jorge's stompbox

Reminder: FOSSCamp 2008

Just a reminder that FOSSCamp 2008 is December 5th/6th at Google HQ, Mountain View, California, USA. As always FOSSCamp is free to anyone who wants to attend. Please let us know you're coming! In case you've never been to a FOSSCamp, it's an unconference where we start off with a room of smart people and a blank schedule, and from there the topics get generated on the fly.

Unlike UDS, FOSSCamp is not Ubuntu specific (though there are lots of Ubuntu people there anyway) - what we like to see is upstream projects come discuss what they're working on and collaborate with other projects present. If you're in the valley and work on an open source project and would like to colocate to do a hackfest or something, then just let me know!

 

Matt Nuzum has whipped up a little badge for those of you that want to be happy and mention it on your blog. :)

Using identi.ca for Ubuntu stuff.

Mike Basinger (@technoviking) sent me a mail asking about how we can use identi.ca and/or laconica for Ubuntu-related things, since a good number of community members have been joining identi.ca and using it. We started talking and as we brainstormed ideas on how to use it more and more people came up with some great ideas, so we wrote them all down.

Nick Ali (@boredandblogging) reserved some Ubuntu-related names for what we might use in the future. This afternoon while taking a break from cleaning (heh) I started up what will be the first of hopefully more-to-come identi.ca accounts for people to follow:

Introducing @ubuntunews!

Currently I am using the excellent twitterfeed to feed certain RSS feeds into this account so you can just follow it and get a good cross section of what's going on in the Ubuntu world. Right now by subscribing to @ubuntunews you get The Fridge, QA/Brainstorm Blog, the Canonical Blog, Ubuntu website news, Ubuntu Screencasts, and the Ubuntu-UK and Fresh Ubuntu podcast feeds. I am currently working on getting a feed working for the YouTube Developer Channel.

So you can either bookmark that page or use an identi.ca client like gwibber to follow along. We have other identi.ca accounts for other things (stay tuned!) but this one was the easiest to deploy, since it's just RSS feeds, so please follow along and let me know if it's useful, if you have any ideas for how to use more microblogging for Ubuntu then please check out the wiki page.

Use UNIX or Die ...

Longtime sysadmin guy Ben Rockwood is apparently starting a podcast for sysadmins.

Ben and Cuddletech have been around /forever/ ... I remember his Enlightment pages being a boon for me in the late 90's when I was on my E kick. (Remember kids, everyone goes through an E phase.)

Help test Openoffice 3.0

Chris "Chain Man" Cheney has put out a call for testing for OpenOffice 3.0.

Chris was just mentioning to me the other day how he doesn't have nearly enough bugs assigned to him and how he would love to have the community flood him with 3.0 bugs. I was shocked that he would be such a sacrificial lamb, but history is full of daring men and women who have taken one for the team.

Note: previous paragraph is a complete fabrication.

New Metallica Song....

"The Day that Never Comes"

Get your hot gwibber action here ...

Ok, so when Ryan Paul (from Ars Technica) started working on gwibber as a twitter client I was mildly interested. It wasn't until identi.ca was launched that I moved wholesale and needed a good client. (Twhirl and Spaz are good too but the Linux Adobe AIR alpha is holding them back).

gwibber was kind of Ryan's playground application where he could mess around with things like webkit and GTK stuff. However, people wanted an identi.ca client, and started using it. Ryan wanted to do the packaging himself to learn it (and hopefully write it up for open.ended) so we specifically avoided packaging it. Well, it became more and more popular, and it was time to make packages, it was already in bzr and on launchpad, so it would be heresy to not leverage the awesome power of Personal Package Archives.

This evening I registered the gwibber-team and set up a PPA. Instructions are here. Note that it depends on the webkit PPA, so you need both sets of sources. gwibber uses webkit to make the cool layout you see in the screenshot, complete with reflections and rounded corners!

Before anyone asks, no, I won't be putting these up for Intrepid proper, gwibber is still fast moving and needs work. Branches are popping up all over the place and people are Doing Great Things(tm), but it's just too fast moving to maintain in the distro, which is why we have PPAs! With webkit coming in a future version of GNOME it should start to settle down. You'll find my packaging branch at the previous URL, if you want to jump in and help out then let me know!

You can follow me on identi.ca using gwibber, I am @jorge, and you can follow Ryan too, @segphault. Come join the other bunches of Ubuntu users on identi.ca!

Installation notes for our openSUSE friends are here. If someone wants to throw these into Debian post-freeze then please let me know, and of course feel free to steal my packages!

Feeding the Harvesting Machine

While we were at Debconf Jono and I tweaked the 5-a-day page to be simpler and less confusing. One list of possible targets we added is the list of unlinked upstream bugs. These are lists of bugs where people have pasted in bug reports in comments but have NOT linked to it via Launchpad's "Also affects project..." feature.

