Ubuntu Traffic #12 For 2004/11/12

By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

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Introduction

Threads Covered

1.	2004/11/05 - 2004/11/09	(30 posts)	Python IDE
2.	2004/11/07 - 2004/11/08	(6 posts)	Maintaining Debian Packages in Warty
3.	2004/11/06 - 2004/11/12	(17 posts)	Documentation Licensing
4.	2004/11/08	(2 posts)	Pressed CDs Update
5.	2004/11/08 - 2004/11/09	(4 posts)	Automated Installers
6.	2004/11/08 - 2004/11/09	(7 posts)	Hoary Install CDs Available
7.	2004/11/09	(1 post)	X.Org Packages for Hoary
8.	2004/11/09	(1 post)	Community Council Meeting and Conference Sponsorships
9.	2004/11/09 - 2004/11/12	(0 posts)	AltGr On PowerPC Notebooks
10.	2004/11/11 - 2004/11/12	(7 posts)	Separating Mozilla/OpenOffice.org Language Packs
11.	2004/11/06 - 2004/11/11	(6 posts)	Security Advisories

Introduction

Welcome to the twelfth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of November 6 - 12, 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:

The documentation team talked a bit about the DocBook format which they are beginning to work with in more depth. Chris Haas wrote up a nice introduction here: https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocBook
On the devel list, Matt Zimmerman reminded folks that changes to seed lists (new package and such) should, "be both added to the wiki pages (so that they aren't forgotten), and mentioned here (so that they can be discussed). How we should combine those two needs into a coherent process has not yet been established." Matt asked for ideas oh now this process could be combined.
Ryan pointed readers to the launch of http://art.ubuntuforums.org saying, "the goal is to provide a integrated art site with the forums were artists can upload their files with screen shots and maintain them. You will not need to register to download or browse the artwork, but you will need to be a registered user to contribute artwork."
Several threads on -users mentioned the desire for a wireless manager applet or an easy GUI way to deal with wireless cards. A couple mentioned a tool called Network Manager by name. Matt Zimmerman said: "We're integrating a tool called NetworkManager in Hoary. http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/NetworkManager "

1. Python IDE
2004/11/05 - 2004/11/09 (30 posts) Subject: "Since ubuntu is pushing python, a good python IDE should be available"
People: Kristof Vansant, Kapil Thangavelu, Jeff Waugh, Matthias Klose

Kristof Vansant asked the ubuntu-devel list about a good Python IDE saying, "Since ubuntu is pushing python, a good python IDE should be available. I was thinking eclipse 3.x with pydev. Or if anyone knows a better one tell me." The two options that came up were eric3 and eclipse using pydev.

Kapil Thangavelu said, "opensource eric3 is the leader of the pack (pyqt based). svn/cvs integration, refactoring, code graphs (via graphviz)." QT of course, is an integration problem with the Ubuntu desktop with GTK2 based.

Eclipse is written in Java which introduces another set of problems because the major Java implementations (like Suns') is not free software and cannot be included in Ubuntu. Jeff Waugh said, "Red Hat is shipping Eclipse built with GCJ. Ideally, that's what we'd do too. I don't know what the status is with regards to Eclipse in Debian. There aren't any packages in sid, that's for sure." Matthias Klose replied to say, " that's Eclipse 2.1? Eclipse 3.0 is a work of progress, compiled with the gcj from the GCC BC branch."

2. Maintaining Debian Packages in Warty
2004/11/07 - 2004/11/08 (6 posts) Subject: "Doing Debian package maintenance under Warty"
People: Chris Haas, Matt Zimmerman

Chris Haas asked about what people do who work on both Debian and Ubuntu (a situation that many Ubuntu developer have found themselves in):

As all "27 official Ubuntu maintainers" (if that information is still correct) are Debian maintainers, too, this should be a common thought. Do you really have two installations? Or have you quit developing for Debian?

It's not that I wouldn't have the space and bandwidth for a second partition. Just if Warty would provide everything then it would be easier. Actually it seems a little weird to contribute to a distribution you don't even use as your main installation. :) And most of the work I do is not package maintenance but writing documentation, managing servers etc.

