You improve your relation with a project if you invest in it, and that is good for the quality of the project and Ubuntu. I would like to make you aware of a great way of being nice to upstreams: Adopt-an-Upstream. Slick name! But what is it? It is part of something a group of people from the community team lead by Jorge Castro have been working on ince the last UDS. The goal was to make it easier for upstream developers to find out how Ubuntu works and to improve the relations and synergy between up- and downstream.

At the wiki a starting point was created for upstreams where they can find an overview of the information that matters to them. Furthermore, a guide was created for upstreams that would like to get included in Ubuntu, but would like an overview of the requirements, the dos and the don’ts.

For members of the Ubuntu community there is something else: Adopt-an-Upstream is a way of taking care of a specific project that is included in Ubuntu. It’s mainly about being the communicational glue between up- and downstream. A comprehensive list of tasks:

• watch what’s going on upstream
• make sure new releases get to Ubuntu
• forward patches from Ubuntu to upstream
• communicate release schedules and announcements from Ubuntu to upstream

Summarised: act like a bridge between Ubuntu and the upstream project. Do you have an application you really like, or you really know a lot of, please consider to adopt it. Of course you don’t have to do it all on your own. Especially for large — be it in size, functionality or the number of bug reports — applications this can be a burdensome task. Those applications can be adopted by a group of people.

Next week Thursday 11 March at 17.00 UTC and on Thursday 18 March at 23.oo UTC Jorge Castro and I will be giving a one-hour session in #ubuntu-classroom at Freenode about Adopt-an-Upstream. We will explain the project more thoroughly and show how you can help out. Also, we will mention the Adopt-a-Package programme, which could be considered a part of Adopt-an-Upstream. If you consider getting involved in either one of these projects, please join one of the two sessions!

Questions? Please leave a comment!

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.

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.

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.

In order to allow testing of this new version I’ve uploaded both versions to a PPA. Devhelp 2.28.1 is in ppa:qense/devhelp and 2.29.2 — 2.29.3 was a mere version bump –in ppa:qense/devhelp-testing. If you find a bug in the first one, it should be reported against Debian since the only change I made there was adding an entry to the changelog.
For 2.29.2 I copied the ‘debian’-directory from 2.28.1 and removed all patches. Apart from that the only change I made was running ./autogen.sh before uploading to make sure the necessary files were there.

If you’ve got a question, please leave a comment.

If you want some help with getting started, Ubuntu Bug Control has got a mentoring program designed for getting people acquainted with triaging. At BugSquad/GettingInvolved is explained how to request a mentor:

• sign the Code of Conduct
• Although not really required, read the How to Triage guide. It does help to read it 
• request a mentor, via an email to ubuntu-bugcontrol@lists.launchpad.net. In this email, please provide an area of specialisation, if you have any.

I would like to add that including the username of your Launchpad account is most helpful as well, since that makes it easier for us to scan what you’ve done so far.

As always, questions can be asked at our IRC channel, #ubuntu-bugs at FreeNode.

If you’re already quite familiar with triaging and want to help new people, you’re most welcome! Please sign up as a mentor by leaving a little note at the ubuntu-bugcontrol mailist and add yourself to the list at BugSquad/Mentors. This page contains also more information about what is expected of you.

A good way of finding tasks to work on is the list of packages without direct subscribers — people that watch a package for new bug reports and keep it in shape — composed by Brain Murray. The packages on this list don’t have someone to look after them, so they often have a lot of ‘dead wood’, bugs that are old and haven’t been commented on for a long time. You could ask if the problem is still there, and close the bug otherwise.

There are probably also a lot of old bugs that are fixed in the Ubuntu release on which development is focussing right now. These bugs, like all bugs that are fixed in the development version of Ubuntu, should be set to Fix Released, unless they are specifically about a bug in a specific package version in a stable release. Look at Bugs/Status for more information about the meanings of the different bug statuses.

