UDS Karmic Goals

[Cody A.W. Somerville]

Hello,

 Apologies for not getting around to this sooner.

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Cody A.W. Somerville <
cody-somerville at ubuntu.com> wrote:

1. Develop 2-3 specifications that are concrete enough to implement within
> the next cycle.
>

Although we didn't draft 2-3 specifications to the point where they're ready
to be implemented, I do feel that we actually have tangible ideas that can
be speced and implemented; a definite win from cycles prior.

For karmic, I'll personally be working on the following:

 * Performance improvements to the Xubuntu "session" (ie. faster login, less
memory)
 * Review of the Xubuntu Seeds (ie. Get rid of cruft, examine default
applications, etc.)
 * Xubuntu documentation & translations packaging (ie. Improvements to
debian packaging)
 * Nightly Xubuntu debian package builds of Xfce trunk (ie. Lets spot
problems early on)
 * Improve tracking of upstream (ie. reports to help us work better with
Debian + Xfce project)

I'm going to create specs in launchpad for these and will followup with
links once complete.

2. Discuss and spec out improvements to notifications.
>

We discussed notifications but no specification or direction was determined
besides the need to evaluate notify-osd for Karmic. SiDi has agreed to look
into improving notifications.

3. Identify and possibly fix the login delay issue.
>

We looked at this issue several times throughout the week. Although we
didn't find the exact cause let alone fix, we did determine or remark the
following:

 * The issue is not specific to Xubuntu. Stephan (sarts) runs Xubuntu 8.10
but his Xfce packages are stock Xfce compiled by himself, Jannis (JPohlmann)
runs Lunar Linux, and I was running Xubuntu 9.04. We all were able to
reproduce this issue on our individual laptops.
 * The extent of the delay is proportional to the number of different
applications autostarting.
 * After the delay, almost everything appears at once - almost as if
everything had gotten ready "behind the scenes".
 * Disabling the autostart of xfce4-settings-helper by the session manager
in particular significantly reduced the delay but didn't appear to fix the
problem.
 * One theory was the issue had to do with the calculated delays
xfce4-session was thought to do between starting different session
levels/priorities.
 * A bug in the session management helper functions used by numerous Xfce4
applications was found that made it impossible to set your own priority
level for said Xfce4 apps.

4. Examine memory usage of default Xubuntu desktop. Compare w/ Debian to see
> where we can reduce our footprint.


We looked at this but didn't find any quick fixes to reduce our memory
consumption. Once idea that was tossed around was to disable the autostart
of the system-config-printer (responsible for autolaunching printer setup,
for the panel icon when something is printing, etc.) as it is a python
application and uses quite a bit of memory. The idea was to instead have
thunar-volman perform the autostart since you can access the print jobs
dialogue from Applications > Accessories. No decision was made but I'm going
to investigate this possability further as a part of 'Performance
improvements to the Xubuntu "session"'. I'm hoping that instead of just
loosing the system tray notification icon thingy functionality (*grins), we
can have something equivalent provided by something that isn't so memory
heavy.

5. Assist Xfce in developing release policy, procedures; release management;
> finer project definition; etc. Come up with draft to send to xfce-dev
> mailing list for further discussion and development.


 As Jannis already mentioned, a lot of work got done in this area. I'm very
proud of the Xfce team who I believe for the most part have decided to adopt
the proposal developed. I think this will have a very positive impact on the
Xfce team and as result help make Xubuntu rock even more.

6. Improvements to documentation, artwork, and community.


The general consensus was that there were a number of good ideas on these
topics from last UDS but they have not yet been actioned on.

Cheers,
>

Big thanks to everyone who participated at UDS either locally or remotely.
I'm already running Karmic and can say that things are coming along very
nicely. I must admit that I have a really good vibe about this release. I
think the next several months are going to be very exciting times for the
Xubuntu project; I hope everyone is able to get in on the fun.

Cheers,

-- 
Cody A.W. Somerville
Software Systems Release Engineer
Foundations Team
Custom Engineering Solutions Group
Canonical OEM Services
Phone: +1-781-850-2087
Cell: +1-506-471-8402
Email: cody.somerville at canonical.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-devel/attachments/20090608/0b0f38c9/attachment.html>