. (In addition to

our regular patch pilots we will have additional people to make
sure all merge requests are tended to.)

If this sounds great to you, make sure pencil in this Thursday, June 23rd into your calendar and just show up in #ubuntu-pyjam on irc.freenode.net.

Just to make it clear: you will need a bit of packaging experience to get involved, but hanging out in the channel and working your way through these guides (Intro, Get Set Up, Fix bugs) should be a very good start.

Thanks a lot Barry for organising this – this will be awesome!

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide is alive and kicking, but we’re looking for some help rebranding it!

What we need it discussed in bug 740044. Raoul Snyman put some work into it already, so it will make some sense to check out his efforts first. He makes use of Sphinx ability to define a theme. Ronnie sketched up additional mockups which follow the Web Guidelines.

If possible, we’d like to re-use as much of https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/light-django-theme as possible.

If you know how CSS inside out and can help us rebrand the HTML version of the Packaging Guide, we’d be forever grateful.

(There’s a few more bugs tagged with ‘look’, so if you enjoy these kinds of things, please consider helping out!)

Ubuntu Development Update

Development of Oneiric (Ubuntu 11.10) is in full swing, we just got Alpha 1 out last week and here’s the list of dates that are coming up in the next few weeks:

• June 30th, Debian Import Freeze which means that packages will not be synced automatically any more, but have to be requested manually.
• July 7th, release of Alpha 2.
• July 11th to 15th, Ubuntu Developer Week! A week full of development tutorials, workshops and interactive sessions.
• August 4th, release of Alpha 3.
• August 11th, Feature Freeze until which features have to have mostly landed in Ubuntu. They will of course still have bugs that have to get ironed out, but most of the hard work will be there already.

As you can see times are exciting right now. There is a lot of hard work going on, lots is still broken in Oneiric, but it’s a great time to get your feet wet, try out things and fix a few bugs on the way.

I’m very happy to see that Full Circle Magazine is now having a new series about Ubuntu Development. Issue 49 has the first installment of this. Be sure to check it out!

New Contributor

This week I talked to Paolo Sammicheli, who is an Ubuntu Member from the Italian Community. He was involved in several things like translations, marketing, advocacy and testing. He also is an UDS addict and since UDS Jaunty spent his holidays attending it. He says “This cycle I decided to move my interests into development and I’m slowly learning packaging. Spare time is never enough ”

I asked Paolo what his personal experience of the development was like and he had this to say:

• “Yes, I tried some merges and few sync. The experience was good, also because I’ve found in the Italian Dev Team people willing to mentoring me and being already an Ubuntu Member helped me to find easily who-ask-what.“
• Paolo was struggling a bit to find tasks to work on. Some of the bitesize bugs he tried were solved already, but when he tried a few merges that worked out better for him, because “comparing the previous ubuntu version with the debian version you start understanding how patches works, how tools works and so on.“
• When merging Paolo found it helpful to get in touch with the person who uploaded it last. A bunch of people were happy to review his merge and upload it. In some cases he didn’t get a reply, which was a bit frustrating. Looks like this is something we can all improve!

Get Involved

1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Here’s a few examples:

• 28906 “init script starts before NFS, NIS, DNS (need two stages)“
• 785052 Update whois server for “.*.ua” zones
• 773141 Playing with options in CCSM can break Unity
• 791467 bump gcdmaster dependency on cdrdao to 1:1.2.3-0.1ubuntu2
• 769405 AppleDouble files present in the package

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net to get all your questions answered.

I’m happy to say that the Packaging Guide project has seen a lot of activity recently, so a bunch of articles have been improved and new articles been added. Thanks a lot to Andrew, Barry and others.

You can download it or read it on its preliminary home. (Expect an announcement of its new and lasting place soon.)

I got a number of questions about the guide in the last few days and I think it’d make sense to clarify the intention behind the guide. We never intended to rewrite or replace other fantastic documentation about packaging that exists already (think Debian New Maintainers’ Guide, Debian Policy Manual, etc.), but we want to have a place where new contributors to Ubuntu get a good and well-rounded introduction to Ubuntu, plus a more maintainable place for “knowledge-base type” articles that are currently spread across the wiki and other places in varying forms of style or out-of-date-ness.

For the project we need feedback and help. If you are interested in helping out, please check out the list of open requests, read the current guide and file bugs.

I’m very excited about this project and feel the quality of it is getting better and better.

As part of my job I have often thought about what motivates somebody to get involved with Ubuntu development or more generally with Open Source development in general. There’s a couple of conclusions I came through, both through my own experience and observations and discussions with others. Here’s my Top 3:

1. The project needs to be exciting. The atmosphere needs to be welcoming and friendly.
2. The documentation needs to be clear.
3. Contributors need to find their first tasks easily.

Regarding 1) I think we’re doing a great job. It’s a lot of fun to be part of the Ubuntu development team and I think almost everybody can easily say that they made lots of friends there. Working on Ubuntu is exciting, because you fix problems not only for you, but also for millions of users.

We’re actively working on 2). The newly revamped Packaging Guide is still work in progress, but expect an announcement soon.

