A new "Unity 8" flavour

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Iain,

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 05:09:33PM +0100, Iain Lane wrote:
> The desktop team would like to add a new flavour (ish, we don't plan to
> have any formal releases at this point) of Ubuntu which contains the
> Unity 8 desktop and the new applications which have been developed for
> the touch project.

> The initial intention is to provide a product which developers can use
> to figure out the work that's required to make a desktop product based
> on this software usable, and to create a space for experimentation to
> figure out the best ways of carrying out the required integration. We
> still plan to migrate pieces of the current desktop over, but we are
> very mindful of the need to not destabilise the desktop and upset its
> users, and are hopeful that developing this flavour in parallel will
> mean that migrations will truly happen when software is ready instead of
> as a result of pressure to get work into the hands of users early.

> There are still many unanswered questions, not least of which is any
> treatment of click packages. That's fine. Here I am just keen to get
> something up and running; many changes will be necessary and we can make
> them as we go along.

> The reason I'm mailing the release list is because I need help in
> getting the flavour built. My initial work is in
> ppa:ubuntu-desktop/unity8-flavour (seed branch
> lp:~laney/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu-unity8.utopic). Here are the questions I
> have right now:

Instead of a separate seed branch for this, I recommend making this part of
the standard Ubuntu seeds at lp:~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.utopic.
I don't see any reason that we would want this maintained independently of
the existing Ubuntu seeds / existing ubuntu-meta package, which is what a
separate branch would imply.

>   - I feel like the name "ubuntu-unity8" isn't very good, because that's
>     the name of a piece of software already so it could get confusing. I
>     thought of "ubuntu-touch-desktop", but bikeshedding (meant in a nice
>     way) appreciated.

I find the name 'ubuntu-unity8' better than 'ubuntu-touch-desktop',
especially since the 'Ubuntu Touch' name is more or less deprecated (and
this isn't an image targeted at touchscreen devices anyway).  How about
'ubuntu-next-desktop'?  Hopefully not too many people will assume this
implies a Display Postscript engine.

>   - Do we have the resources to build another flavour?

If you mean computing resources, yes, definitely; we're well below the
all-time high water mark for images being built.

If you mean human resources, well, I think we'd better find them so that we
can move forward with Unity :-)

>   - Most importantly, I don't know all of the places that need to be
>     touched to enable daily builds. I'm happy to do all of the work that
>     I have access to do, but could someone who knows how this all fits
>     together please point me to the places that need to know about a new
>     flavour?

  - lp:ubuntu-cdimage (incl. etc/crontab)
  - lp:~ubuntu-core-dev/livecd-rootfs/trunk (maybe)
  - upload ubuntu-meta

And that should be it, given that we shouldn't need a new packageset here.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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