Ubuntu Traffic Benjamin Mako Hill

Welcome to the fifth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of September 18 - 24 in 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

Ubuntu has stormed into the Linux world and made a huge splash. In the two weeks after our preview release, we have already seen more than a couple thousand messages on the mailing list and there is no sign of slowing down. Certainly, something like Traffic is proving increasingly important for people who want to track the most important news and discussions.

Our quick grown is creating a volume of traffic that is difficult to track and there's a chance I will miss things. I do my best to go over the lists and the IRC channel but there's a chance I will miss things. Please, don't hesitate to point things out to me either on IRC (I idle there as "mako") or by sending me a quick email at mako@canonical.com. Thanks!

Finally, as I mentioned last week but will mention again, you can sign up for any of the email lists mentioned here at http://lists.ubuntu.com. Please join in making some traffic of your own!

Bits and pieces that didn't get a full story but are worth mentioning include:

Eugenia Loli-Queru asked if there were any plans to include by default the Gnome bindings 2.8? I mean, you would be the first distro to include, by default, the full range of Gnome bindings, allowing for easy compilation on a variety of apps out there, that are currently are very lacking on the repositories (especially some new perl-gtk apps). Currently, the bindings source packages are too many and too time consuming compiling them manually. I would find an excellent selling point having the latest bindings together with the latest gnome, because no one else does that.

Jeff Waugh followed up with the Current Official Ubuntu Policy on Bindings:

  • We're committed to insanely great Python support throughout Ubuntu, and will ship a bunch of useful Python modules and bindings in the default Desktop install to enable that.
  • We'll support modules and bindings for other languages when they are required by cool applications that we don't want to pass up.
  • We will provide lots of help to interested maintainers who want to support their favourite language modules, bindings and apps that use them in universe.

So, I think that's a pretty good set of goals... But if there's any reason to change this policy, we'll have to leave that for Hoary.

Colin Watson pointed the newcomers (almost everyone at this point) to the CD images built daily from the Warty archive:

http://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/daily/current/
rsync://archive.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/daily/current/

I'm afraid we don't offer BitTorrent downloads of these. If you're going to be keeping up-to-date with the daily images on a regular basis, I very much recommend using the rsync download method to keep bandwidth requirements reasonably sane.

We'll be dropping a few new features into the archive soon, and both these and bug fixes go into the daily builds. For the most part, of course, you can simply upgrade using apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, or whatever, but from time to time I may ask people to try to reproduce installation problems using the daily CD images.

Matt Zimmerman pointed out that the lack of bittorrent for daily downloads is temporary saying, we do intend to provide torrents for the daily images as well, but they are not yet available.

Jeff Waugh mentioned that the "sounder" list (used originally for testing Warty in it's pre-preview time) will stay around as the new community chit-chat list. the sounder list, of great historical value, will live on as the general community chit-chat list, on which just about everything is on-topic, except technical matters relating to Ubuntu. Those should go to one of the other two lists. The other two in this case are, of course, ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-users.

You can sign up for the sounder list at http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/sounder.

Over on Ubuntu-user, Brandon Hale announced that, Last night I stayed up late grabbing source packages from Sid and building against Warty. Here's the resulting packages for mono, muine, and blam, hopefully someone finds this useful. The following line in your sources.list should do the trick:

deb http://www.getsweaaa.com/~tseng/ubuntu/debs ./

Mark Shuttleworth replied saying, Matt how would you feel about setting up a procedure where users can contribute updated packages for universe / multiverse. They would need to have (a) built it on a Warty system, (b) made sure it was clear of known security bugs. If nothing else, SOME external review and updating of universe / multiverse packages would be better than none. Jeff Waugh replied that he'd be thrilled with this.

Matt Zimmerman gave his thoughts on the issue saying:

I think we should have two processes for contributors:

  • Source uploads, under certain conditions and subject to review
  • Requests for importing a new version from Debian unstable, which I think we should generally allow if its build-dependencies are met in Warty and it builds on Warty architectures in Debian (both of which are straightforward to check, and even automatable if we want)

The user needs which have emerged so far for Warty are:

  • "I want foo, but it's not there [doesn't build]"
  • "I want a newer version of foo"

The former need has been met by LaMont providing quick fixes for FTBFS in universe; he has been able to fix all of the reported breakage of this type in short order.

I expect that the latter need will be met more effectively by opening Hoary and providing a moving target for them where they have the latest versions of everything. I don't think we need to put much effort into a process for Warty, because folks who want current versions of everything are not likely to stick to Warty when it releases anyway.

However, I am more than happy to have new versions from Debian brought into Warty at this stage in order to fix bugs, because the review process can be generally automated (e.g., we can verify that it is likely to build correctly once imported). However, since we don't yet have a formal maintainer process, source uploads would need to go through some sort of review queue, and that will take someone's time away from working on the release.

