Hoary status and plans

[Matt Zimmerman]

Kickoff meeting
---------------

The kickoff meeting for Hoary development was held Monday 25 October 2004,
at 16:00 UTC, in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.

Mako has prepared a summary of this marathon meeting here:

http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/hoary_kickoff-20041025-summary.html

and a transcript is available nearby:

http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/hoary_kickoff-20041025-log.html

We discussed a wide variety of ideas for new features and bug fixes for the
Hoary release.

Merge status
------------

With Ubuntu having been frozen for some months, there were a great deal of
changes in Debian that needed to be brought in.  In many cases, we had
customised the package for Ubuntu, and so a three-way merge was necessary.

As discussed at the kickoff meeting, Scott James Remnant applied some
automation to this problem, and bugs were filed for the merges which could
not be automated.  166 bugs were filed, and only 13 now remain, so we are
mostly caught up with the initial merge.

There is still work to be done in order to keep up on an ongoing basis, and
we'll discuss that more as time goes on.  Scott is working on a system to
automate the process of attempting merges and filing bugs where manual
intervention is necessary.

Goals
-----

I've finished the initial process of documenting the goals for Hoary on the
wiki:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryGoals

The summary of the kickoff meeting also provides a summary of them.  Please
review that page and ensure that the list is complete and correct.  In cases
where more detail is called for, I've created either a wiki page, or a
broken link to one which should be created.  If you're listed as responsible
for a goal, please flesh out these pages with your plans and thoughts.

There are many goals which are not yet assigned to anyone.  If you're
interested in working on any of them, follow up here with your ideas, or
create a wiki page.  If you aren't sure what a particular goal involves,
read the kickoff meeting summary and transcript before asking questions.
There is potential for a number of these to be funded on an individual basis
according to the bounty process:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/bounties/

Early breakage
--------------

Some of the changes that we'd like to make for Hoary have the potential to
introduce instability, so we should make these changes early in the release
cycle.  The current list of such items is:

Change the default locale to UTF-8 (Colin Watson)
Change the default dpkg-reconfigure priority to medium (Colin Watson)
Start gdm earlier in the boot sequence (Daniel Stone)
Enable laptop suspend (Matthew Garrett, Herbert Xu)
Load apm automatically (Thom May)
Switch from fam to gamin (Jeff Waugh)
Polypaudio (Jeff Waugh)
Apt authentication (Matt Zimmerman)
Migrate from XFree86 to X.org (Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, Daniel Stone)

If your name is listed next to one of the above items, be sure that you know
what needs to be done in order to effect the change, and carry out those
actions as soon as possible so that we can spend more time fixing the
resulting bugs.

Bugs
----

We have a few hundred bugs of severity 'normal' or higher.  While bugs are
not our highest priority during this stage of the release, we should be
careful not to let them grow out of control.  In particular, everyone should
review their own bug list and check the status of existing bugs, close those
which do not apply to Hoary, close bugs which are stalled and incomplete,
and do general housekeeping.

Changes to the Package Lists (Seeds)
------------------------------------

A number of seed changes have been proposed since Warty's package list was
frozen.  Since these need to be reviewed and discussed, I'll start a
separate thread to discuss them.

Priorities
----------

Current priorities for Hoary are:

1. Finish the remaining merges
2. Implement early breakage items
3. Work on other Hoary goals
4. Bug fixing and housekeeping

-- 
 - mdz