Ubuntu Traffic
Latest | Archives | People | Topics
currently untranslated

Ubuntu Traffic #11 For 2004/11/05

By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Welcome to the eleventh edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of October 30 - November 05, 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

You can sign up for any of the mailing lists summarized here at http://lists.ubuntu.com. You can also join the IRC discussion summarized here in #ubuntu and other channels on the Freenode network: irc.freenode.net. Please join in and maybe you will be featured in the next traffic!

First, the following bits and pieces didn't get a full story but are worth mentioning:

 

1. Ubuntu Book
2004/10/25 - 2004/10/31 (45 posts) Subject: "Ubuntu book"
People: John Hornbeck, Sivan Green

The hot topic on the extremely active Ubuntu Documentation list over this week and last was a long thread on the creation of a project to write an Ubuntu Book. John Hornbeck kicked off the thread saying:

OK, I am proposing this to the group. I am interested in writing a book about Ubuntu. I have talked to Mark Shuttleworth and have his blessing. My question to everyone is what type of book would be needed first off. We talked about a "Nutshell" book for O'Reilly, but I am thinking more of a book like the "Learning Redhat Linux" book. For those who don't know, I work part time as a Linux instructor for a Vocational school and that was the book I used mostly because it covered a lot of ground in a fairly small book. What are you opinions? If this is something that emerges I will want to fully work with everyone and keep contributing the things I learn back to the doc team. I do not plan to stop working on docs (someone I told already asked so I thought I would address that right now), but this is a doc that I think is really needed.

The list saw lost of suggestions out there on what to write it about and how to ago about writing it. Brett Carrington suggested a "Learning Linux with Ubuntu?" aimed towards new desktop users. Sivan Green pointed out: "I agree with you very much. Moreover, doing so that way we could contribute back to our ROCK, debian - something I wish to see in all our documentation efforts. This book should just as well released under a license that would allow Debian to freely use our works and nurture back the community."

Ben Edward said he liked "Red Hat Linux in Small Business" and would like to see something like this. One of the more powerful memes throughout the thread was about about both reusing existing documentation to build from and about writing things in such a way that they could go back to the community.

The final set of issues brought up centered around process. There are still lingering concerns about ReST, DocBook, or switching between the two. To top it off, people want some sort of revision control on documents including those that are being done in DocBook (which means no wiki). The answers aren't clear yet but the group hashed out a number of their options on the list.

 

2. Hoary Says: "Get Your UTF-8 On"
2004/10/29 - 2004/11/01 (12 posts) Subject: "UTF-8 in Hoary"
People: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh come out to say:

Good morning freedom lovers!

First thing you should do when you upgrade to hoary is enable UTF-8 by default -> and only UTF-8! :-)

  1. sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
  2. Disable all of the ISO-8859-1 locales in the list
  3. Enable the appropriate UTF-8 locales for the languages you use
  4. Choose a UTF-8 locale as the default system locale

UTF-8 is an important feature goal for hoary and we need as much testing as possible on this.

 

3. Ubuntu Learns a Few More Languages
2004/10/29 - 2004/11/05 (15 posts) Subject: "italian-speaking Ubuntu GNU/Linux mailing list"

By the prompting of users on ubuntu-users and ubuntu-devel, a few new lists were born to facilitate discussion of Ubuntu in languages other than English. This week we saw Davide Pesenti push for and set up an Italian version, Pedro Faraco start discussion around a Portuguese list and Alexey Molchanov start a Russian list.

Here are the relevant lists:

Italian:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-it
Portuguese:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-pt
Russian:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-ru

There are companion IRC channels with predictable names for each of these projects on Freenode (irc.freenode.net); e.g., ubuntu-it. It's amazing to see the number of lists and the number of languages growing so quickly.

While I cannot read the non-English language lists and summarize them for Traffic (because I don't speak the languages), I'd welcome highlights for inclusion into traffic. Just email me at mako@canonical.com and I'll be happy to add your bit into the next traffic!

