[Ubuntu-Classroom] Proposed New Lernid Release

[John S Gruber]

A new proposed Lernid release will be showing up for those of you who
have added the lernid-proposed ppa to their sources
(ppa:jsjgruber/lernid-proposed). No magic will be required to install
it this time since I've gotten rid of the strange versioning from the
build recipe. If you have the ppa in your sources it should be offered
automatically by update-manager.

The new release gets rid of the online event configuration file on
ubuntu-owl, adds new slide features, rounds off some rough edges, and
should be somewhat more robust. It currently runs under Oneiric
despite the desktopcouch or couchdb problem there. It begins to
address non-English use. I'm delighted to say that it includes patches
from three other contributors, two relatively new. One contributor's
patch is his first contribution to open source.

I'd appreciate any testing any of you might have time to do,
particularly of the two new options, --debug, which puts out debugging
messages like now, --verbose, which  does the same but without the
constant stream of message received and members changed log messages,
and --avoid-desktopcouch, which tests the new desktopcouch robustness
mechanism. Just start up Lernid, change your userid and a preference,
and restart it and make sure the changes are still there.

Testing command options is obviously sort of hard to do online since
it involves losing contact with testers.

By the way, because of intermittent problems getting lernid to run
under Oneiric (no fault of Lernid's) I didn't ask for a Lernid 0.8.1.x
sync to Oneiric. Our ubuntu Lernid releases are all still quite old.

Lyz, would it be possible to schedule a testing session sometime
between Monday and late Thursday? It might be good if someone could
voice a nick not in the calendar during the session. I'd anticipate
that testing would take between an hour and an hour and a half. I may
contact you later for another testing session this weekend.

I'd like to have this version in the lernid-releases ppa in time for
the sessions beginning Monday, if that's okay with all of you.

Leandro, Lyz kindly supplied me with the calendar information for
ubuntu-charlas. I've dropped ubuntu-classroom-es. I trust that's okay.

By the way, a description of the new release is at
https://sites.google.com/site/gruberdocuments/engineering-docs/Lernid0.8.2.pdf
.

Thanks to all of you for your help.

John