Xubuntu meeting summary

[Cody A.W. Somerville]

Hi Eero,

 I'm excited to hear from you and that you're interested in working with
Xubuntu. You make some excellent points and I most certainly will take
advantage of your expertise! :)

 Give me a shout the next time you're on IRC.

Thanks,

Cody

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 6:17 AM, Eero Tamminen <oak at helsinkinet.fi> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Thursday 27 March 2008, Jim Campbell wrote:
> > I'd first like to start off this e-mail by announcing the Xubuntu
> > community meeting was a *huge* success. We had roughly two dozen people
> > take part (including old, current, and new faces) and a number of other
> > individuals who sent in e-mails or left a quick IRC message to let us
> > know that they were unable to attend but would be following up with much
> > interest. After just under an hour of constructive discussion led by
> Jono
> > Bacon and several free form votes, I'm happy to present following
> mission
> > statement for Xubuntu:
> >
> >     "To produce an easy to use distribution, based on Ubuntu, using Xfce
> > as the graphical desktop, with a focus on integration, usability and
> > performance, with a particular focus on low memory footprint. The
> > integration in Xubuntu is at a configuration level, a toolkit level, and
> > matching the underlying technology beneath the desktop in Ubuntu.
> Xubuntu
> > will be built and developed as part of the wider Ubuntu community, based
> > around the ideals and values of Ubuntu."
>
> Level of integration and especially usability can often be subjective
> matters, but sometimes it's very clear which of the alternatives is better
> in these respects.
>
> However, performance and memory usage are something which can be
> measured[1]. I think having them in the goals requires specifying what
> kind
> of test-cases and tools&measurements should be used to evaluate them.
> I.e. decisions related to them should be based on facts, not rubbish like
> "I feel gnome libs are heavy...".
>
> Maemo "Quality Awareness" document could be looked for examples:
>
> http://maemo.org/development/documentation/how-tos/4-x/quality_awareness.html
>
>
> [1] Some performance metrics:
> - system & desktop startup time[2]
> - system & desktop memory usage[2]
> - application startup time
> - application responsiveness
> - application memory usage
> - how application CPU & memory usage correlates to its data size i.e.
>  scalability (e.g. archiver memory usage in relation to archive size)
> - power usage (wakeups and polling can affect laptop battery usage
>  dramatically, but this is getting important also for servers and
> desktops)
> - performance over network (for LTSP setups)
>
> There are tools to measure and analyze all of these, some can be a bit
> hard
> to use though.  Anyway, it needs to be prioritized what kind of
> performance
> Xubuntu cares about.  Is power usage important?  What about LTSP stuff?
> In what amount of memory (most) applications should work?
>
> Also, if some non-gnome app initially takes less memory, but with larger
> sets of data takes significantly more memory than the gnome-variant, I
> don't
> feel it's the right one for Xubuntu.
>
> [2] System part comes from Ubuntu and has unfortunately pretty large
> effect
>     on these measurements.
>
>
> [...]
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/Xubuntu_2008-03-26.
>
> "19:19   meborc  i believe the main fight was in either including or
> excluding some gnome applications... this should also be somehow said in
> the statement!"
>
> Well, to me it seemed that the main issue of "the fight" was that
> the changes were not:
> - presented to community before hand so that they could comment on what
>  issues the changes would/could have, what changes would be needed in
>  documentation, support etc
> - reasoned (until the reasoning for them had been asked for many times)
> - backed up with facts about actual performance/memory usage improvements
>
>
> "19:30   cody-somerville IMHO, I don't think we have the expertise to have
> a
> focus on performance."
>
> I can help here.  I don't run Xubuntu myself currently, but I have a lot
> of
> experience on this area (what tools to use, when and how to interpret
> the results), please use it.
>
>
> "19:36   j1mc    i get the feeling that, if we have a leader, that they
> will
> likely have the final say on some technical matters, and that everyone
> might not agree with their perspective, but that is part of having a
> leader."
>
> I wouldn't go as far as to say that they have the final say, instead they
> should have a veto on changes that:
> - haven't been presented to community for commenting,
> - don't contain enough/valid reasoning or
> - aren't aligned with the Xubuntu goals or (after presentation) the
> majority
>  of the community.
>
> The leader facilitates this kind of decision making and makes sure that
> the project goals and members are respected. If the community cannot
> produce
> a decision with his guidance, he has the final decision, but I think this
> is
> usually an indication that the matter should be postponed until there's
> more
> information or better design (or in current case, more focused vision
> :-)).
>
>
>        - Eero
>
> --
> xubuntu-devel mailing list
> xubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-devel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20080327/74b6e6cc/attachment.html>