Bug 0 review pls

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 7:11 PM, Dan Shearer <dan at shearer.org> wrote:
> I have put some text for Bug 0 up at
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/Bug0#preview . I didn't get into the
> solutions we worked on at UDS, thinking this is what bug report followup
> comments are for and the body was already too long.

Hey Dan-

Here's some candid feedback on your wiki page...

First of all, I'm afraid some people might take offense at calling
this initiative "Bug #0", thinking that it precedes or supercedes Bug
#1.  Bug #1 has really been Ubuntu's rallying point for nearly 4 years
now, with the thread gathering some ~700 comments in that time.  I'm
not sure how people will take suddenly putting Ubuntu Server "ahead"
of Ubuntu Desktop.

That said, I recognize what I think is your key point...  That in Bug
#1, Mark very clearly states: "Microsoft has a majority market share
in the new desktop PC marketplace.  This is a bug, which Ubuntu is
designed to fix."  This statement quite overtly omits the "server PC
marketplace".  If and/or when he decides to target the server
marketplace in full force, perhaps an update by Mark to that bug
report is in order.

In the mean time, I think constructing this as a Blueprint in
Launchpad (http://blueprints.launchpad.net) would be a more
appropriate approach.  You can link it to Bug #1 as the motivation,
and track the progress there.  Every Blueprint points to a
Specification in the wiki (template at
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/SpecSpec).  Your current Bug0 page is the seed
for the specification.  That's where you'd define a summary,
rationale, use cases, design, and implementation details for how we
would go about taking market share by making Ubuntu's server
technology superior in the market.

And actually, I think you have several distinct ideas in the Bug0
page...  You could really create a Blueprint/Spec for each of those.
Each is a unique problem that could and perhaps should be solved in a
future Ubuntu release.  These are the individual sorts of work items
we try to gather at UDS and coherently present in Blueprints/Specs
(eg, Active Directory Integration, Outlook-compatible replacement,
Large Filesystem Replication).  And we did discuss a number of those.

In any case, I think you have some excellent ideas in there!  I'm just
not quite sure that creating a single, super-bugreport is going to be
the most effective method to actually solving the problem.  However, I
think we do have some excellent tools within the Ubuntu/Launchpad
infrastructure for defining precise technical shortcomings, designing
appropriate solutions, and tracking them into Ubuntu releases.


Cheers,
:-Dustin