I would like to propose the removal of Postfix from base for hoary.

1. Postfix is a large, fully-featured MT&DA -- yet our default configuration is intended to only allow local mail delivery.
2. Desktop users will "generally" not require an MTA, as most MUAs can deliver mail themselves (hiding evo2.1 under the carpet, briefly).
3. Server users will have specific MT&DA requirements, and won't feel put out from having to install and configure one along with any other server they require.
4. A local MDA would be useful for receiving cron reports, there are far simpler systems out there than Postfix.
5. Postfix listens on port 25, this goes against our "no open ports" policy.
6. Not only does it listen, it rejects mail -- causing major problems for users of dial-up ISPs who deliver mail via SMTP.
7. It does, however, happily accept mail for $USER@localhost _from_the_network_ and deliver it.

I propose we move postfix into supported, where it can live with the other servers. We could consider promoting exim4 into universe in its place also, but that's a different argument.

In base, I suggest we aim for the simplest possible MDA.

1. not a daemon, provides only /usr/sbin/sendmail
2. delivers mail locally
3. [optional] delivers mail externally "sensibly", could possibly pick up per-user preferences to do this.
4. [optional] if delivering mail externally, startup script resumes any deliveries that didn't complete before shutdown.

If there's no available software, I suspect it would be trivial to implement in Python.

In general, I agree, with caveats:

• If we do this, Postfix should be in ship.
• I would support the selection of a known, proven, applicable tool (which we don't have) straight away - but I don't believe we should be writing software to facilitate this kind of change at this stage of the release process.

That said, if a tool to do this was packaged and tested before UVF, it might be acceptable.

I've finished summaries of the two most recent Ubuntu Community Council meetings. Both the summaries and the full logs can be found at the links below:

Meeting on December 7, 2004:

• Summary: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-summary-20041207.html
• Full Log: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-meeting_log-20041207.html

Meeting on December 21, 2004:

• Summary: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-summary-20041221.html
• Full Log: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-meeting_log-20041221.html

The second meeting covered the creation of new country/region teams. People interested in starting or working within an official Ubuntu Country team should contact Matthias Urlichs <smurf@smurf.noris.de> and optionally me about this. You should especially consider doing this if you've been active in doing country or language specific work for Ubuntu and are interested into finding ways to integrate this work in the larger Ubuntu community.

I think it would be best to let it continue to run, only not file bugs, so that up-to-date output is always available if we need it.

Another question is whether we should have a different cutoff date for merges. I think it makes sense to stop MOM a few days (or even a week?) earlier, and fix all of the open merge bugs, so that we're "caught up" when UVF happens. Otherwise, we'll inevitably be lagging behind on merged packages, in some cases by a wide margin.

Recently I installed Ubuntu for a friend, who was using a Microsoft USB wireless adapter. While none of the native drivers in Warty could drive this device, ndiswrapper seems to work like magic. However, in order to get it working, I had to download ndiswrapper-utils onto a floppy on another machine and copy it over. Apart from that, it was trivial to get it working.

Any objections to adding ndiswrapper-utils to Ship?

• Fixing a Unicode error on Recent Changes for all but the "last day." I installed a workaround, hopefully a permanent fix for this. This also makes the user name links work in recent changes, if your home page is named appropriately; most of them are. Basically use your user name as the name of your home page. You can omit the spaces if you prefer.
• Recent Changes times are now adjusted for your time zone, set a cookie at http://ubuntulinux.org/wiki/FrontPage/useroptions
• http://zwiki.org/FuzzyUrls now work in the ubuntu wiki. This means you can type in the first few letters of a page name in the URL field to jump to that page. Capitalization and whitespace don't matter. If no matching page is found, you can do a search, or you can create a new page with the name you typed.
• As requested on IRC, I made the wiki's "not found" page use the standard site skin. For now it just tries to complete your URL, or shows the usual error page.

I would like to ask for some testing for the new "progress bar when dpkg is running" feature of synaptic. A repository can be found at:

deb http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mvo/synaptic/progress-bar /

(screenshot at: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mvo/synaptic-progress-bar.png)

It contains patched apt and dpkg versions and a patched synaptic. You need to unset "Apply changes in terminal window" in "Settings/Preferences". It will set the debconf front-end to gnome, so make sure that libgnome2-perl is installed. It should calculate the progress pretty accurate. It will report errors that happend during the installation and can prompt for config file changes (it can't do diffs yet, this is planed with additonal support for external tools like meld).

Problems:

• Configure tools like apt-listchanges or apt-listbugs to not use the terminal directly but open a new xterm/browser.
• synaptic will hang on applications that use read in maintainer scripts. It can't detect that and will hang with a message like "configuring $packagename".

I'm interested in any problems (crashes, incorrect progress calculation, packages that ask questions in postinst etc).

Please spread the word that people writing howtos or guides should check if they are present in http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HowTo, and if not add a link to them, possibly with a line of short description.