[Foundations] Release Meeting 2012-03-23

[Colin Watson]

== What was done engineering wise? ==

We spent the bulk of the week in an installer sprint, fixing many
important bugs.  Some highlights:

 * We now have a handle on critical bug 876298, with a prototype
   implementation of a hook in update-notifier to allow packages to
   request a data download when it's possible, currently pending FFe.

 * We killed off long-standing Mac bugs 855871 and 856763 by adding a
   new partitioner check.

 * We hunted down a delicate race condition that caused failures when
   downloading updates during installation, namely bug 944191 (and
   probably many duplicates).

 * We cleared up a recent regression that caused a hang during Ubuntu
   Studio installation, namely bug 955617.

 * We fixed oem-config automation, bug 924018.

 * We arranged to avoid offering boot loader installation (during manual
   partitioning) on partitions that can't support it due to the
   filesystem they contain, bug 959724.

We didn't get through everything we wanted, or probably everything
everybody else wanted, but it seems to have been a pretty productive
three days and we got to spread some experience around the team.

Due to this sprint we didn't hold our weekly team meeting, so I don't
have a clear handle on what other things people have squeezed in this
week, but I know there's been some bug-fixing work on the crash
database, we have an Upstart 1.5 release due for upload today, and we
landed a new launchpad-buildd which builds packages considerably faster
(by not bothering to remove build-dependencies at the end of builds,
since the chroot is torn down with extreme prejudice and we were
ignoring failures in build-dependency removal anyway).

== Summary of bugs working on by team (reasonably reliable) ==

 * Bug 684309 ("Ubiquity Advanced Partitioning - Converting/Using ext4
   to ext2 without formating formats the partition without warning")
 * Bug 876298 ("[FFe] [MASTER] We need to better handle external
   payloads (Flash, msttcorefonts) not being available.")
 * Bug 960278 ("ubiquity crashed with UnicodeEncodeError in debug():
   'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 55: ordinal
   not in range(128)")

... and also a small number of regressions from the installer sprint
work.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]