Status of Lubuntu

[Julien Lavergne]

Dear members of the Technical Board,

I would like to request a clarification about the status/process of
Lubuntu becoming an official flavour in the 'Ubuntu' family. After more
than two years of development we would like to progress to the next
level in the community and enable the development team and community to
use the same tools as other flavours. The acknowledgement and support of
the board for Lubuntu becoming an official flavour and achieving our
goals would be greatly appreciated.

Before going into details, let me do a quick introduction: Lubuntu is a
distribution based on Ubuntu, and the LXDE desktop environnement. The
main goal is to provide a very lightweight distribution, but with all
the advantages of Ubuntu world (repositories, support ...). [1] The
project began 2 years ago when Mark Shuttleworth and Mario Behling (the
founder of Lubuntu project) discussed it in Berlin. Later, work began in
Ubuntu community, improving the support of LXDE, and the others
applications part of the Lubuntu seed.

During this 2 years, we achieved some goals :
- Lubuntu packages are 100% hosted in Ubuntu official repository (we use
PPA for testing and bringing extra functionalities, not for building the
ISO)
- Lubuntu provides the "standard" functionalities that you expect for an
OS, by using LXDE environnement, well-known (Chromium, Pidgin ...) and
adapted applications (Sylpheed for mail, Xpad for notes ...), and a
original artwork (including a slideshow).
- Lubuntu was acknowledged by several teams in Ubuntu (Artwork Team,
Beginners and Youth Team, Documentation, IRC, Forum)
- We provide an "official" i386 ISO, using a system similar to Ubuntu
infrastructure, and a non-official alternative ISO.
- We follow the same release cycle that Ubuntu (including Freezes). We
plan to release Lubuntu 11.04, the 3rd version of Lubuntu, the same day
that Ubuntu 11.04.
We also have usually positive feedbacks from users, even if Lubuntu is
still not perfect.

As an non-official flavor, we can't use some ressources
available :
- Building ISO
- Using ISO bug tracker
- Booking sessions at UDS
Even with an official status, I know that this couldn't be done in the
short term. However, we don't spend time to maintain our tools to
generate ISO, because we think an official adoption will make them
obsolete. If we can't gain the status of official flavor, we will spend
more time for them, but the non-decision make us quite uncomfortable.

I know Emmet is writing an official process for adopting flavors, with
all the technicals details to achieve it. The goal of this email is not
to bypass the process, but to know if the Ubuntu governance officially
acknowledge our existence to the Ubuntu family. The Lubuntu community
has already widely adopted working and community models in the Ubuntu
sphere, but the non-official status make the situation quite unstable
for us.

Our goal is to be included as an official release (included in the
release notes). IMO, it's another topic, that should be deal by the
Release Team when (if ?) the same ressources are available for Lubuntu,
as any other flavors.

To conclude, I would like to have an answer: When will we be officially
part of the family? It's important for all people who work on Lubuntu,
helping users on IRC, forums, IRL, but also people doing bug reports,
artworks... Your support for the Lubuntu project will ensure a
continuously strong motivation of contributors and a growth of the
community and ecosystem.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I'll be glad to answer
them.

Looking forward to your response,

Best regards,
Julien Lavergne

[1] : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu