Foundations team meeting minutes, 2008-09-10

[Colin Watson]

For minutes of previous meetings, please see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam.

== Present ==

 * AlexanderSack
 * ArneGoetje
 * BryceHarrington
 * ChrisCheney
 * ColinWatson
 * EvanDandrea
 * JamesWestby
 * LarsWirzenius
 * LukeYelavich
 * MatthiasKlose
 * SteveLangasek 

== Agenda ==

 * Outstanding actions:
  * Colin or Evan to review to see if the /etc/fstab change is an adequate solution for long term.
  * Lars to find sponsor for system-cleaner
  * Evan to continue with usb-creator testing and write up MIR when ready
  * Colin to pass around idea of distro-activity
 * Outstanding feature freeze exceptions
 * Milestoned/targeted bugs
 * Sponsorship queue
 * Any business from activity reports
 * AOB

== Action Items ==

 * Chris to upload openoffice.org3 to the ~openoffice-pkgs PPA without Sun branding (pending an agreement)
 * Alexander to write mobile broadband MIRs

== Outstanding actions ==

Colin reviewed the /etc/fstab change in Ubiquity and is generally happy with the approach, although it needs a small implementation tweak (done).

Michael promised to upload system-cleaner, and Colin uploaded python-fstab; the latter is waiting in NEW. Lars will poke the archive admin of the day.

Evan has written up an MIR for usb-creator, and will throw it open to ubuntu-devel for testing after a UI review with MPT.

The idea of distro-activity did not meet with broad interest or approval; the recommendation is that anything in your activity report that is of wider interest should be posted as a mailing list thread.

== Outstanding feature freeze exceptions ==

 * new pulseaudio to match new alsa and new kernel

Pulse``Audio is getting good testing from [[https://launchpad.net/~themuso/+archive|Luke's PPA]]; 0.9.12 was released recently with fixes for some important issues found in 0.9.11. Together with some fixes from alsa-lib git, people aren't having too many problems, although there is one new issue still outstanding. New releases of pavucontrol and paprefs have been uploaded as well.

GNOME 2.24 uses libcanberra, which is best off using pulseaudio as a backend, but that needs to be >= 0.9.11. As a result, event sounds will be broken until this lands.

 * experimental python 3 packages

No follow-ups on distro-team. Colin suggested that we include this in universe and build the python3-* modules we need from separate source, since modules will generally not be source-compatible anyway. Matthias agreed and will do this.

 * openoffice.org 3 (again, not by default, parallel-installable)

Had been blocked on agreeing Sun branding. Colin asked Chris to upload to his PPA without the branding for now.

 * xorg-options-editor needs promotion to main

Promoted; done.

 * mobile broadband wizard and database

Processed through new, but MIRs still need to be written.

== Milestoned/targeted bugs ==

No targeted+milestoned bugs belonging to the foundations team. Colin reminded the team of the definitions in RCBugTargetting, since [[https://launchpad.net/bugs/267682|bug 267682]] and [[https://launchpad.net/bugs/256054|bug 256054]] were milestoned but not targetted, despite being release-critical.

Targeted bugs:

 * [[https://launchpad.net/bugs/185311|bug 185311]]: Some non-Java problems still being reported, but no upstream fix is likely in the near term. Needs help.
 * [[https://launchpad.net/bugs/251640|bug 251640]]: On Colin's plate (but now unreproducible, so may be done).
 * [[https://launchpad.net/bugs/262451|bug 262451]]: No longer release-critical, since the ufw bug that triggered this has been fixed.

== Sponsorship queue ==

Alexander, Chris: queue zero throughout week
Colin: minicom 111021 (bounced); cron 118168 (bounced); gtk-sharp2 254855 (uploaded, forwarded to Debian)
Evan: slipped
Luke: has processed accessibility stack updates that were pending for GNOME
Steve: linux-wlan-ng to close out today

Colin clarified that the new world order is that you won't get things assigned to you, so you won't necessarily have your own queue. We've asked for all uploaders in Canonical to do an hour a week, which may well include going and looking for unassigned items on http://people.ubuntu.com/~dholbach/sponsoring/ and dealing with those.

Bryce provided http://tinyurl.com/63cfxt, which allows sorting and filtering of the sponsorship queue. Daniel said he would look at adding these features to his page.

== AOB ==

[[https://launchpad.net/bugs/243130|bug 243130]] is due to a conffile not being updated (presumably due to local edits), and upstream having used a different name for a local parameter name we introduced. Matthias asked for advice on solving this. There seem to be two alternatives:

 * While it violates the letter of policy, we could say that if the conffile has been changed locally and is known to be wrong now then we can get away with changing it in a maintainer script;
 * Add a tiny bit of compatibility code in fontconfig to support our old parameter name.

Colin suggested that the latter is likely to be easier than testing all conffile modification cases, even if we have to maintain the compatibility code forever.

== Activity reports ==

=== Alexander Sack ===

 * Synching two snapshots for network-manager to bzr and stabilize latest snapshot together with upstream.
 * fixing dhclient config issue upstream
 * reviewing most patches left in 0.7 package together with dcbw
 * reviewing plugin alternative dialog with mpt; incoporate most suggestions.
 * fixing some other minor glitches in new ubufox
 * discussing firefox branding wishes with gnewsense and find a better name for the firefox free-branding package.
 * preparing and running ubuntu developer week session.
 * network-manager bug triage.