Why linking bugs upstream is important

Just mentioning a bug report that is upstream is only one aspect - sure it's useful, but linking it allows us to query Launchpad for these bugs, and more importantly track these bugs programmatically so they get on the right person's radar to fix it. Instructions for doing this are here. Now, let me show you an example on why this is important.

Example bug

Bernhard Schmidt reported this bug on rdesktop on February 8th. Basically, he wanted rdesktop to be compiled with IPV6 support. Bernhard also opened up a bug in Debian. Three days ago Laszlo Boszormenyi reported that it was fixed in Debian with the upload of rdesktop 1.6.0-2.

Ok so now what? The bug just sits there right? Well, that depends. As it happens, I was doing my 5-a-day and stumbled across this bug - and I thought "This bug is fixed in Debian already, it should be on someone's hit list to fix, right?" Wrong. Or am I? No way to tell for sure, and short of Bernhard chasing someone down or having someone else who can actually fix it find it isn't very efficient. If only there was a list of easy, low hanging fruit ... like say Harvest!

I linked the bug to Debian bug in Launchpad. The next time the bug watch is updated Harvest will find it, and it will show up in Harvest automatically. Now as people trudge through Harvest the bug is listed as a possible fix and they can fix it.

Oiling the machine

So, what needs to happen for this to be as efficient as possible?

• Bug reporters - Do continue to report bugs upstream like Bernhard did in this case. Well done Bernhard! Instructions for filing bugs in upstream trackers are here.
• Bug reporters and triagers - Don't just throw a URL in the comment box, link it via Launchpad (instructions).
• Bugsquad / Experienced Bug Triagers - encourage people to link bugs during Hug Days.
• Ubuntu Developers - Keep monitoring Harvest for easy "sync-from-Debian-or-upstream" bugs.

Lessons Learned

As you can see, linking bugs upstream helps get bugs moving in the process, and eventually end up in things like Harvest or the "bugs fixed elsewhere" pages. People write tools and scripts to find these bugs, especially if they're resolved upstream, which makes it easier for people to find so that the fixes can be shipped to users, which is what this is all about!

Now let me put my Jordan Mantha hat on: "But Jorge, getting it on Harvest is one thing, that's only half the solution. Getting someone to find it and fix it on the other hand ..." Yes, absolutely. If you think as this entire Harvest workflow as one big machine, then upstream linkages are feeding the machine, but at the end of the day it needs to spit out bushels out the back.

So we need developers to fix these bugs - which is why we have things like Ubuntu Developer Week, MOTU mentorship, sponsorship, Harvest, etc to grow the developer community. This is a tough area to grow, but we are making progress, and tools like Harvest are making things easier I think, in the meantime, keeping the machine well fed is still better than a bug sitting in Launchpad all by itself ...

New location for Debian-related documentation.

Greetings from Mar del Plata!

I just wanted to mention to everyone that we've been consolidating and moving Debian-related material to a URL that is easy for everyone to remember:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Debian

Currently it's divided into two main sections - Explaining the importance of Debian to new Ubuntu contributors, and providing a "one stop shop" section where Debian Developers and contributors can learn about workflows and tips for working with Ubuntu.

There are lots of little bits of Debian-related stuff on the wiki, so feel free to review it, and either merge it or move it to this section. The existing pages could also use some updating as well, which I will get to as the week progresses.

I am really excited about the discussions that are taking place here at Debconf8 - the derivatives panel was particularly interesting - more debconf stuff to follow, as soon as I get one of those xbox-sized Argentinian hamburgers.

Debconf 8

I am denting things from Debconf 8 - check it out at identi.ca.

http://identi.ca/tag/debconf8

You've CUPSed a long way, baby.

I am sitting at a lounge in Detroit waiting for my flight to Argentina for Debconf. They have a printer available, an hp2010 and I wanted another copy of my itinerary.

The guy in front of me is plugged in and got the CD of drivers from the front desk and was wrestling with this thing for like 15 minutes. I finally decided to help the poor guy print his dreaded spreadsheet of what seemed like lots of work for the guy.

He went on his way and I plugged in the usb cable. Getting ready to go into the menu to configure the thing a notification thinger pops up and told me the printer was ready. It didn't even ask me a question. NOT A THING.

In fact, I thought it was lying to me. The actual thought of "That can't be right" went through my head. I went into the printer configuration ... and there it was ... hp2010. I clicked print, and it worked.

Things learned here:

• Seemingly impossible things a few years ago seem so trivial now ... like say ... printing in Linux.
• ... or it could be that printing will always be the last impossible problem in computer science and I got lucky this time. It's up there with an accurate progress meter and quantum computing with ponies.
• Shout out to the linuxprinting.org people and others for this painless print job. Thanks!

I went to return the cable to the front desk and the lady asked, "Did it work for you?, The person before you had all these problems."

"Nope, out-of-the-box ...."

In hindsight I should have said something more badass like ... "Nope, I roll with Till Kamppeter ..."; but I always come up short... it's days like this when I miss my computer asking me if I want to manage my fonts with defoma. (Not Really) ....