[lubuntu-devel] 22.10 Development Status and Sprint

[Simon Quigley]

Hello,

The Kinetic Kudu (22.10) development release has been exciting thus far, 
here are some of the main highlights:
  - LXQt 1.1 is now shipped by default.
    - Several upstream patches have been backported to fix various 
issues. My intent is to ask the Global Team if it's worth it to do a 
full translations pull from upstream shortly before the release to 
benefit users in other locales; this is still pending.
  - Calamares 3.3 is now shipped by default.
    - This is an alpha snapshot from upstream and is subject to major 
changes. It has been tested pretty thoroughly and upstream is responsive 
despite the official departure of the maintainer. We are seeking to help 
upstream in any way that we can to continue the development of the 
Calamares installer.
  - The Lubuntu Manual is now shipped as a shortcut on the desktop. It 
can easily be disabled in the same menu you would disable the trash can 
with.

22.04 highlights:
  - Prior to 22.04.1 LTS, our goal is to fix an installer bug related to 
btrfs installs. Please test when it becomes available.
  - We're working on backports for LXQt 1.1 and other goodies. If you're 
a developer type, you can track the progress here[1].

R&D highlights:
  - Since Phabricator is unfortunately dead upstream, we are switching 
to GitTea. Thomas Ward has been working diligently on setting this up 
for us.
  - Before 23.04 is released, I would like a full-featured CI back up 
and running. Backports, stable, and unstable branches, ISO builds, the 
works. This will make our processes much more efficient and distributed.
  - I started work on a "Try or Install Lubuntu" menu. I also have 
Ubuntu Studio in mind on this one, so the goal is to make it 
configurable with e.g. a YAML file and take a separated 
downstream/upstream approach. Code is here[2] (fully Qt 6). **I am 
terrible at UI design. Please save me. I'm drowning. :)**

Miscellaneous highlights:
  - We onboarded a new contributor, Aaron Rainbolt. Thanks for your work 
so far, keep it up. :)
  - We worked with the Ubuntu QA Team to bump the maximum number of 
daily ISO builds from 3 to 6. This is useful when we're rapidly 
iterating on installer changes.

General archive highlights for this release in case you haven't been 
paying attention (more details here[3]):
  - binutils 2.39
  - systemd v251
  - glibc 2.36
  - GCC 12 as default
  - LLVM 15

If you've gotten this far, I'd like to schedule a sprint for next week, 
from July 7th to 9th. If that does not work, please let me know and I'm 
happy to reschedule. Items I'd like to completely tackle as a team:
  - Ensure all of our changes are upstreamed to Debian and everyone 
worthy and able has access to the necessary packages in the Debian archive.
  - Finish backports for 22.04, preferably with a thorough automated and 
manual testsuite set.
  - Consider our routes for additional automated testing and scope out 
CI changes.
  - Wishlist: finish up installer-prompt.
  - Wishlist: Qt 6 porting.

If any of that interests you, hop on one of our async channels [4] 
(Matrix is great, perhaps I'm biased...) and join us. We're happy to 
help anyone from newbies to experts. Come on in :)

Side notes:
  - Looks like Lubuntu.me is finally #1 on Google. Thank God.
  - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1013334

Best wishes, and have an amazing July 4th if you celebrate. :D

[1] 
https://launchpad.net/~lubuntu-dev/+archive/ubuntu/backports-staging/+packages
[2] https://github.com/lubuntu-team/installer-prompt
[3] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/kinetic-kudu-release-schedule/27263
[4] https://lubuntu.me/links/

-- 
Simon Quigley
tsimonq2 at ubuntu.com
tsimonq2 on LiberaChat and OFTC
@tsimonq2:linuxdelta.com on Matrix
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