=== Arne Goetje ===

 * Language-Selector: bugfix, language-pack-{gnome|kde} weren't pulled in automatically, now they are.
 * generated new language-packs for Intrepid
 * generated new language-support-writing packages to include the missing hunspell dictionaries
 * discussion with jtv and pitti about new language-pack generation times: Wednesday for Hardy and Monday and Friday for Intrepid
 * fixed the hunspell dictionaries: they had an unversioned conflict with thunderbird, causing thunderbird to be removed when installing language-support-writing packages for the affected languages (LP: #227711)
 * working on a new fontforge package; the current fontforge version in Intrepid is completely broken and FTBFS.
 * CJK-Unifonts: checked in 220 glyph variants for the UKai font.

=== Bryce Harrington ===

Blueprints:
 * xorg-input-hotplug:  DONE.
 * mouse-extra-buttons:  DONE.
 * Xorg apport hooks:  DONE.
 * xorg-ctrl-alt-backspace:  POSTPONED.
 * x-testing-infrastructure:  Not FF-critical.

Changed this week:
* xorg-options-editor:  DONE.  MIRs went through; g-c-c updated to use new code.  Some additional integration work (ide issue (quite a few!)  Hopefully will be able to fix a bunch of bugs with quirks in coming weeks.
 * Documented several X quirks, how to test for them, how to request quirks be added:  http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Quirks
 * Couple hours work on sponsor queue
 * Reviewed all X patches + fedora patches on Daniel's Harvest pages. Flagged some patches to incorporate as I have time.
 * Testing and bug-fixing on some IHV-supplied hardware.

=== Chris Cheney ===

 * Uploaded openoffice.org 1:2.4.1-8ubuntu1
 * Uploaded openoffice.org-l10n 1:2.4.1-8ubuntu1
 * Prepared openoffice.org 1:3.0.0~rc1-0ubuntu1
 * Open``Office.org bug triage

To do:
 * OOo Hug Day slated for Sep 18! :-)
 * Still waiting on Sun to approve the new 3.0 branding images, already emailed them just waiting to hear back at this point.
 * Open``Office.org 3.0.0~rc2 should be released on Sep 12 and officially announced Sep 15.
 * Open``Office.org 3.0.0 (final) is now expected to be released on Sep 19 and officially announced on Sep 22, if this actually happens we should have plenty of time to get it into Intrepid as the main version.

=== Evan Dandrea ===

 * Lots of work on usb-installer.  0.1.2 now in universe.
 * Filed a MIR on usb-installer.  Awaiting response.
 * Started a UI and usability discussion of usb-installer with Matthew Paul Thomas.  I will endeavor to get any necessary changes in before UI freeze.
 * Answered some brief d-i questions from kirkland.
 * Brief discussions with Agostino and Dave Morley on the status of Wubi.  Agostino has almost completed the Wubi python rewrite, but believes it is probably too late for 8.10, which I agree with.  The existing Wubi code is running into trouble in Intrepid, most likely in ntfs-3g.  According to Ago, Colin King is looking into it.
 * Call with Colin to discuss feature development status.
 * Prepared for and ran a Developer Week session on contributing to the Installer Team's efforts.  There were not a lot of questions, but there was some interest in usb-creator and the questions I did receive provided valuable insight into what information is needed on the team's wiki pages.
 * Fixed a missing d-i dependency and I will need some help from bzr experts on.

=== Lars Wirzenius ===

 * Intrepid Alpha 5 ISO testing.
 * Fixing and rebuilding of workstation.
 * Fixing and re-re-uploading python-fstab and system-cleaner.

=== Matthias Klose ===

 * catching up with things after vacation
 * prepared stable release updates for gcc-4.2, gdb, glibc, tested with test builds of some key packages with no regressions in their testsuites.
   Sidenote: pygtk ftbfs without any of these changes, plus perl ftbfs on the PPAs.
   gcc-4.2, gdb is uploaded, glibc, gcj-4.2, gdc-4.2 and gnat-4.2 uploads are pending.
 * gcc-4.3 updates for intrepid. somehow the buildds were broken. We were not able to determine what went wrong on the buildds. Adam did fix the chroots by hand.
 * preparing binutils update (a 2.19 prerelease is currently prepared by upstream). will ask for exception for uvf after testing.
 * handled most of the sponsor reports
 * bug triage and forwarding for gdb, glibc, gcc*
 * started merging glibc-2.8 with Debian.

=== Steve Langasek ===

Release management:
 * more post-FF new processing
 * post-VAC mail catchup
 * inaugurate the release blog
 * go through a frustrating fight with VMware, because the licenses for the VMware workstation are recently expired and setting up the VMware server doesn't work on the kernel used on my devel system,  Since my hardware also doesn't have VMX support, and intrepid is currently broken under vbox, this was something of an unexpected delay for being able to do ISO testing to cover the outstanding tests.
 * release intrepid alpha-5
 * post minutes from previous release meetings
  * lose two hours of work to the wiki deciding not to accept my new page, my browser not saving my form contents, and me not thinking to save the content somewhere else before hitting 'Save Changes'

Specs:
 * work on getting the PAMConfigFramework spec page into a respectable state

Misc:
 * Monday archive duties

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]