Congrats on karmic, looking forward lucid

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hey everybody,

Karmic is available now and I would like to thanks everybody who worked
on making it a great desktop experience for our users. 
This new version, as every Ubuntu version, is the result of combined
efforts from lot of different people, users who tested our changes and
gave feedback on those, upstreams who write most of the code we are
using, translators, packagers, bugs triagers and many others not listed
there, thanks to all of you.

Karmic has seen lot of technologies changes (new gdm codebase,
pulseaudio required by GNOME, empathy by default, devicekit-disks and
devicekit-power used in GNOME, etc) so it was expected it would have
some rough edges. Looking through the recent feedbacks we got, while
karmic is working nicely in many cases and looking great, it also has an
increasing number of annoyances, things which used to work and got
broken on the way, etc. The next Ubuntu version will be a LTS and I
think now is time to focus on bringing the stability back and tackling
those annoying issues which added during recent cycles. 

To work toward this goal I would like to suggest that we do several
things:

- let's not spend too much time on backporting changes to karmic, using
the next 2 weeks to look at the user feedback, do stable updates to fix
the most annoying issues until UDS and then move our focus to Lucid

- try to be conservative in the changes which will land in lucid, GNOME
upstream will likely rework some component in the GNOME3 optic and other
teams or upstream will probably keep working on changes to improve the
user experience, while the work they do is great it would probably be
good to wait until lucid+1 to bring those in the default installation.
I expect we will have some of those discussions at UDS too

- start early to list and milestone issues we want to see fixed for
karmic, some will probably need blueprints and non trivial changes it
would be good to have those on the map for UDS


Some example of topic raised by users:

- the new gdm doesn't allow to do xdmcp from the login screen
- the new gdmsetup doesn't allow to turn off the login sound which is
annoying when you want to boot your computer in library school
- empathy deals with some protocols in a non optimal way
- the new GNOME audio capplet and pulseaudio have limitations, without
starting discussions on pulseaudio again it would be nice to know
earlier what options the user interface should allow to tweak and
doesn't now for example
- desktop login speed
- the screensaver handling and inhibition is less than optimal
- lot of other small issues which are not stoppers but make the daily
user experience less good that it should

Those are random examples of things we might want to look at now to
define what we want to do for lucid.

One thing which would be nice to try this cycle is to have people
responsive to make sure a software or feature keep working as it should,
some examples: users switching, screensaver and inhibitors,
<empathy_protocol> working as expected, cd dvd recording, rhythmbox (or
banshee) handling audio players correctly, GNOME automounting working,
etc. We have some of those broken every cycle and sometime user testing
doesn't raise issues until late in the cycle, if we could have some
people doing some testing at each milestone during the cycle on things
they are interested in it would probably have a good impact on the next
version stability.

What people think about those? Do you agree on the focus and goals for
the next cycle? What do you think should be the workflow to suggest bugs
that should be worked in karmic? Are you interested in doing testing on
some desktop components along the cycle, how should we build a list of
things which need testing? Should that be discussed on the list or
during an IRC meeting, at UDS, just be on a wikipage?


Thanks for reading this email, I'm waiting for your comments on the list
and looking forward a great LTS cycle


Sebastien Bacher