Matt Zimmerman replied point out that the statistic of the 27 official maintainers, "is not (nor has it ever been) correct. The press seem to get this wrong without exception." Matt also added that, "I use a chroot for building binary packages for Debian, as do some others." My sense is that the two machines, two partitions, or a chroot are the primary solutions in use.

3. Documentation Licensing
2004/11/06 - 2004/11/12 (17 posts) Subject: "Licensing of Documentation"
People: Louise McCance-Price, Enrico Zini

There were a few threads on a few lists that discussed the way that Ubuntu is going to license documentation. George Deka brought this up on the ubuntu-doc list.

Louise McCance-Price announced that, "it appears the winner is: GFDL." Enrico Zini seemed less than thrilled about this saying:

Two questions:

GFDL documentation cannot currently go into Debian main. Is there a reason why GFDL has been chosen even if it has this problem?

(more practical) do we track invariant sections in the wiki, or we say that wiki pages shouldn't have invariant sections except when approved by someone/some group?

Arun Bhanu suggested the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Louise McCance-Price responded to these concerns by Enrico and others brought up by George Deka saying, "Mark [Shuttleworth] is keen for it to be GFDL, but this will not be forced. The creator of the document can choose what license they wish to use. Derived works will remain under the license of the originator."

George, in particular, was worried about the invariant sections and suggested a new version of the GFDL without the invariant sections options. In fact, the author a document under the GFDL can choose whether to include any invariant sections (or covertexts, or acknowledgments, etc). Mark Shuttleworth has also said he does want to invoke any of these more controversial bits of the GFDL.

4. Pressed CDs Update
2004/11/08 (2 posts) Subject: "Ubuntu 4.10 Pressed CDs Status and Last Call"
People: Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill gave a status report on the orders of pressed CDs saying:

The first batch of pressed Ubuntu 4.10 "Warty Warthog" CDs are beginning to ship this week. They include people who had complete data in our database on October 19th. Please try to be patient as they will take several weeks to all ship and to make it to your door. Thanks to Canonical, the shipping and the CDs are free of charge!

If you would like to order CDs or if you would like to check to see if we have processed your order (we unfortunately cannot track individual shipments), you can log in to the Ubuntu CD Distribution database here: http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org

At the time of the last mailing some people left off essential shipping information. I have tried to contact most of these people and will be contacting the rest this week.

There is a FAQ entry to answer questions you may have about the CD shipping process online at: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documentation/faq/shipit/

Let me know if you need any specific help or have specific questions.

Additionally, I announced a deadline for the CDs as November 12th. Due to overwhelming demand, we decided to continue pressing and shipping CDs on a regular basis (every two weeks) until much closer till Hoary Hedgehog's release. That said, we're still, by default, going to do one shipment per release per person. If you order CDs and give them all away and need more, pleas get in contact with me personally at mako@canonical.com.

5. Automated Installers
2004/11/08 - 2004/11/09 (4 posts) Subject: "Automated installers - custom package selections - kickstart"
People: Andy Rabagliati, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson

This was covered in the hoary features goal post briefly but it was brought up several times on the lists this last week so I figured I would cover it here as well.

Andy Rabagliati started one of those threads off saying, "I have a minor distro I developed, maintain, and use that performs the task of dialup and firewall, with mail (exim/courier) and a web proxy server (wwwoffle) with UUCP as the primary transport. Most of the packages are available from Ubuntu. What I need is a replacement for kickstart, the dandy redhat python-based installer."

Matt Zimmerman replied saying, "You can do this today, but it requires some depth of knowledge about how the installer works. One of the feature goals for Hoary is to implement a kickstart-compatible interface to allow you to do this very simply. http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/KickstartCompatibility" Colin Watson replied to clarify, "That's with the Hoary installer, not Warty. The required changes for preseeding did not make it into Warty."

