Xubuntu (Council) future

[Stephen Kellat]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 10:04:57AM -0400, Pasi Lallinaho wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm sorry but I couldn't make the meeting last night. Let's continue the
> council discussion on the mailing list.
>
> For non-team-members, here's what I wrote earlier in a team exclusive
> e-mail:
>
> > While I've been relatively inactive for some time, I've had this
> > feeling that we are approaching another turning point where the
> > community seriously needs to reassess the situation and create a plan
> > going forward. Getting no nominations for the council verifies my
> > thoughts.
> >
> > While change often comes with uncomfort, fear not!
> >
> > The last time we discussed about existential issues, our main trouble
> > was Xfce being inactive. Back then, the team decided to channel forces
> > to bringing Xfce back to life so Xubuntu could also stay alive. And
> > see how well Xfce is doing now! (In a way, I feel like the focus is
> > still on Xfce and might continue to be for the unforeseen future for
> > some of us.)
>

I wanted to bring some thoughts to the table.

Leadership is a hard thing in the current uncertain climate.  I have felt fairly paralyzed in the current pandemic situation quite heavily.  It is understandable that frankly things are not okay right now.

The big question is where do we want to go from here.  What do we want Xubuntu to look like by the time of the next LTS?  I know that many people have had a very hard time thinking about what next Saturday may look like let alone where they want the distribution to go by April 2022.  It got really bad for me during the lockdown here in Ohio when things changed in Governor Mike DeWine's then-daily press conferences and I tried to not plan beyond the next press conference.  My life still isn't back to whatever constitutes normal and that impacts others too.

In the Strategy Document we have a vision set out.  Have we met that?  Do we want to go in a new direction?  Do we need to merely adjust the sails to correct our course?  I spent several years away serving my country's interests so there is a big block of time that I have been away from -team.

As to 20.10 I had some productive discussions with Sean and Yousuf today in our documentation debt conference call.  Documentation String Freeze is coming up on September 24th and we do appear to be on track to have the docs rewrite done by September 10th.  We should be able to backport the docs rewrite from 20.10 to 20.04.  Sean ran a script and according to what the packages we seed we have very few changes to packages as of Feature Freeze.

UI Freeze is in 3 weeks, DocString Freeze is in 4 weeks, Mandatory Beta is in 5 weeks.  This release will not be one of changes.  This release is one where we can thoroughly eliminate any strange glitches, bugs, and inessential weirdnesses that cropped up as of the LTS.  A good place to mine for possible problems to squash would be this search on AskUbuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/xubuntu+20.04

The goal on the docs side of things is to finish off the last two chapters and then get everything moved off the collaboration platform back into proper DocBook formatting.  Sean and I discussed looking for documentation on how QA testing can be automated and found some leads.  There are other things that will help us move forward once we make some further progress.

I'm not sure going back to having just a Xubuntu Project Leader is a great idea in the current pandemic climate.  It was hard enough being leader for Ubuntu Ohio that I turned it over to a council eventually myself.  There is quite a bit of truth in the paraphrase from Shakespeare that heavy is the head that wears the crown.

I do hope we can have a great Groovy Gorilla release.

Stephen Michael Kellat

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