Development team status report + plan

[Tim]

Hi Eveyone,
  Here is the report for the development (including packaging team). Sorry if this reads more like a blueprint.

*GNOME 3.16*
  - A large part of this has already been uploaded to Wily
  - Some of the core (gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-control-center and a few others), however most of the work for these is done and should
almost certainly be uploaded before B1
  - nautilus, is WIP by ubuntu-desktop team
  - gedit, still needs UI patches for unity, not aware that anyone is currently working on this
  - Bluez5 transition should also start soon, finally!
  - Feature Freeze is August 20th so most of the above needs to happen by then.
  - None of the new to 3.16 GNOME apps have been packaged yet afaik, not really a priority at this stage though.

*General Packaging work*
  - Package up the new artwork assets for artwork team, preferably before UI Freeze September 10th
  - Finalise details of default apps for wily and update seeds.
  - Try and include gnome-getting-started guides on the Live Images (this would split packaging and only english installed only so as to not
completely blow out the size of the ISO's
  -  Try and reduce the ISO images back under 1GB or increase our size limits.
  - None of the above tasks have been started, however they are mostly pretty simple, and it would be nice to see some extra help on these.

*automated image testing*
  - A community based effort has been started to get the ubiquity autopilot tests running again on the daily images
  - Hopefully we won't have to do much here apart from fix Ubuntu-GNOME specific issues in the tests
  - However there is extra work in generally fixing autopilot needed if people are interested in contributing to this.

*gnome-software preview*
  - It would be good to have a preview of this in 15.10 with a possible view to switching in 16.04
  - Requires DEP-11 metadata, the Kubuntu team are working on this. Which should be available this cycle
  - Requires Packagekit 1.0, bug 1470655, may not happen this cycle
  - Requires switching to PackageKit aptcc backend instead of aptdaemon. That may affect ubuntu-software-center
  -   None of the above tasks have been started, however again they mostly pretty simple, apart from the PackageKit transition. It would be nice
to see some extra help on these.
  - Could potentially be staged on a ppa, later in the cycle.

*GNOME 3.18*
  - As usual this will be available on gnome3-staging PPA later in the cycle
  - So far a bunch of the core bits are available now. Most of the apps etc, will follow well after we pass feature freeze

*Packaging infrastructure work*
  - These are all wishlist items, most of the them have been on the cards for quite a while, but for the most part no existing members have had
time to work on them. Would mostly require python and very little packaging knowledge.
  - Autopkgtests for uploads to the gnome3-team PPA's (This could potentially be integrated with the community image testing project for all
flavours to take advantage off)
  - git packaging branches for gnome3-team PPA, There are a bunch of scripts already done for this, but requires some tweaks and the actual
migration to happen.
  - Jenkins CI testing for the above git branches
  - Using live-build to generate daily images based from wily/gnome3-staging PPA
  - autopilot smoketest to make sure gnome-shell started successfully (this would be hosted on ubuntu jenkins instance)

*Finally the Plan*
  T1: All of GNOME 3.16 should be included, but higher priority will be given to seeded (installed by default packages)
  T2: General Package work as detailed above
  T3: Automated image testing as detailed above

  Those are the critical bits that need to be done for Wily, any other items needing to be done above can be   considered wishlist status, but
it would be great to see them all tackled in the next 6 months (some aren't even strictly tied to the release cycle!), even better if it came
from new contributors!

Tim