[ubuntu-studio-devel] 17.04 cycle

[Ross Gammon]

Hi All,

Some ideas:

1. Bugs: There are lots of bugs against packages that we care about. 
They need to be triaged (confirmed). They need to be forwarded upstream 
to get them fixed, or we need to look upstream to see if they have 
already be fix, and maybe steal the commit that fixed it and propose is 
as a patch. You don't need to be a skilled developer to do a lot of 
this. There is lot of good advice on the Bug Squad wiki 
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad/). Maybe we could hold some Bug Hug 
weekends concentrating on some of our favourite packages?

2. Testing: We have some Manual Test Cases here 
(http://packages.qa.ubuntu.com/). Through the Yakkety cycle, nobody 
uploaded any test results. It would be good to see some people running 
these tests occasionally. We need to get the tracker updated though, the 
latest development release (Zesty Zapus) is not listed there yet.

Also on a personal note, as for two years ago, this development cycle 
coincides with the Debian freeze and release. So I may be less visible 
in Ubuntu while I take care of things there (including a few packages 
that we care about in Ubuntu Studio). But just ping me by email if I can 
help might help with something and appear to have gone silent.

Regards,

Ross

On 27/10/16 11:09, Set Hallstrom wrote:
> Greetings everyone!
>
> Technically we entered the new cycle after releasing the previous one, 
> but its fair to say we all need to live a little bit of delicious post 
> release relaxation. The new cycle, Zesty Zapus 17.04 is a special one 
> for US. While it isn't an LTS, it marks the 10th aniversary of Ubuntu 
> Studio. While 16.10 saw a few oldtimers leave, it gained new blood in 
> contributors. By fear of forgetting someone, i will skip dropping 
> names, but we've seen activity in our artwork team, in the PR team and 
> in the tester team. The IRC channels have been running hotter than i 
> have ever whitnessed and while there was an episode of hurt feelings, 
> it's been fun and interesting to exchange on- and off-topic chats.
> I would like to invite everyone to share their thoughts on how we do 
> this 10th aniversary unforgettable. From the top of my head these are 
> a few things i think we should work on this cycle:
>
> - Recruit devels. We have an acute need of actual coders. While those 
> among us are awesome and skilled, we need to work on discharging 
> workload from their shoulders so that they can remain happy and 
> relaxed contributors. The only way i can think of is to campaign about 
> it e v e r y w h e r e. Engage the community and emphasise our users 
> production. Create pride of the healthy kind. Gain attention and 
> outline the fact that there is actualy a demand for what we do. Our 
> community is small from a global scale, but it's huge from the 
> perspective of an altruistic volunteering based project. There has 
> been discussions about creating contests and i think it is great and 
> now that have a job, i am ready to invest a few bucks into some prizes 
> in the form of swag from the distributors we have at hand.
>
> - Include gameing design tools. There is no doubt that game art is a 
> an ecompassing artform, including most of the multimedia fields we 
> cover. While blender has game engine, i hear there are interesting 
> alternatives and including this expression forn would open us up for a 
> wider community.
>
> - Review our artwork. Some of the artwork we have, such as boot images 
> and loading screen could need a makeover.
>
> I invite you to fill the list :)
>
> The emergency project right now is the website. It's been queued for 
> too long and while it is mostly an issue of miscommunication with 
> Internet Services, we still need to figure how we showcase the 
> community with it.
>
> Now for a little bit of reality check, on my personal side, my new job 
> is super interesting but also, well... fulltime and some...  I 
> basically manage IT events, and while i'm learning craploads of stuff 
> that are usefull for my work with you, these first weeks i've been 
> struggling to find the energy to do anything else than procrastination 
> on my freetime. I'm hopefull iöthis is due to the nature of beginning 
> something new and intense that requires a lot of energy and 
> dedication. I do not intend to give up on this project by any means, 
> but for the sake of the group unity, i need to inform you of this. I 
> will probably not be able to learn all i still need to learn to be a 
> packager and therefor i think i should focus on doing what i already 
> know how to do: PR, docs, artwork and troop coordination/motivation. 
> On that note i would like to invite everyone to observe how xubuntu 
> has migrated from having a project lead to having a project council. 
> Xubuntu has a remarkable infrastructure, and while our team is small 
> enough to be quite agile we should learn as much as we can from their 
> methods. In any case, i invite you to share any and all ideas, 
> suggestions, and motivations regarding our group in this thread.
>
> Looking forwars to read you, with warm regards from cold sweden,
>
>