Minutes from the Technical Board meeting, 2009-05-05

[Scott James Remnant]

= Attendees =

 * Matt Zimmerman
 * Colin Watson
 * Scott James Remnant (chair)

= Apologies =

 * Mark Shuttleworth

= Minutes =

== Codecs in ffmpeg ==

Reinhard Tartler asked whether, given the recent discussions about
ffmpeg codecs, the x264 package could be promoted from multiverse to
universe so that vlc and ffmpeg (without -debian) could be promoted as
well.

Colin Watson confirmed that the distinction between the components was
purely a question of licence, not patents, and that a simple bug
subscribed to ubuntu-archive was sufficient to accomplish them.

== ubuntu-drivers ==

The ubuntu-drivers team exists with various people and other teams
attached to it, and itself is used as the driver of the Ubuntu
distribution and the current development release.  However it's not
clear what this is actually used for, and whether there are better
alternatives to using this team.

We agreed that Mark should investigate, Scott will begin the process by
mailing him and the LP lead.

== Archive Reorganisation ==

Colin Watson asked for three things to be decided by the Technical
Board.

=== Debian Maintainer Field ===

Obviously <ubuntu-motu at lists.ubuntu.com> for universe/multiverse
packages no longer makes as much sense in the new world order.

It was decided to simply set Maintainer to
<ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com> across the board, except where
it has been set to an individual or more appropriate list.

=== Security Support ===

Right now the Canonical/Ubuntu security team concentrates effort on
main, and universe is a best-effort kind of thing.  Colin didn't think
they're going to want to offer full security support for everything,
just on workload grounds.

Colin asked which package sets would they offer elevated security
support for.

Matt indicated that since this is a question about the Canonical
security team, this is better directed towards that team rather than a
TB decision.

=== Package set creation process ===

Colin asked for guidance on the process for approving the creation of
new package sets, a responsibility that will rest with the TB.

Daniel Holbach had made the following suggestion:

    As Package Set creation will result in significant amount of work
    and organisation, we want to ensure the request is reasonable. All
    these decisions will be subject to TB approval. Requests for new
    package sets should be discussed in TB meetings and be accompanied
    with the following data:
     * Name of the package set
     * Purpose of the package set
     * Expected packages: ... (at least 5)
     * Expected developers working on the set: ... (at least 2(?))
     * Canonical Supported (if so, follow new equivalent of
       MainInclusionProcess)
     * Is the set likely to grow, change?
    We want to make sure:
     * The software is well-maintained,
     * There's a clearly defined purpose of the package set and no
       uncontrolled wild growth,
     * There's no other convenient way of satisfying developers to work
       on this.

Various comments were raised on this process, and Matt suggested that
until we've actually had a few new package sets to deal with, we
wouldn't know what form of process we require.

A separate question was raised about moving of packages between sets,
and the delegation of that to ubuntu-archive.  This was agreed.

Otherwise we opted to decide on a case-by-case basis.


Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at canonical.com
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