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Ubuntu Traffic #19 For 2004/12/31

By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Welcome to the nineteenth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of December 25 - December 31, 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

Ubuntu Traffic can be found on the web at http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/ubuntu-traffic/. You can also receive in text form over email by signing up for the Ubuntu News mailing list at http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-news. There is now an RSS feed for traffic available as well! You can find information on turning that on at the Ubuntu Hompage.

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!

It was another slow week with many of the Canonical folks taking the week off for vacation. That said there were important issues that were raised which I've tried to summarize here.

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

Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 1018 posts in 4415K.

There were 274 different contributors. 150 posted more than once. 134 posted last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

 

1. Replacing Postfix In Base
2004/12/16 - 2004/12/27 (12 posts) Subject: "Removal of postfix from base"
People: Scott James Remnant, Colin Watson, Thom May, Jeff Waugh

Scott James Remnant made a proposal to remove Postfix from the base installation (but not from supported or ship) saying:

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.

Colin Watson replied saying, "If it's delivering mail externally, wouldn't it need to listen in order to cope with the substantial number of mail servers that do callback verification? Unless you just mean delivery to a smarthost configured to accept without callbacks, of course. (In general, though, I love this proposal.)"

Thom May replied to say that, "I think we don't want to consider 3 or 4 just yet - they're not required for the simple desktop case and make life harder. In future, connecting to a smarthost and punting mail might be a reasonable move, but I think we want to think very hard about exactly where we draw the line between our dmta (desktop mta) and a full-fledged one."

Scott James Remnant replied saying that he tended to agree and provided a link to a sendmail implementation: " I tend to agree... http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/sendmail.py" Jeff Waugh, in turn, said:

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.

 

2. Recent Community Council Meetings
2004/12/27 (1 post) Subject: "Recent Community Council Meetings + Introducing Country Teams"
People: Benjamin Mako Hill

The Ubuntu-News list (where Ubuntu-Traffic is announced) saw a message updating people to the goings-on at the two most recent community council meetings. Benjamin Mako Hill said:

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:

Meeting on December 21, 2004:

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.

Country teams were not yet formerly announced on their own -- a future traffic will include that announcement.

 

3. Upstream Version Freeze Postponed
2004/12/28 - 2004/12/30 (7 posts) Subject: "UpstreamVersionFreeze delayed one week, to January 5th"
People: Matt Zimmerman, Scott James Remnant

Upstream Version Freeze is the point within the release process where we the upstream version if frozen for all software in Ubuntu and we are picky about only letting in bug fixes. Matt Zimmerman announced that, "Due to vacation time being taken by various developers, the UpstreamVersionFreeze has been delayed by one week, to January 5th 2005. http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryReleaseSchedule"

Scott James Remnant followed up asking, "What kind of plan do we want wrt. the merge-o-matic for this date? Do we want to just switch it off, or do we want to be able to poke me to merge certain packages when requested?"

Matt Zimmerman replied saying:

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.

 

4. NDIS Wrapper
2004/12/28 - 2004/12/29 (4 posts) Subject: "Seed proposal: add ndiswrapper-utils to Ship"
People: Matt Zimmerman

Matt Zimmerman sent a message and proposal to the devel list saying:

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?

The only feedback onto the list was of the positive sort.

 

5. Wiki Improvements
2004/12/29 (4 posts) Subject: "wiki recent changes fix"
People: Simon Michael

ZWiki Ninja Simon Michael posted a series of messages to the user list updating them of a series of improvements and upgrades to the wiki that he was making. This included:

  • 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.

Thanks Simon for all your important work on this! For us heavy wiki users, this is a huge help.

 

6. Progress on the Synaptic Progress Bar
2004/12/29 - 2004/12/30 (11 posts) Subject: "synaptic with progress bar while installing"
People: Michael Vogt

Michael Vogt asked the devel list to test a set of changes to package management tools that now show a progress bar in Synaptic while dpkg is running:

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).

There were a few initial hitches but Michael Vogt worked quickly to resolve them.

 

7. Doc Team Happenings
2004/12/23 - 2004/12/31 (64 posts) Subject: "Updating HowTo page"
People: Enrico Zini, Simon Michael

The documentation team clocked in another good week of solid work.

Enrico Zini started reorganizing the wiki by creating an index for all of the HowTos in the wiki and by renaming them appropriately. After loosing a big chunk of this work, Enrico announced to folks something that should really be heard much wider than just the doc team list:

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.

Simon Michael replied saying, "Enrico, have you thought of just parenting all howtos under that page ? Like http://zwiki.org/HowTos . Going this route you lose the ability to add descriptions, but you would no longer have to update the index page manually. Just parent howto pages under it."

Enrico asked if, "Is it possible to give a page two parents? That would be useful to link a page from more than one idex."

Simon replied saying that it was possible but the display was not very graceful.

In other wiki news, Enrico re-parented the following wiki pages under http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocumentationArea:

The other major topic on the list was some good work being done by Sean Wheller to reorganize the subversion repository where most of the work for the Documentation team is getting done. Sean made a proposal to reorganize some of the content in the quick guide and a more sweeping proposal to reorganize the SVN repository that he was also offered to fix.

Thanks for all your hard work to help get the doc team up and working Sean!

 

8. Ubuntu Security Notifications
2004/12/29 (1 post) Subject: "imlib vulnerabilities"

There was only one Ubuntu Security Notification issued this week. It included:

imlib vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-53-1 (CAN-2004-1025, CAN-2004-1026)

Affected Release: Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)

Affected Packages are: imlib1

Fix: The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 1.9.14-16ubuntu1.1. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.

More Information: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2004-December/000055.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

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