6. Hoary Install CDs Available
2004/11/08 - 2004/11/09 (7 posts) Subject: "First Hoary install CDs available"
People: Colin Watson

Colin Watson made an announcement that Hoary install CDs were now being built once a day:

Daily install CD builds for Hoary are now available, at the usual place:

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

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

I strongly recommend using rsync to download these, as while Hoary is still in a great deal of flux the changes from day to day are much less for rsync to deal with than downloading the whole thing again from scratch, so it will be easier on your bandwidth and ours.

All the usual warnings for Hoary apply. The installer works for me on the one architecture where I've tested it so far, but you really shouldn't expect to be able to use it in mission-critical environments yet.

7. X.Org Packages for Hoary
2004/11/09 (1 post) Subject: "Announcing X.Org packages for Hoary"
People: Daniel Stone

Perhaps the big news of the week was the eagerly awaited announcement by Daniel Stone of X.Org packages for Hoary:

Announcing a long-awaited feature for Ubuntu: X.Org packages.

Since Ubuntu's public announcement in September, 'does it have X.Org?' has been one of the most frequently-asked questions. Until now, the answer to that was that we were based on XFree86 4.3.0, with some 320,000 lines of patches; however, the answer to that question is now dead simple: Yes!

For the last two weeks, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto and Daniel Stone have been locked in a room together, and we now have packages to show for it. The upgrade from XFree86 to X.Org should be perfectly smooth and seamless, and it is supported across Ubuntu's three architectures: amd64, i386, and powerpc.

This release brings many new features, and hopefully even more hardware support than before. This represents one of the most significant core package updates we have ever tried in Ubuntu, and is the result of weeks of work.

To upgrade, you must be running the Hoary tree; if you simply run a Smart Upgrade in Synaptic, or 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade', your system should automatically get upgraded to X.Org. The next time you restart GDM (either by running 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart', which will kill your active session, or by restarting the machine), you will be running the X.Org X server.

Please bear in mind that this represents the first public release of these packages, and as such there will no doubt be bugs to be found. In particular, people using ATI chipsets may experience X server crashes when the resolution given in the configuration file is incorrect; also, use of Synaptic may cause a very loud error about the locale being unknown. Copy and paste between some GTK1 applications (e.g. emacs) is known to be problematic.

While this release also features the Composite extension, which enables true transparency, Expos351-like functionality, etc, this extension is still experimental. As such, it has been disabled by default, and we have respected this default. If you want to enable the Composite extension, add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Enabled" EndSection

but please be aware that you may experience random crashes, and performance using Composite is still rather sluggish at this stage. This is not an Ubuntu-specific problem: it is an architectural problem with the current X.Org server.

That being said, if you are confident that you can deal with any unexpected breakage that may occur, please upgrade to X.Org and give it all the testing it needs! If you find a bug, please report it through our bug tracking system.

There were a few minor complaints of problems relating to fuzzy fonts but the release seemed to be an unqualified success! Thanks Fabio Massimo Di Nitto and Daniel Stone for their hard work that helped make this possible.

8. Community Council Meeting and Conference Sponsorships
2004/11/09 (1 post) Subject: "Community Council 2004-11-09 [ + Conference Sponsorships ]"
People: Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill posted another review of the community council meeting where, among other things, we discussed paid sponsorships to the Ubuntu conference:

Today Community Council held its fourth meeting. I've written up a summary you can read at the link below. The agenda covered:

Reviewing maintainers on the maintainer candidates list;

Documentation team, maintainership, and GPG/PGP keys;

Conference sponsorships;

You can read it all here:

Summary: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-summary-20041109.html

Full Log: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-meeting_log-20041109.html

Many of you may be interested in conference sponsorship for the upcoming Ubuntu conference on the 5-18 of December in Mataro. This was discussed in the meeting so I'll cut to the chase:

If you're interested in conference sponsorships for the upcoming conference, read the relevant section of the meeting summary and note the information on the conference attendees wiki page here (you will have to log in/create an account to edit the page): http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/ConferenceAttendees

Let me know if you have any questions.

As I write this, the deadline for sponsorship has passed. That said, people are more then welcome to attend the conference and we have not closed "registration" for the conference yet. Please view http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/Conference for up to date information or email me at mako@canonical.com if you have any questions about the conference.

