Do something good for the world, adopt a package! Comment
Have you always wanted to do something good for the world, but did you never know what to do? Here is your chance: adopt a package and help making Ubuntu rock where you want it!
Every day a lot of new bugs are reported on Launchpad, adding to the number of open bugs reported against Ubuntu. Currently there are 81259 open bugs in Ubuntu, of which 43775 are in the ‘New’ state. This means that roughly 54% of all open bugs in Ubuntu are not or were barely touched and when this post will have been published the number is already larger. When handling such large numbers of bug even the omnipotent BugSquad can’t keep up. How can we make sure the important bugs don’t get lost in this superabundance of support requests for writing good defect reports?
If you’re working with something — in the case of Adopt-a-Package an application — you like, you’re more productive. If you work on something you can keep an overview of, work is easier. This is what Adopt-a-Package purports. You choose an application you’re familiar with, or particularly fond of, and focus on getting it into shape on Launchpad. What does this mean? A small list:
- Triaging previously untriaged — ‘New’ — bugs
- Making sure no bugs are forgotten
- Moving Confirmed bugs to Triaged
- Forwarding bugs upstream
There are several ways to tackle the adoption. If you would like to adopt something as big as GDM[1] you’ll have a hard time if you’d try to do it all on your own, unless you have a lot of spare time. In such cases it’s better to form an AdoptionTeam and attack the bugs together with some other people. Smaller applications like ‘gedit‘ can be handled by one person, although it largely depends on your personal preferences and the amount of time you’re able or willing to spend on triaging. Of course you could always look for an existing group to join. As a matter of fact, I’m still looking for some more people to help out with Nautilus.
Adopt-a-Package is thoroughly explained on its wiki page, and it is that page you should use as your primary source of information. On this page you find a list of currently adopted applications and applications that we’d really like to see adopted. When you decide to adopt an application, whether you do it with a group or on your own, please check this page first to make sure you’re not duplicating efforts. After you’ve made up your mind about what you’re going to adopt, please add your name and the application to the list and notify the BugSquad maillist.
Are you interested but still have got some questions now you’ve read this? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop by in the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel. Also, in March there will be two sessions about Adopt-an-Upstream in #ubuntu-classroom, one by me at 4 March on 17.00 UTC and one by Jorge Castro at 18 March on 23.oo UTC. You can find them listed in the Ubuntu Classroom schedule.
Introduction to Planet Ubuntu 2 Comments
Hello! I’m Sense Hofstede. Yesterday I was approved as an Ubuntu Member during the Ubuntu Membership EMEA regional approval board meeting. I’m very happy and the support I received was heart-warming. You may not know me, so let me introduce myself first.
Activities
Most people know me as a member of the Ubuntu Bug Control team, which I fist applied to in 2006, first joined in 2007 and then rejoined in 2008. That last year was the year I started to really contribute significantly to Ubuntu and slowly started to show my face at more and more different places. I’m a bug triager, foster-parent of Nautilus, and a Brainstorm Idea Reviewer.
Ubuntu Wanted is also a project I’ve started, but it’s really behind schedule for something that was discussed during UDS-J in Barcelona. I apologise for that; the Drupal module just grew too big and Launchpad integration was too hard for it to become something satisfying. However, I’ve restarted the project and am currently working on writing an implementation with Django when I’ve got some time on my hands. The code can be found in lp:ubuntu-wanted, but please bear in mind that I’ve already got something completely different on my own work-station. However, I wait with committing it until it works and doesn’t throw errors with everything you do. At the moment most work is going into writing Django Middleware that injects a connected and authenticated Launchpad object in the request object.
As you can see on the Classroom wiki-page there are two sessions planned about Adopt-an-Upstream; I will do the first at 4 March and Jorge Castro will do the second at 18 March. If you’re interested in working on a specific area or with a certain upstream, but would like to know more about it: come to the session!
Names
In spite of what (too) many people seem to think, is my first name not English nor a nickname. My full name is Sense Egbert Hofstede, but I usually just use Sense Hofstede, which should be pronounced like this: [ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steːdə]. The first name derived from the Germanic derivation Sint and changed via Sent and Sens to Sense. It means ’sent’. My last name is the Dutch word for ‘homestead’. I’m the sixth Sense of the family, ‘Sense’ is common in my progeny.
My first name is often already taken whenever I need to pick a nickname, so in the end of 2005 I came up with ‘qense’. It’s close to my real name, but since the first letter is replaced with a not-so-common letter usually available. At least it’s not used as the name for graphical interfaces, sexual education campaigns, margarine, companies, charities or bands.
Tiny little BugSquad tool: AdoptionStats Comment
In order to make fetching a the number of bugs in each status against a certain package easy I’ve written a small script called AdoptionStats. We’re currently working on the Adopt-a-Package project for the Ubuntu Bug Squad and if you want to be able to keep track of how a package is doing you need data: information about the current status and information about past statuses for comparison.
AdoptionStats generates a data list and constantly returns it in the same format and therefore the results can easily be manipulated by other scripts, e.g. for generating graphs.
