Development Update
Huzzah, time flies when you are having fun. We are in week 15 of the release already and have 13 weeks left until release. Next week, according to the plan, we will get Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 out. As you can imagine, everybody is trying to get their current work into Precise, so it is well-represented and can be played with and tested.
With Mark Shuttleworth’s major announcement that Ubuntu’s Desktop will soon offer an additional way to interact with your applications through a more innovative and modern “HUD” or “Heads Up Display” we took the opportunity to highlight some of the blog posts covering this major development in the roadmap of Unity: PCWorld, The Register, The Inquirer.
An upload which got a lot of interest was gnome-control-center 3.2.2-2ubuntu4. OMG!Ubuntu! probably covered it first: Unity now has configuration options for you.
Events
Developer Membership Board Meeting – Monday January 30, 2012 19:00 UTC
The Ubuntu Developer Membership Board will have its regularly schedule meeting to address general agenda items and review applications of Ubuntu developers to be granted upload rights.
Ubuntu Developer Week – January 31st – February 2nd
The Ubuntu Developer Week is an event that takes place over a period of three days which aims to educate people who are interested in Ubuntu Development while better equipping existing developers with techniques on packaging and holding sessions covering various teams and what they do. See below about more information.
Things which need to get done
If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:
- There’s Merges that need to be done (main, restricted, universe, multiverse).
- Also is the Ubuntu Mozilla team looking for help, so if you’re excited about Mozilla and what’s happening there, join IRC, talk to the guys on #ubuntu-mozillateam on irc.freenode.net.
- And then there’s Security bugs you can take a look at, the team is a friendly bunch and they’re incredibly helpful in getting your patch reviewed.
- There are bitesize bugs.
Spotlight: From your Ubuntu developer with love: Ubuntu Developer Week
Ubuntu Developer Week will start in five day, from Tuesday, 31st January to Thursday, 2nd February there will be heaps of online IRC sessions all allowing you to step behind the scenes and find out how things work. We managed to get loads of Ubuntu developers and other experits on board to explain, teach, entertain and answer your questions.
Joining in is pretty simple, use an IRC client (or web client) or just install and use lernid to connect. In one channel the session is taking place, while in a second channel discussions can happen or questions can be asked. This allows uninterrupted, action-packed sessions, where questions can be carried-forward, while discussing and having a good time with others.
If you have a look at the list of session you can see how this event is full of win. Let’s run through them real quick.
Packaging
We will kick off with two hours of introduction and getting a development environment set up, have a session about Dos and Dont’s and learn more about incorporating changes from other projects into Ubuntu. On the second day we will find out how to update packages to new versions, how to use Ubuntu Distributed Development to merge changes easily and find out how to work with Debian, Ubuntu’s most important upstream project. On the last day, we will toy around with building packages locally, find out what to bear in mind when writing changelog entries and check out automated packaging with ‘pkgme’.
Quality Assurance and fixing bugs
Beware: lots of goodness ahead! On the automated testing front there will be automated User Experience testing and an introduction to our Jenkins automated testing infrastructure. On day 2 we will learn how to use the development release in a sane manner and how to go about fixing small bugs in Unity. The last day will be full of bug fixing action, so hold tight: we will fix Desktop bugs, learn how to triage Desktop bugs, also what to do with internationalisation bugs and what the general bug life-cycle looks like.
Writing Code
We will kick off with an overview of Ubuntu’s technologies, move forward with Unity Lenses, how to write them and get more information into Unity’s dash. Day 2 brings you up to speed on how to get your app into Ubuntu, and a speaker whose birthday and getting up really early did not stop him from introducing you to HTML and CSS. On our last day you will find out more about how to write Lenses this time with Singlet, also we will have a great session about pair programming and code review in the cloud, how to make use of Ubuntu One’s U1DB and how to wrap your apps around Ubuntu One’s services.
Ubuntu projects
Ubuntu has grown dramatically, which is why you probably want to learn more about all the projects it has spawned. On our first day, our speakers will bring you up to speed on Edubuntu, our Ubuntu flavour for schools and have a session about Ubuntu TV and how it all works. Day 2 will bring you into the fold when it comes to deploying services into all kinds of scenarios using juju charms. Our last day will introduce you to the Ubuntu Documentation project, how it works and how you can help out.
Speakers from all parts of the globe put effort into this event and they will share their experience there. We look forward to seeing you there, join in or read the logs afterwards.
Get Involved
- Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
- Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
- Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.
Find something to work on
Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.
- Help out with fixing packages that don’t build anymore.
- Help out with security bugs.
In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.
Getting in touch
There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.
- Be interactive and reach us most immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
- Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
- Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Google+, Identi.ca or Twitter.