 

4. Ubuntu Artwork Sites
2004/10/30 - 2004/11/02 (30 posts) Subject: "Art sites, Ubuntu exposure"
People: Mark Turner, Jeff Waugh, VolvoGuy

Ubunut-users saw a few threads on artwork including a thread started by Mark Turner saying, "I'm working on www.ubuntu-look.org which will (hopefully) be a repository for Ubuntu artwork, themes, GRUB splashes, and anything else Ubuntu related, If anyone is int rested on working on the site or has any suggestions please email me so we can all get a plan together."

Careful to say that it was not policy but just something he'd be thinking of, Jeff Waugh posted a message to the sounder list talking about one compromise that he'd be thinking of saying:

So I was thinking about the somewhat suboptimal situation with the two artwork sites, and it reminded me of a thought I had a few weeks ago when I first saw artwork appearing on {gnome,kde}-look.org...

Having Ubuntu-related artwork on those sites is an excellent form of exposure - grass-roots marketing, if you will - because people will see the artwork there and wonder what all this Ubuntu stuff is all about. Hopefully they'll like the artwork and the concepts behind it, and try Ubuntu out.

Ubuntu-specific artwork sites would not have the same effect, because anyone going to them would either be interested in Ubuntu, or existing users. So even though it's a cool thing to do (and thanks to you guys for having the initiative to set them up!), perhaps we should wait a while and let these sites attract more users for us..?

Ultimately, I think we do want to have more Ubuntu-specific sites out there, but perhaps we should try and figure out a way of working closely with some of the existing sites that get a lot of eyeballs. Hmm. Wonder if we can come up with something clever for this.

Jeff's perspective got a bit of positive feedback. Volvoguy liked the idea and suggested that, "A solution that might kill two birds with one stone might be to put your artwork on BOTH sites - the Ubuntu specific AND the Gnome/KDE specific. That way existing Ubuntu users can easily find related artwork and FUTURE Ubuntu users will see all the cool artwork on the other more generic sites"

Jeff pointed out that this was still problematic because we can't expect artists to upload to half a dozen sites. Maybe some kind of syndication system?

 

5. Hoary Woes
2004/10/30 - 2004/11/01 (45 posts) Subject: "hoary woes"
People: Simon Burke, Michael Vogt, Matt Zimmerman

The list saw a number of threads this week on issues relating to people's upgrade of hoary. As was mentioned when Hoary was announced, things may not and will not go smoothly and things might break. Things certainly did in a few big ways.

Two of most common problems were reported in a thread started by Simon Burke who complained that:

  1. Synaptic crashes out whenever there are dependencies, the dialog appears but if you click on OK or cancel synaptic just closes. There's not output that i have found, so thats as detailed as i can be.
  2. Sound: For some reason esound works but nothing else. If i open up beep media player i have to use the esound output as both ALSA and OSS don't seem to acknowledge that there is a soundcard. Both give errors that it was unable to open the sound device.

In terms of the first issue, Michael Vogt announced that: "I build updated packages at: http://people.debian.org/~mvo/synaptic/warty/0.55 Please test and tell me if it works for you."

For the second issue, Matt Zimmerman suggested that: "Some application has the sound device open, so no others can open it at the same time. This has always been the case; you must use esound in order to share the sound card." In another thread, Volvoguy pointed out that Inkscape was crashing. Sebastien Bacher announced that he an uploaded a package that fixed the bug.

 

6. Documentation Meeting
2004/11/01 - 2004/11/03 (15 posts) People: Enrico Zini

The documentation team held a meeting this week organized by Enrico Zini who said, "There will be a Documentation Team Meeting on #ubuntu-devel on Thursday, November 4. The time, after merging all the preferences given at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocumentationTeamMeeting, will be 13:00UTC."

The meeting agenda is at the above URL as well.

A few days later, Enrico posted a followup with a summary of the meeting saying, "I've finally finished summarizing the meeting we had 2 days ago. You can find it on the wiki at https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocumentationTeamMeetingSummary2"

Great work guys! Keep it up.

