Ubuntuwire: tools for every developer
The UbuntuWire project, created to get developer services to the community by community members, is the culmination of lots of hard work from Ubuntu Developers within the community outside Canonical. The aim is to provide hosting and support for the many community-developed tools that help to make Ubuntu run smoothly, particularly for those working on Ubuntu’s Universe and Multiverse.
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“people.”: SSH access with shell scripts, cron and Ubuntu-related file uploads without having quotas, bandwidth, or CPU restrictions. A genuine replacement for the (restricted access) “people.” server previously available and finally on par with what people.debian.org offers!
ssh username@people.ubuntuwire.com
is all that is needed for any Ubuntu developer already registered on Launchpad and with their SSH (secure shell) key uploaded. Log in today!
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qa.: Quality Assurance. Automatic testing run on a scheduled basis to will help improve the quality of future Ubuntu releases.
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lists.: Mailing lists for anything Ubuntu Development related. Quickly, efficiently and without any hassle.
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REVU: The legendary web-based package checking tool. New contributors can do a real “dput” upload with and have the new package syntax checked. Even if you are not an Universe maintainer (MOTU) yet , your “NEW” packages can be forwarded to the main archive after checking and a review by fellow developers! For an introduction, hop over to theREVU pages on the wiki.
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Ubuntu search: customised Google search, making it easy to find those *buntu related answers. The next time your are stuck, you’ll know where to go first, without having to trawl through pages and pages of unrelated Google results!
The history of Ubuntuwire
The community network was founded 18months ago, back in February 2006. Ubuntu developers wanted a quick way to compile and test for several architectures (i386, AMD64 and PowerPC). One of the first pieces transferred across to the new hosting was REVU (“review”) the system used to check new upload for the community supported “Universe” and “Multiverse” components of Ubuntu. REVU was transferred across in August this year has most recently been joined by a customed Google search covering Kubuntu and other members of the Ubuntu family.
The developers behind UbuntuWire had a long desire to provide a single location of the set of tools available to developers to work and help improve Ubuntu. In the past most of the available servers behind Ubuntu have been funded and run by Canonical, with the downside that access has only been available to those developers directly sponsored by Canonical and not to the vast majority of developers within the Ubuntu community.
The solution in the mean time has been the spreading out of lots of individually developers tools across lots of servers. Ubuntuwire now provides a central location to pull together All the testing services that have been independently developed and keep them in a single, easily accessible place. A big difference is that network speed to the servers has been increased and stability improved. Now the servers are hosted by the Technical University of Nürnberg instead of lots of home internet connections!
The Future
By coordinating the administration of available servers, and providing consistent linking to recommended services, the project hopes to fill the gap that was previously left between what Canonical has been able to provide and what works best for efficient workflow within the Ubuntu development community.
UbuntuWire is growing. There is a hope to restore the email, jabber and ‘ppc’ and ‘amd64’ shell access that used to be available. For any technical question or request or help out, get in contact with the MOTUs and Core developers over on #ubuntuwire.
