Other communication channels for Kubuntu development?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On 3/6/24 17:01, Bob Cat wrote:
> I have been downloading daily builds of what is supposedly Kubuntu noble.
> These builds fail to install and appear to contain parts of a Lubuntu 
> operating system.
>
> I am mystified. I have been downloading, installing and using Kubuntu 
> for almost 20 years.
> Something appears to have gone very wrong.
>
> It was always reliable and was an excellent choice of operating system.
> The daily downloads are not what they were it does not bode well/

I work closely with the Kubuntu devs and am a Lubuntu and Ubuntu 
developer. No need to freak out, everything's going as expected.

tl;dr: There's a reason the Noble images are still considered 
alpha-quality. This is one of those reasons - sometimes big things have 
to happen and stuff goes wonky during that time. We get things as ironed 
out as humanly possible before the beta release, and get stubborn rough 
edges polished up for the final release. You're not seeing neglect or 
disrepair, you're seeing the results of ongoing work in early testing.

Long explanation:

What's happening is a bit of a mix-up with two large projects in Ubuntu 
happening simultaneously. One the one hand, Kubuntu is switching to 
Calamares as the installer. Calamares has been used in Lubuntu for 
years, so to get it up and running the Lubuntu Calamares configuration 
was ported to Kubuntu, which worked great. However, new branding still 
has to be made so that the installer looks correct for Kubuntu, and 
we're working on that still. The old Lubuntu branding and artwork are 
thus still in the Kubuntu Calamares config - this will be corrected 
prior to release.

What happened after that was a new release of Calamares came out, which 
I uploaded. Sadly, no one noticed that it had a bug that caused 
installation failures when the release was first made by upstream. They 
quickly made a couple more releases that fixed issues, and another 
Kubuntu dev has uploaded the fixed version to the Ubuntu archive.

So why is the fixed version not on the ISOs? Well, sadly our uploads 
ended up colliding with a massive change happening in both Ubuntu and 
Debian that is designed to avoid serious problems with 32-bit UNIX 
timestamps (the Year 2038 problem). This change (known as the time_t64 
transition) is taking a long time to complete and is still being worked 
on (thankfully a highly skilled Canonical employee is spearheading it), 
and while it's happening, it's making it just about impossible to get 
new uploads of certain components into the Ubuntu archive since they're 
getting "stuck" on the other libraries that are being changed. Our new 
Calamares upload was one of the stuck items.

Thankfully, Calamares appears to have gotten un-stuck and should be on a 
new daily image in the near future. When that happens, things should 
work once again. The Lubuntu branding will probably still be there, but 
again, we're working on that. We just have lots and lots of development 
happening all at once.

> On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 14:37, Jan Rathmann <Jan.Rathmann at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     since this list seems rather quiet, are there other communication
>     channels about Kubuntu development (Matrix? IRC?) where the
>     communication happens nowadays that I should check out?
>
>     Kind regards, Jan
>
>     -- 
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>
-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
Matrix: @arraybolt3:matrix.org
IRC: arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat
GitHub:https://github.com/ArrayBolt3

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