 

7. Ubuntu Bug Reporting
2004/11/01 (12 posts) Subject: "Universe bugs idea"
People: Jeff Waugh, Matt Zimmerman

This is really a couple threads that I'm (probably unfairly) collapsing into one. In any case, there was a deal of talk on bug reporting in Ubuntu on the -devel list. Jeff Waugh said:

So it has been generally agreed that having all of the universe packages in Bugzilla would be a bad idea, slowing the developers down a lot, and that we wanted to separate things out a bit - I just had an idea for doing so.

The 'Ubuntu' product can == main, and we can add an 'Unsupported' or 'Universe' product (though it would encompass multiverse too) for all the other packages.

Nicely separated, and we can distinguish the Bugzilla mails either with the advanced email header stuff we hope to merge soon, or have a bugs list for each product.

Jeff Waugh then followed up his own mail to say that, "[Dave Miller from Bugzilla] points out that this might get confusing, as components will end up moving between the two. Though, I guess that'll end up being a problem with pretty much every solution. Hrm."

In another thread, Matt Zimmerman talked about using report bug and the way we are currently working by using reportbug in such a way that we don't end up spamming Debian with bugs that are in Ubuntu -- although developer should certainly forward fixes back up to Debian where appropriate. Matt said:

As background, what we currently do is to modify reportbug to change the default /etc/reportbug.conf to include 'bts ubuntu'.

Also, I noticed that Chris Lawrence, the author of reportbug, pro-actively merged (the non-configuration parts of) our branch of reportbug, which makes it easier for us to maintain it:

  • Incorporate applicable changes in 2.62ubuntu1 to this tree.

    (Main advantage: --bts=ubuntu works now. If someone will kindly tell me an easy way to tell a Ubuntu system from a Debian one, I will incorporate code to eliminate the need for the forked package. Same goes for any other Debian fork, BTW...)

Thanks for that, Chris. To answer your question, the canonical method to identify an Ubuntu system is to use "lsb_release -si" or otherwise parse /etc/lsb-release. I think it would be great if reportbug incorporated such a test and used it to set the default BTS. Matt Zimmerman evaluated a couple of methods thrown onto the list by Wichert Akkerman from Debian and others and explained the primary options we have in terms of reportbug as:

  • Leave things as they are now. Ubuntu carries a tiny patch to reportbug which sets the default BTS to us. If the user (for example) pulls the Debian version of reportbug for some reason, the autodetection magic would still do the right thing as a fallback, given an intact lsb package.
  • Drop the Ubuntu patch to reportbug, and rely on an autodetection mechanism in upstream reportbug. I'm not sure that this provides enough safety as specified; users can remove the lsb package, and Ubuntu derivatives will modify it. We should try to avoid falling back to Debian in those cases, and rather fall back to Ubuntu. Can we ever really be sure whether we are on an Ubuntu system, in a world where packages can be mixed between Debian-based distributions?
  • Drop the Ubuntu patch to reportbug, and carry a tiny patch to dpkg instead, which changes the bug reporting address for the 'debian' origin, with the caveats described above. Reportbug can attempt to detect an Ubuntu system, but we would fall back to origin-based determination, with the caveats described above.

No real consensus seemed to come out of the conversation although the conversation seemed to very positive for all parties involved. It's interesting to these issues come up in the process of trying to collaborate with Debian.

 

8. Ubuntu Conference
2004/11/02 - 2004/11/03 (4 posts) Subject: "Ubuntu Conference: December 5-18, 2004"
People: Benjamin Mako Hill

I (Benjamin Mako Hill) posted the following announcement about the upcoming Ubuntu Conference in Mataro Spain:

Canonical is pleased to announce that it will be organizing a two week-long conference and hack-session for Ubuntu in December. Here are the essential details:

  • Where: Mataro, Spain (Near Barcelona)
  • When: December 5 through December 18
  • Who: Anyone interested or involved in Ubuntu

The conference will be held at the Telecampus Mataró. Access to a network over wireless will be provided. Information on the space is here: http://www.tecnocampus.com/eng/presentacio.htm

If you intend to come for the full conference, plan to arrive into Barcelona on December 5 and out again on December 18th. People are welcome to come for just part.

