[lubuntu-devel] What I didn't get a chance to talk about at the meeting

[Simon Quigley]

Hello everyone,

I had a few agenda items I wanted to discuss at the recent Lubuntu
meeting, but unfortunately I didn't do the math right on the time zones
and I ended up not being able to attend.

BUG DAY:

Walter wanted a report on Bug Day, but to make it short, nothing
happened. Nobody seemed to pop in on IRC, and I didn't see any bug
activity in particular.

LUBUNTU MANUAL:

Slow progress (been busy with a lot of different things). I would always
appreciate the help. Here's the GitHub repo which should have all the
details if you'd like to give us a hand:
https://github.com/lubuntu-team/lubuntu-manual

I don't think it applies to DocumentationStringFreeze (which was today)
because it's not a package. If it all goes as planned, there will be
time before release to translate, if desired.

LXQt/PLANS FOR 16.10 AND 17.04:

We won't get LXQt 0.11 in the archive for 16.10 because they didn't
release yet. Hopefully for 17.04 we'll be good to go. I've heard that
LXQt 0.11 provides a lot of  improvements, so I'm looking forward to it. :)

(maybe I'll get it in a PPA somewhere and take it for a test drive, who
knows? ;) )

Lubuntu team, I would like to propose that we at the very minimum
provide an image with a fully featured Lubuntu with LXQt for 17.04 (if
not default). This would include LXQt 0.11 (or 0.12, depending on their
timing) and would have all the default settings set. Even if we can't do
it, it would be a nice goal to set, just to have something to work towards.

It seems we're just waiting on a patch to be merged into Qt[1] so we can
set an environment variable to make our default settings apply
correctly[2]. Then, depending on when it's merged and what version of Qt
ships with 17.04, we might have to get the patch cherry-picked[3]. I'm
CCing Palo Kisa who has been awesome in helping me figure out a few
little quirks along the way (for example, this pull request which will
really help us in the future: https://github.com/lxde/liblxqt/pull/104
), just in case he has anything to add. But, I honestly don't see this
happening right away as 16.10 is right around the corner (we can use
PPAs to test, though).

Something to consider would be doing what Kubuntu does. If an individual
running 16.10 would like to use LXQt from the Yakkety archive, we can
upload to a backports PPA. Thoughts on this, Julien?

Within the next day or two, I'll get a tarball and some instructions on
installing LXQt and manually applying the default settings I whipped up,
so people can get testing. I haven't had a good experience building
ISOs, but I'll try again in a few days as well.

For those people who are unaware, we currently have a blocker in our
LXQt transition. We would like to apply some default settings, but there
are currently some upstream blockers (Qt at the moment, there might be
another blocker in the future, who knows?) that we have to unblock to be
able to continue.

Lubuntu team (especially Julien), objections?

Lubuntu community, about the above, more opportunities to test things
will certainly come very soon (within the next few weeks). We look
forward to any feedback you might have. :)

I encourage feedback on anything I wrote about here.

Have a good night everyone!

[1] https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/169245/
[2] An environment variable has to be set so LXQt knows which settings
to use.
[3] Just that patch could be put in the Ubuntu Qt package, which allows
for things like this to be immediately worked with.

-- 
Simon Quigley
tsimonq2 at lubuntu.me
tsimonq2 on freenode and OFTC