Recent changes to Ubuntu

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Sean Wheller wrote:

>Both these issues are not major, but do indicate that communication and 
>workflow are not as tight as they should be. The results could have been much 
>worse, so we do need to avoid this type of problem if we can.
>  
>
We should have an artwork list, and the doc-team should be on that.
Artwork is always likely to be changing close to release, though we had
planned to have it final 7 days before and in the end only finalised it
2 days before.

Artwork encompasses:

 - the default theme
 - the login screen(s)
 - the default desktop background
 - the icon set
 - the sound scheme

We've not done a great job with Hoary. It was better than with warty,
but we still lacked a cohesive execution. Andy Fitzsimon is working on
icons, Cliff Chen was involved, Jeff Waugh was involved, I have
requirements to be considered and a hard boot for the final look... and
all of this was sort of semi-decoupled. I think integrating the doc team
and making an artwork team will help, but the main thing we are missing
is a lead organiser who keeps track of the moving parts.

For Breezy, I think we should make a big push on sounds, for example.
It's the weak spot in our art portfolio at the moment, in the sense that
it's the thing we've put the least into. It would be nice to have a
great folio of sounds, and to make sure that every mail app, for
example, uses the same "new mail" sound.

>On our part we also need to be more vigilant. I highly recommend that all 
>authors document against development and not the preview releases. Post Hoary 
>  
>
Well, we could help the doc, i18n and artwork guys if we had a process
for reporting changes post-preview that would impact on them. We could
also put in place some sort fo package alerting system, so the doc team
could get alerted to uploads of specific packages.

>In general, devel should just be sensitive to the fact that we also have i18n 
>stuff in our build system. So a single menu change could result in many 
>smaller updates trickling through the ecosystem. On the side of caution, it 
>is best to give early warning especially near preview and final releases.
>  
>
On this front we've been pretty good. Even the spatial browsing
behaviour change does not affect UI or translations, though a comment in
docs would have been a good idea that I missed.

Mark