The conference is open to anyone but it will be of interest to those who have or are interested in or involved in Ubuntu. That said, we will need to have an idea of how many people are coming.

Please keep tuned as I'll be posting additional details about the conference, options for accommodations and about how to let us know if you're planning on coming.

If you have any questions, please contact me personally.

I followed up a couple days later with more information on the conference here:

I have posted a load of additional information on the venue, travel, and accommodations on the new Ubuntu wiki here: https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/Conference

If you would like to suggest a BOF or suggest some goals you can do that here:

If you are planning on attending, you should sign up on the attendees page here:

This is on the new wiki. Like on the old wiki, you will need to create an account and log in first before you can edit the page. You will need to do this if you want to add your information if you are planning on attending for example.

I hope to see a number of you there!

 

9. Separating Language Packs
2004/11/03 - 2004/11/05 (17 posts) Subject: "Thoughts about separating language packs"
People: Martin Pitt, Matt Zimmerman, Scott James Remnant

As you may know, one of the goals of Hoary is to separate languages out into separate packs to decrease the size taken up by translations and to pave the way for unlimited amounts of translations -- one of Ubuntu's long terms goals. Martin Pitt has been thinking about this and he posted his thoughts (in wikiable form) to the list:

Goal

The goal is to separate all translation and localization parts from all packages to "language packs". Per supported language we want to have one package which contains l10n stuff for all Ubuntu supported packages.

In particular, the following package components are affected:

  • translations using gettext
  • translations and language elements that do not use gettext
  • debconf translations

(Details below.)

Automatic Extraction

There are two obvious points where an automatic extraction could be hooked in during package build:

  1. dh_builddeb
  2. dpkg-deb

We currently have 1047 source packages, but as much as 265 do not use debhelper. Although a debhelper hook would be easier, it would miss about a quarter of our source packages, which is not acceptable.

Therefore, dpkg-deb must be modified, preferably in a general way so that it could go to Debian, too. dpkg-dev should introduce a directory.

/etc/dpkg/dpkg-deb-hook.d/

All files in this directory are executed by dpkg-deb (with at least the build directory as parameter) right before actually assembling a .deb file.

Then we can create a package ubuntu-langpacks (or so) which puts scripts in the hook directory that do the extraction. This approach does not clutter up dpkg itself and allows to write the scripts in arbitrary languages.

The extraction package then needs to be installed at the buildds. The extracted l10n stuff would be copied to an accumulation directory. The language pack source package should automatically be able to build debs from this directory (i. e. it should be enough to put a debian/ directory into the accumulation directory and call dpkg-buildpackage).

The last script in the hook directory can check if a regeneration of the language packs is necessary and trigger it if appropriate.

gettext translations

This part should be easy; it should be sufficient to move all files that a package wants to install under /usr/share/locales.

Could be done with a simple shell script /etc/dpkg/dpkg-deb-hook.d/extract-gettext.

non-gettext translations

Since this must be handled on a by-case basis, it might be impossible to catch each and every tiny bit. However, the two major cases are currently mozilla-firefox and openoffice.org. Both packages currently provide separate debs for languages, so the contents and maintainer scripts should just be merged into the appropriate language packs. A quick check showed that both should be possible fully automatically.

debconf translations

This is probably the most tricky part. All translations are stored in a single ".templates" file. It is possible to automatically extract them, but it is difficult to dynamically add them again at package installation. If we want to do this, we need a dpkg pre-installation hook.

The question is whether it is really worth to separate debconf translations in the first place. During normal installation the user does not see any questions anyway, and I doubt that debconf translations account for a significant increase of package size.

Matt Zimmerman responded with a list of things to think about in terms of automatic extraction:

Some things to worry about regarding extraction and repackaging:

  • What happens if the package is built with a stock build environment which does not perform the extraction? The package's files will overlap with the language pack.
  • How can we ensure that the language packs are up to date at release time? We wouldn't want a security update to cause some language support to disappear, for a package which hadn't yet been built with the modified build environment

Scott James Remnant strongly disagreed with Martin's comment on modifying dpkg-deb to introduce the new directory saying:

I utterly disagree. I've rejected features like this for dpkg before, and will continue to do so. I don't believe package managers should be arbitrarily extendable like this, instead I believe they should be completely predictable.

