Phew, finally I get down to writing day 5 overview, a few days after UDS. Generally, I write the previous day’s blog post on the next day. After day 5 though, I had to get work (yeah, on a Saturday). On Friday, I decided to tackle my power trouble by going outside for the hours that I know in advance I won’t have power. Overall, good idea, but they decided to cut power at different times. Sigh.
First thing in the morning was a call with Daniel Holbach to discuss about the Cleansweep Project. Skype kinda gave us trouble and we ended up using Facebook chat in the end to discuss stuff.
A round up in the morning of all the community stuff including what we have to go ahead. My memory is faint about what we talked, but I vaguely remember everyone summing up the week and the progress that was made. Also, someone was playing music from Benjamin’s laptop, which included the Titanic song. Fun times 😉
Ubuntu Women Session
A session I didn’t want to miss. This session was very goal oriented from all the other sessions. I liked the mentorship discussion and revival of the whole thing. I’ll probably sign up to be a mentor. I’ve already helped a few friends that I know through UW in other teams like Bug Squad. The idea was not to replace the other mentorship options but to work with the others and to give a list of folks on the UW wiki who can be contacted for particular stuff.
I decided to take a break from the nest session to plan for Operation Cleansweep, a project that I have volunteered to coordinate. I put up wiki pages and came to the realization that we needed more time to get things together. I’d rather have a proper start with documentation everything ready rather than having to wait. I pinged Daniel and we decided to postpone start date to May 24th, 2010.
Lightening Talks
As usual James Tantum rocked us with pictures of slides since most of it were using slides. I forgot a lot of them, but ones that rocked including one by Jonathan from Launchpad team about ‘How to be an evil overlord’ or something to that extent, Popey’s Momubuntu talk, James Westby’s talk about launchpadlib (and yes, try try try until you succeed), a talk from Google Chrome guys about how speed matters, Chris Johnston talked about Classbot, Alan Bell about etherpad (we overloaded the pad 😉 ), and more that I’ve forgotten. I’ll wait for the videos.
Travis Hartwell talked about how he wanted a way to pull the source for all the dependencies of a package with one command instead of typing out many different commands. I was pretty sure sed or awk could do something coupled with apt-cache. My sed foo is pretty low and I asked my good friend Mackenzie Morgan wrote something up for this. Travis, this one’s for you buddy
apt-get source $ (apt-cache depends gwibber | awk '/Depends/{ print $2 }')
That command would get you all of Gwibber’s dependencies. You can change that package name to get the source of dependencies for any package. This source will be downloaded into the current folder when you’re running it from a terminal. Perhaps someone could make the whole thing more prettier, but hey, this is a start 🙂 Thanks again maco!
Advocate the use of daily builds
One of the projects that Daniel Holbach has been assigned for this cycle. Its been given a high importance and I realize the reason. A daily build means every time you write new code, it will be built for you and a whole lot of folks can test it for you and give you bug reports. Various improvements to LP were discussed including a rollback option among the others.
Ubuntu News Team
Amber is the chief editor of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, so I attended this one hoping it would be interesting and it was! A lot of discussion about unifying teams, etc. There was a thought of doing away with Fridge which I stopped right away. Reminding you folks again, We WANT the Fridge! Well, it wasn’t a serious consideration but a thought someone had. All in all, they made some tough calls, which will happen internally. Also, Fridge is going to be in WordPress soon, so that should help make a lot of things easier. I don’t remember who, I think Joey, will be working with the Design Team for a new theme, etc for the Fridge.
Closing Session
Finally, the UDS comes to a close. Everyone had great fun for a week and did lots of work. Most people were tired and close to burn out (yeah, from all the staying up late in the bar or out partying 😉 ). Seriously, it was tiring. Even from remote, I was burned out. Last 2 days I’ve been so tired. Hopefully I can recharge this week. All the track leads summed up their tracks. Important stuff include Robbie confirming that 10.10.10 could be a release date, pending TB approval. He was talking about how much time each cycle has had and it seemed okay. Jaunty cycle only had 25 weeks, so for 10.10.10, we’ll have only 23 weeks and it seems possible. Scott, talked about btrfs and how it may be the default option for Maverick. Keyword there being ‘may’. Scott blogged about what needs to happen for that. Leann summed up the kernel track decisions. I didn’t understand much of it, so skipping that. Design track, Desktop track, and cloud track also had a small summary which I don’t particular recall. This why I should perhaps write blog posts then and there. Oh yeah, now I remember one decision from desktop, Chromium will be the default browser for the netbook edition. Finally Jono summed up the community track. A huge list of summing up. Most of which I think I’ve already written in the previous posts. He announced Project Cleansweep. Well, he announced it as Project Babu and how it was renamed to Project Cleansweep. Well, I wonder why I even bothered to oppose if he was going to call it Project Cleansweep a.k.a. Project Babu 😀
The final quote from Jono ‘Lets get seriously drunk people.’ He did say he was kidding, but the tone he said it in, was awesome. Marianna arranged for a treasure hunt and she was given a small token of appreciation from the community for all the hard work she did over the week. Finally UDS is over!
Now, time to get to work.