One area of focus for this cycle should be 3). We often face new contributors who say “Yeah, I read all the documentation – what do I do now?” There’s all kinds of tasks we can set for new contributors. We can try to just point them to Harvest, we can involve them in some organised activities, and lots of other things.

In the UDS session “Initiatives to involve new developers” we discussed a very light-weight approach: if you encounter a bug that should be easy to solve, but probably not what you want to work on yourself right now, just

• tag it as ‘bitesize’,
• subscribe yourself,
• add a comment saying that it should be a bug that’s simple to fix and
• offer your help.

It’s not a huge commitment to help somebody fix one bug, so let’s all try to tag a few more to make sure we give new contributors something to sink their teeth in.

Luckily: there’s a script in oneiric’s ubuntu-dev-tools, that does just that: it’s called “bitesize”.

Dylan McCall is rocking Harvest again. We just got Harvest 0.2.8 out the door. Among some great other fixes, we finally added RSS feeds. You can now subscribe to opportunities of certain packages and also subscribe to the last 25 opportunities that came in. This is absolutely fantastic news and a great way to stay up to date.

Thanks a lot Dylan for all the awesome work!

If you want to help out, check out the list of bugs.

UDS in Budapest is awesome. Not only is the city beautiful, the food delicious and the venue great but also are the people just fantastic. I’m having a great time and will soon blog about my plans for the next cycle.

For now I just want to point out that there’s going to be a session with Mark (and the Community Council) on Wednesday, 11th May 2011 at 17:05. It will happen at UDS in room Pet?fi. Be there and ask your questions (how to participate from remote).

Update: The session is in the same time-slot, but moved to the room Kazinczy.

Update 2: The session was moved again. Same time, but in Jokai.

Another great release is out. I just had to count through all of the release names and can’t believe it’s actually the 14th release I installed, tested and enjoyed.

To almost all of the releases I made modest contributions (I wasn’t that much involved during the first one yet), but what always excited me even more was to see new people get on board, learn, enjoy what they’re doing and take on responsibility in making Open Source software even better.

During the Oneiric (11.10) cycle, I want to work harder on reaching out to new contributors, helping them get started and hit the ground running. If you always thought about contributing to Ubuntu or Open Source in general and haven’t started yet, Oneiric is going to be YOUR cycle!

The Community Council has regularly been made aware of recurring problems on the sounder list. In the last few months, the tone and atmosphere doesn’t match any other Ubuntu mailing lists or IRC channels – including #ubuntu-offtopic. At one point, Mark reached out to remind everyone how we want to communicate with each other. Still debates kept getting out of hand and were mostly wildly unrelated to Ubuntu. Alan reached out again and made clear that the list had long moved away from its initial focus and welcoming atmosphere. No solutions for the problem were brought up in the list discussion or in the Community Council meeting.

In the meeting on April 19th the CC decided to shut down the Sounder mailing list. In essence, this is a decision to prune areas of the project which are off-topic or ungoverned, on the basis that they distract from our shared community focus on the goal of delivering free software in the best possible state, on particular terms (free of charge, cadence). While we appreciate that the Sounder list (and possibly other, similar forums) provide a particular social release for those who use them, we think there are better forums for each of the varied topics discussed there. Some of those are inside the project, most are elsewhere.

Thanks for all the fun moments on the list, see you elsewhere.

I just set up a daily build for the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. To get the latest goodness, simply:

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-packaging-guide-team/ppa
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide
4. <point your browser to /usr/share/doc/ubuntu-packaging-guide>

Once installed, you get a handy packaging guide in PDF, HTML, Single HTML and ePub formats.

If you have any feedback from the guides, please file bug reports. Also can we need some help massaging the old packaging guide into reStructuredText. Have a look at the open bug reports to see what we’re currently working on and looking for.

I’ve been slacking a bit when it comes to DJing land picked it up this year again. Some of my mixtapes are on a part of my blog that’s not syndicated, but I set up a page with all the posts. I just posted a new one today.

If you have no plans tonight and you’re in Berlin, come to the GNOME3 Launch Lounge (Facebook event page) in c-base tonight. I’ll be playing there as well.

This is another article of the new Ubuntu Packaging Guide project. Please leave your comments below, or report a bug on it, or start helping out. Just branch the code and get involved.

The article below is all about fixing bugs in Ubuntu.

$ apt-file find /usr/bin/tomboy

tomboy: /usr/bin/tomboy

$ apt-cache show tomboy | grep ^Source:

$ apt-cache show python-vigra | grep ^Source:
Source: libvigraimpex

$ patch -p1 < ../bugfix.patch

$ bzr bd -- -S -us -uc
$ pbuilder-dist <release> build ../<package>_<version>.dsc

$ dch -i

specialpackage (1.2-3ubuntu4) natty; urgency=low

  * debian/control: updated description to include frobnicator (LP: #123456)

 -- Emma Adams <emma.adams@isp.com>  Sat, 17 Jul 2010 02:53:39 +0200

debcommit

lp:~<yourlpid>/ubuntu/<release>/<package>/<branchname>

lp:~emmaadams/ubuntu/natty/specialpackage/fix-for-123456

bzr push lp:~emmaadams/ubuntu/natty/specialpackage/fix-for-123456
bzr lp-open