My understanding is that these mono packages are a binary build of current Debian unstable packages for Warty. I think it would be fine for the new source package to be imported into Warty and be built by our infrastructure.

Louise McCance-Price pointed folks to a page on the wiki with all sort of good Ubuntu artwork saying, I have set up a page on the wiki at http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/UbuntuArtwork This will be a central location for our artwork and there is a palette of colours that will assist you when creating icons etc.

Artwork is one great way that those of us that actually understand what a palette of colors is useful for but don't know how to code can contribute to the community.

Jason Scott asked if there were forums in the works for Ubuntu. The answer is yes although not timeline was announced. I have to say that the extra traffic monitoring is absolutely frightening to me in a very good sort of way. :)

In related thread, Andrew Bennetts pointed out that Ubuntu lists were available on gmane now. You can look at all the gmane.linux.ubuntu.* lists over at http://www.gmane.org.

Gmane provides a web and a newsgroup interface to mailing lists. Some people find Usenet much easier with dealing with very high traffic lists like, oh, ubuntu-users. For example, you can get to ubuntu-users this way:

Newsgroup:
nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.user
Web interface:
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.user

Rudi von Staden started a thread over on -users which was kicked over to the Sounder chit-chat list asking: I'm busy downloading Ubuntu and am really impressed with what I'm hearing so far. Being South African, I'm also glad that Mark Shuttleworth is backing it! I've been trying to convince several of my economically oriented friends that this is a significant step towards Linux becoming a viable option in the desktop market, especially within the private sector. Their response is that Open Source will never succeed in the long term because there is no financial incentive for the developers/investors. I don't want to clog the list with philosophical debates on Open Source, but I am curious about why Mark Shuttleworth would invest in Ubuntu - is it purely benevolent or is it intended to return a profit in the future?

Mark replied saying:

I'm investing in open source software now because I believe it represents a new and more powerful way of developing software, and am optimistic that I can find sustainable opportunities inside that newly-shaped industry if I participate in the process. And having used open source software for a decade behind the scenes, I have watched it mature to the point that I believe the time is right to make a push for open source on every desktop.

There's a more philosophical slant to my interest than the immediate opportunity it presents. Very simply, I believe that open source software is a first glimpse of new economic forces that will have a significant impact on all sectors of the global economy over the next 30 years. Open source software is the first manifestation of "collaborative competition" empowered by the internet. It happened first in the software industry because code is relatively easy to diff, patch and merge. But other industries, starting with the publishing industry, are going to find themselves rocked by this same underlying force. The recording industry, motion picture industry, and then service industries, will see similar effects.

Hold onto your hats, I think this is going to be a fun ride.

For those that are confused as to what a technical board is and how you can particpate, you can catch up by reading http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/community/governance/ which has all sorts information on Ubuntu governence and, more importantly, how you can get involved in the decision making for the the Ubuntu community.

To quote the page, "the Ubuntu Technical Board is responsible for the technical direction that Ubuntu takes. The Technical Board will arbitrate any disputes over package selection, packaging policy, installation system and process, toolchain, kernel, X server, library versions and dependencies etc." The board meets every two weeks on IRC. The first such meeting was on the 21st. The meeting had the following agenda:

  • Universe: discussion of additional items needed in universe, proposed by MarkShuttleworth consenus... place items which are not known to be free in a "multiverse" component. James Troup to create.
  • Bugs: a review of bugs requiring architectural solutions, or which otherwise have bearing on the distribution as a whole
    • Spell checking and associated dictionaries
    • ALSA, OSS and ESD consensus... use esd where possible, as discussed in bug report
    • How to address UI and functional issues introduced by desktop changes and pmount ... restore mounted filesystems only to desktop for warty, arrange better notification for hoary

The major takeaway conclusions was that the group decided on two components to replace what is currently "universe." Universe will stay as universe and will mostly reflect Debian in its role as a snapshot of the free software universe. Additionally, a new component called "multiverse" will be introduced to show snapshots of other pieces of software that are either under different licensing terms or of a nature that make the team unsure of even including them in universe -- but is included on the servers for completeness. Both will have to be added by hand by people making the choice to use this software Ubuntu will not support either.

Release manager Jeff Waugh announced the (new) release date for the final version of Ubuntu:

To get some extra testing exposure for our very first (YAYAYA!) release, Mark has suggested that we push out a Release Candidate on the 13th, and our Final release on the 20th of October. The release schedule has been updated for this change: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/WartyWarthog/ReleaseSchedule

Matt Zimmerman seemed mildly concerned that it was being moved to a day other than his birthday. Matt: your Ubuntu Traffic editor feels for you.