If you want certain files to not be placed in the package, you take them out (or don't put them in) in debian/rules. Either add a call to something that extracts the translations, or modify debhelper and friends to do the extraction for you.

 

10. Hoary Status
2004/11/04 (1 post) Subject: "Hoary status and plans"
People: Matt Zimmerman

Matt Zimmerman pointed an update on the Hoary Hedgehog status and the plan with this announcement (quoted in full). This built off the meeting last week that I summarized in the last traffic.:

Kickoff meeting

The kickoff meeting for Hoary development was held Monday 25 October 2004, at 16:00 UTC, in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.

Mako has prepared a summary of this marathon meeting here: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/hoary_kickoff-20041025-summary.html

And a transcript is available nearby: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/hoary_kickoff-20041025-log.html

We discussed a wide variety of ideas for new features and bug fixes for the Hoary release.

Merge status

With Ubuntu having been frozen for some months, there were a great deal of changes in Debian that needed to be brought in. In many cases, we had customised the package for Ubuntu, and so a three-way merge was necessary.

As discussed at the kickoff meeting, Scott James Remnant applied some automation to this problem, and bugs were filed for the merges which could not be automated. 166 bugs were filed, and only 13 now remain, so we are mostly caught up with the initial merge.

There is still work to be done in order to keep up on an ongoing basis, and we'll discuss that more as time goes on. Scott is working on a system to automate the process of attempting merges and filing bugs where manual intervention is necessary.

Goals

I've finished the initial process of documenting the goals for Hoary on the wiki:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryGoals

The summary of the kickoff meeting also provides a summary of them. Please review that page and ensure that the list is complete and correct. In cases where more detail is called for, I've created either a wiki page, or a broken link to one which should be created. If you're listed as responsible for a goal, please flesh out these pages with your plans and thoughts.

There are many goals which are not yet assigned to anyone. If you're interested in working on any of them, follow up here with your ideas, or create a wiki page. If you aren't sure what a particular goal involves, read the kickoff meeting summary and transcript before asking questions. There is potential for a number of these to be funded on an individual basis according to the bounty process: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/bounties/

Early breakage

Some of the changes that we'd like to make for Hoary have the potential to introduce instability, so we should make these changes early in the release cycle. The current list of such items is:

  • Change the default locale to UTF-8 (Colin Watson)
  • Change the default dpkg-reconfigure priority to medium (Colin Watson)
  • Start GDM earlier in the boot sequence (Daniel Stone)
  • Enable laptop suspend (Matthew Garrett, Herbert Xu)
  • Load apm automatically (Thom May)
  • Switch from fam to gamin (Jeff Waugh)
  • Polypaudio (Jeff Waugh)
  • Apt authentication (Matt Zimmerman)
  • Migrate from XFree86 to X.org (Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, Daniel Stone)

If your name is listed next to one of the above items, be sure that you know what needs to be done in order to effect the change, and carry out those actions as soon as possible so that we can spend more time fixing the resulting bugs.

Bugs

We have a few hundred bugs of severity 'normal' or higher. While bugs are not our highest priority during this stage of the release, we should be careful not to let them grow out of control. In particular, everyone should review their own bug list and check the status of existing bugs, close those which do not apply to Hoary, close bugs which are stalled and incomplete, and do general housekeeping.

Changes to the Package Lists (Seeds)

A number of seed changes have been proposed since Warty's package list was frozen. Since these need to be reviewed and discussed, I'll start a separate thread to discuss them.

Priorities

Current priorities for Hoary are:

  1. Finish the remaining merges
  2. Implement early breakage items
  3. Work on other Hoary goals
  4. Bug fixing and housekeeping

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Hope You Enjoy Ubuntu Traffic
 

Ubuntu Traffic is created and produced by Canonical Ltd. All pages are copyright Canonical.