Use
I’ve pushed to script to a Bazaar branch on Launchpad: lp:~qense/+junk/adoptionstats. If you haven’t done it yet, install Bazaar and download the code with the command “bzr branch lp:~qense/+junk/adoptionstats” .
The script depends on the package ‘python-launchpad-bugs’, execute the command “sudo apt-get install python-launchpadlib” python-launchpad-bugs or click here click here to install it if you haven’t installed it yet.
(now using python-launchpadlib, thanks to thekorn)
The usage is very simple, but make sure you’ve made the script executable — right-click->Properties->Permissions->check ‘Allow execution of this file’, or just “chmod +x ./adoptionstats” . For getting a report on the current status of the ‘nautilus’ source package you enter the command “./adoptionstats -p nautilus” in the directory you save the file. The result is like this:
2010-01-21 16:15 {'need_forwarding': 5, 'per_status': {'In Progress': 3, 'Confirmed': 0, 'Invalid': 2279, 'New': 34, 'Fix Committed': 1, 'Triaged': 583, 'Fix Released': 754, 'Incomplete': 158, "Won't Fix": 16}}
Since the application uses optparse you can get the help text with “./adoptionstats -h”, but the only other option next to ‘-p’ and ‘-h’ is ‘-v’, which enables the printing of debug-level messages to your commandline.
Lucid on Lynx, Alpha 1 Comment
It’s still a bit too early to confirm the statement of the title — if you’d have a look at the release schedule (Where did the artwork drops go to?) you can see Alpha 2 is not going to be released until 14 January — and it is probably not wise to switch to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx already, but I still risked the chance and upgraded my production environment to the development release.
So far everything’s going quite fine actually, booting has become a lot less scary now the “Segmentation error” message that was the first thing you saw on boot is gone now and I found a way to solve the issues with the NVidia drivers.
Currently the package ‘nvidia-glx-185′ in Lucid is incompatible with the Xserver — ‘nvidia-glx-185′ provides the virtual package ‘xserver-xorg-video-5′, and that conflicts with ‘xorg’, which wants ‘xserver-xorg-video-6′. Fortunately Collin Pruitt came to rescue with his blog post “Problems With Xorg and the nVidia Drivers“, which explains that you need to use the PPA ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa to get newer versions of the NVidia driver, nvidia-glx-195 is the latest release available from this repository, but legacy drivers are also available and should work on Lucid.
If you still get error messages from the Xserver and you can only run it in the safe-graphics mode you should make sure that the NVidia driver is enabled in System->Manage->Hardware Drivers and try again.
New stuff
Understandingly there isn’t much new in Lucid currently, the most striking difference I found was the new lay-out for the Users and Groups (‘users-admin’) configuration utility. The interface is cleaner and simpler and shows details that previously were limited to the About Me-dialogue. I reckon this is part of Canonical’ effort to make account managing easier and more consistent across the desktop, as outlined in the User Account Management-blueprint.
The Ubuntu Software Center is also being worked on, the most distinguished visual addition so far are the nice breadcrumbs that already received a lot of attention on other blogs.
Usplash is now definitely gone from the default installation and ‘libplymouth2′ is already a dependency of ‘mountall’, we’ll see probably more of that in the future. Currently there is no splash whatsoever before GDM is launched, but this is probably going to change. Keep an eye on the Boot experience work-blueprint for updates on the work being done.
I end this blog post with a Warning: the system might seem stable now, but this is because a lot of the changes still need to be made. Do not use a development release in a production environment unless you’re prepared to face the risks.
Snow stops public life in the Netherlands Comment
You may or may not have wondered why I was online for the most part of the day yesterday. Because it was a regular schoolday, the last regular school day before the Christmas Holidays, in fact. It was because in the North of a country where most people are already exited if there lies just one centimetre of snow that suddenly everything came to a standstill.
In the morning there was more snow than expected already, but transportation was still — somewhat — possible. However, it snowed a lot during the ample hour — just a few minutes slower than usual — it took me to get from my home village Veenwouden — actually Feanwâlden, since the Frisian names have been made the official ones in our municipality at the beginning of this year — to the city of Leeuwarden, which is where my school is, and when I arrived at school I was one of the few people that had made it. Inside there was tea and coffee and outside students were throwing snowballs at each other.
It quickly became clear that it was not doable to give lessons and therefore the day was cancelled. A lot of the buses didn’t show up, or were very slow and the trains had delays as well — later on the day the public transport would be almost completely stalled — but a few friends and I were able to catch a train back home. I left my bike at school, where it will have to stay for the Christmas Holidays because today has been cancelled as well; the Christmas breakfast, the Christmas Service and the Christmas ball.
The morning rush hour was one of the five worst rush hours ever, with more than 670 kilometres of traffic jam in a country with 16-17 million inhabitants, 116.500 km of road and an area of 41.528 km² — 18% of that is water. Many people decided not to show up at work, take a day off or go home early.
This house is For Sale!