Distro Sprint Day 1&2 Summary

[Jane Weideman]

This is a short summary to keep everyone up to date with the progress
and development taking place at the Distro Sprint which is currently in
progress at the Novotel London Excel Hotel  in London, UK.

The sprint has been in progress for 2 days now, and will continue
throughout the week.

Most of the first day was taken up with bug tracking, merges, updates
and general clean-ups and getting up to speed with things. The latter
part of the week should bring some more exciting reports, as goals are
finished and implemented.

Here's a run down of the activities so far:

-----

* Gnome has been updated to ver 2.13.90, this includes new desktop
backgrounds, totem, new documentation for Gnome games and many bug fixes
for annoying breakages.

* Gnome-panel also this includes new versions of gnumeric, eog,
nautilus, gnome-games and gtksourceview.

* LTSP work included sanitizing all the LTSP breakage which occurred due
to changes in the underlying Dapper architecture - this is now fixed and
running again.

* Work was done on Xauthority handling on LTSP to allow secure
authentication of thin clients to the Edubuntu server.

* Thin Client Low Memory Usage:  netboot mode in initramfs tools added
and integrated to LTSP - still to be tested and uploaded.

* Reverted the change of the SIaddr that breaks the LTSP booting with
DHCPD. This prevents breakage on upgrades of LTSP set-ups.

*  More work was done on the dist-upgrade tool. Upgrade testing done,
and started dev on an automatic version that can run on a server so that
we can run a daily test automatically. 

* Reviewed the differences between Ubuntu and Debian Firefox and turning
them (where appropriate) into bug reports to Debian and/or upstream.
 
* Collected bug reports about dpkg conffile processing issues.

* Tracked down Firefox instability problems to a less-than-perfect
scheme to allow the non-free Flash plug-ins sound to work with remote
displays.

* Prepared for initial public release of AutomatedTesting test
framework: preparing a few bug fixes and working on draft announcement.

* Evaluated the possibility of including apache2.2 in Dapper. Some major
issues were encountered with external modules (mod_python,  mod-auth-*)
that at the moment are not fully functional with apache2.2. After
careful consideration, and bearing in mind 5-year support requirement
for Dapper, the server team have recommended not to include apache2.2 in
Dapper. They have stated that it will be in shape in time for Dapper +1.

* Fixed some failures on sparc64  - porting & bug fixing

* Server-candy - system integrity checks etc

* ubuntu-desktop was made installable, making it possible to build live
CDs again.

* Work was done on improving the responsiveness of Espresso's UI: trying
out switching to cdebconf, and experimenting with GTK event loop
hackery.

* Helped to troubleshoot bug with libgksu on ppc (binutils fault,
already fixed, rebuild solves it)

* Uploaded klibc which no longer depends on gcc-3.3 [sparc], actually
builds [sparc], and no longer overwrites linux-kernel-header bits when
upgrading libklibc-dev from breezy to dapper.

* Tested atheros and network-manager (works, yay!)

* Applied fixes to the live CD to make it easier to have the persistent
data on USB hard drives. 

* Added support for storing the live CD image on a USB thumbdrive or
harddrive, including storing it on a vfat file system

* Tested the new branch of madwifi to get it working with network
manager.  NetworkManager and madwifi-ng appear to get along great, but
madwifi-ng still has bugs on amd64.

* Got Apache 2.2.0 packages built for Breezy in a state that James Troup
can stress test them on archive.ubuntu.com.

* Discussed the new python-central implementation with Matthias Klose,
in order to more easily ship multiple python versions.

* Made ubuntu-desktop installable so that we can build live CDs again.

* Worked on the responsiveness of Espresso's UI: trying out switching
to cdebconf, and experimenting with GTK event loop hackery.

* Fixed various networking/boot bugs 

* Tested madwifi-ng drivers on Atheros card

* Tested network-manager

* Audited dhcdbd for promotion to main, made it stop/start as a dbus
event.d script 

* Finished openssl transition to 0.9.8 for main.

* Setup dapper sparc env

* Converted kpdf to use the poppler library (and ignore the local xpdf
copy); this reduces duplication and eases security updates. Ported kpdf
and koffice to poppler

* Tested new version of konversation for UVF exception sanity, got
exception and will be uploaded. 

* Investigated using locales for .desktop files to let them be easily
translatable.

* KDE 3.5.1 is in dapper and due to be released later tonight
Packages are available for KOffice 1.5 beta 1 due to be released later
tonight.

* initramfs-tools "fix your favourite bug!" brainstorming and hacking
for everyone

* Worked on linux-restricted-modules to update a few binary-only
drivers.

* Tracked down and worked on build failures and other buildd issues
blocking the installability of ubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-live

----

As you can tell there has been a lot of activity and hacking happening.
Stay tuned for more exciting distro sprint developments over the rest of
the week.


Regards,
JaneW

-- 
JaneW
_____________
Jane Weideman
mobile: +27 83 779 7800
Canonical Ltd.