9. AltGr On PowerPC Notebooks
2004/11/09 - 2004/11/12 (0 posts) Subject: "Making AltGr work on powerpc notebooks"
People: Martin Pitt, Colin Watson

Martin Pitt brought up a bug relating to the AltGR key on PowerPC notebooks saying:

It is time to discuss bug: https://bugzilla.ubuntulinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2327

The problem: there are some powerpc notebooks around (at least European iBooks) which do not have an "AltGr" key. But without AltGr it is impossible to type characters like @ {} [] ~ on non-English keyboard layouts.

The solution to this is to use the Apple (Command) key as AltGr. [1] describes how to do that under Gnome; in short, you need the 'lv3:lwin_switch' keyboard option in your X configuration. This will make the Apple key ("Left Windows" - hmmm) act as a level-3 keyboard switch, i. e. the function that AltGr is supposed to have.

However, hardcoding this as the default would have the drawback that the Apple key could not be used for other purposes any more on powerpc books that _do_ have an AltGr key.

So what are the options?

Leave it as it is and annoy European iBook users (at least they cannot complain by email since they are unable to type '@' :-) )

Make lv3:lwin_switch default and annoy PowerBook and British/American iBook users

Have the powerpc version of the X server ask a debconf question and annoy all powerpc users

Autodetect whether an AltGr key is present (but I do not have the slightest idea how to do that). An ad-hoc heuristics would be to enable lv3:lwin_switch on non-English locales on powerpc, but I know too little about other non-English iBook keyboard layouts.

Thanks in advance for any idea and have a nice day!

Colin Watson replied saying, "Surely it's possible to put this kind of thing into the XKB definitions for the keyboard layouts that need them? That seems like the obviously correct approach." Tollef Fog Heen and Martin both agreed that this sounded sane.

10. Separating Mozilla/OpenOffice.org Language Packs
2004/11/11 - 2004/11/12 (7 posts) Subject: "Separating Mozilla/OO.o language packs [was: Re: Thoughts about separating language packs]"
People: Martin Pitt, Chris Halls

On a newly created sub-thread of the separating language packs discussion that was summarized last week, Martin Pitt raised the issues of the non-gettext translations (namely OpenOffice.org and Mozilla) again:

Since the gettext extraction has major drawbacks and should better be discussed in the Tech Board Meeting, I decided to tackle with this first, since AFAICS our main problem is the absence of localized Mozilla/FireFox/OO.o translation by now.

Currently both the mozilla and the OO.o language debs depend on the respective main package, i. e. mozilla-firefox-locale-de depends on mozilla-firefox. However, it is relatively easy to modify Mozilla, FireFox and OO.o so that language packs can be installed independently of the main package.

This has the advantage that we do not need to bother with extracting the contents of various l10n debs and merge them into a "language pack". Instead it would be enough to have e. g. ubuntu-language-de depend on mozilla-firefox-locale-de, openoffice.org-l10n-de, myspell-de-de and so on.

Unless there are objections to this approach, I would start to modify the existing l10n debs to be installable independently and create ubuntu-language-* metapackages afterward. If we decide to really extract gettext stuff, we can always enrich these language packs with it later.

Chris Halls replied saying, "This sounds like a reasonable idea to me. We have exactly the same problem concerning OOo and tasksel for Debian proper. I wonder if we could come up with a package name that could be provided by both tasksel and the ubuntu language packs, maybe language-* ? I'd be happy to add such a Depends into the language packs for OOo." In a separate thread he added a bit of technical detail saying, "We change each langpack to Depend: openoffice.org | language-XX Then ubuntu-language-XX can Provide that, and tasksel could install something similar too."

11. Security Advisories
2004/11/06 - 2004/11/11 (6 posts) Subject: "[USN-19-1] squid vulnerabilities, ETC"

This week saw six security advisories for Ubuntu. Thanks again goes to Martin Pitt who sent the advisories and to everyone that had a hand if finding the bugs and creating the patches. Here's the list: