I’m probably taking the blogging thing too far with 3 back-to-back posts, but whatever. One big reason I missed out on going to this UDS was my passport had expired and I hadn’t renewed. I finally decided, it was time to re-apply and set out to the nearest Bangalore One to get a form.
It took me 1 whole hour and around 20 km of roaming around to find the place. Absolutely no one knew the place when I asked around. Even a policeman I asked gave me wrong directions. Eventually, I ended up doing everything else on my things to do and was on the verge of giving up when I located the place. Turns out, its less than 4 km from my place. Sigh. I circled around for an extra 10 km. Before you talk about Google Maps, yes I tried it out there and it didn’t know what I was talking about.
Overall, Thursday was frustrating in terms of power availability. I kept on getting power cuts and missing sessions. The first half of the day was pathetic. I lost power halfway through the community roundtable and could get back online during the Maverick Governance Changes and Needs session. I can’t believe I missed the BugSquad Roadmap! Again, I lost power halfway through Debian Healthcheck. Sigh. Today, I’ll just go outside to some internet cafe for the first half. I have a call scheduled and after that I’ll just go some place for 4 hours.
Community Roundtable
Another general discussion at the roundtable, I lost a bit of that thanks to the power situation.
Maverick Governance Changes And Needs
This session was very interesting. Though I’m not on any councils, we had a lot of folks from different councils and we were exploring the possibility of working the CIVS system into Launchpad. Jono has a task for that and perhaps we’ll have an awesome voting system by the end of the cycle. Most of the council elections use the CIVS system. We even used the same system for the Beginners Team Council voting.
Debian Healthcheck
This session started with Jorge introducing the good parts and the bad parts. Zack, the DPL, was in the session and he gave some good suggestions on how to go about uploading to Debian. A lot of packages designed for Ubuntu don’t go into Debian and Zack particularly said that they wanted them. He explained how we could upload to experimental and sync from there. We’ve agreed to do this. Personally, I agreed to work on Gwibber in Debian sometime back, I guess its time to actually start working on it. In this case, I had spoken to Ken earlier and he specifically said he was happy to help me. Any delays are my fault and my lack of time. As I said earlier, I lost power halfway through this session.
‘Collaboration with Ubuntu’ Plenary
Stefano Zacchiroli, or Zack, the current DPL, talked about Collaboration with Ubuntu from the Debian point of view for the first plenary. This was the most awesome plenary. Zack totally changed my vision of Debian Developers. There are more than 1000 Debian Developers and he mentioned that though the option against Ubuntu exists, its a corner case. His talk encouraged Ubuntu to collaborate with Debian all the time. Yes, you heard me right. Debian wants us. Uploading to Debian would give all the other distros that fork from Debian a chance to get those packages. He also mentioned that if we have a bug and patch, he wants Debian to get the patch too because DMs and DDs are the people who know the package best. A growing trend that is being noticed is Ubuntu developers being Debian maintainers and Debian developers! Wow, that’s interesting. All in all, it was a very impressive talk and I’m waiting for the videos to be uploaded to watch them. Again, special mention to James Tatum for the pictures. We all love you James!
‘What does this bit do?’ Plenary
James Scott a.k.a. Keybuk talked about the plumbing layer. The past, the present, the future. Yes, it was like sitting in ‘A Christmas Carol’ about the plumbing layer. Some of the stuff flew about my head since I didn’t know much about it. But it was nice listening to it all the same. He explained about upstart and how its planned to be awesome in the coming releases. Can’t write more since I didn’t understand much about it.
In between this session, I was also in the Ubuntu Women Project meeting, so I was only listening in partly.
Crystalizing Project Cleansweep
I’ve agreed to coordinate this project. Project Cleansweep is about cleaning up all the bugs with patches by Maverick release. It needs a lot of work and lot of identity to be successful. Stephan and Daniel Holbach is going to be helping me along with Brian Murray and Jono and everyone else. We want to get a lot of community attention to this project and use the ‘buckets’ that we use in Reviewers Team into coordinating patch review for all the patches in Ubuntu. I’ve arranged for a call with Daniel to discuss the specific actions that we need to be taking. I’ll be posting more updates as time goes on.
I gave up after this. All the roaming around in the morning and the 4 days was too much for me. I switched off IRC, got off the audio feed, and started planning for Project Cleansweep and what needs to be done. I hope to have a productive call with Daniel today.
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