Next to the dead wood there are the normal bugs, you can handle these like you would handle any other new bug. Because these bugs are often not frequently being looked after you’ll won’t have much trouble to find one that’s easy to start your triaging career with.

Some people would like to triage all bugs for a whole package. In that case you adopt a package, which means you first triage all bugs reported against your chosen package and then subscribe to the bugmail for that package to keep an eye on it. More information about that is at BugSquad/AdoptPackage.

Triaging bugs is a very good way to help Ubuntu, get involved!

The upgrade itself was smooth and didn’t cause any problems. I didn’t finished the clean-up part of the upgrade due a lack of time. When I started the system after the update everything still worked apart from GNOME Do, so nothing big was broken.

The first thing I noticed was that the background colour you always see before the wallpaper is loaded now has disappeared. This colour is the one you can set in the Appearance settings to replace a wallpaper and was previously always shown. If your wallpaper and/or login screen had very different colours, it would look very ugly. I’m glad it’s gone, good change!

Performance

The second thing I noticed was that the system felt a bit more sluggish. I’m not sure whether this was caused by the video card driver upgrade from 180.11 to 180.35 or is a general decline. At first I thought it was caused by a change in the Compiz settings — especially since the window shadows seem to have darkenend — but the settings seemed unchanged. It could still be caused by Compiz too though, 8.10 uses version 7.8, whereas 9.04 alpha 5 is using the 7.9 git version.
Windows become unresponsive more often and get that grey layer from Compiz, backspace lags more frequently too and it takes longer for programs to start. Especially Firefox(3.0.7) is badly affected by this. This can’t all be graphical lag.
Any suggestions on finding the cause(s) of this problem?

On a related note: the memory leak in seahorse-daemon seems gone for now. Good work, developers! Something I did find

Other regressions

Enough on the performance. Something that bugged me a lot more was the disappearance of my beloved GNOME Do dock. It did run, and the empty space at the bottom of the screen was indeed there, but it didn’t contain any dock at all. Searching at Launchpad reveals that it’s caused by the way the plugins. Chris Halse Rogers says:

“This is an artefact of the way GNOME Do uses mono-addins. When you enable them in the preferences window, the plugins are copied from the repository that’s distributed in the gnome-do-plugins package into ~/.local/share/gnome-do/plugins-$ABI_VER. What’s worse, mono-addins won’t overwrite the plugins already in there!”

A work-around is removing the plugin directories in ~/.local/share/gnome-do/.  You can re-enable plugins afterwards, but I’m not sure what happens when new versions of stuff are released.
LP# 330025

Evolution seems to have stopped responding. You can select the folders in the sidebar, but the main screen won’t change. After a while the sidebar becomes unresponsive and turns grey. Closing the program normally isn’t possible, you have to force it to. After a while it won’t even start anymore!

Empathy‘s MSN plugin stopped to work. For MSN support I have to use Pidgin. I hope a fix for this regression is pushed soon, I’d really like to use one application for all my chatting.
LP# 338891

Speaking about Pidgin: while using this IM-client again after a while I found out that the Last.FM plugin, something I would really like in Empathy too, after a while creates one pop-up per applicable account, which can’t be normally exited. When forcing them to exit the whole Pidgin client crashes.
LP# 338904

There were also some dependency problems, probably caused by not all required packages being built correctly yet. So can’t Anjuta be upgraded at the moment because it overwrites some files in libgbf-1-2 and are a lot of Python packages still broken due the switch to Python 2.6.

Some Nice stuff

Something I’m really fond of is the new notification system. It’s now a joy to see Banshee starting with the next song, it’s really an improvement.

I’m not sure what the Indicator Applet can do, though. It does show a mail envelope when Pidgin and/or Evolution are/is running, which shows a list of the names of the two programs when you click at it.
Evolution starts minimized and listed in the list of the new applet. The programs can be activated by clicking at the titles.

I also like the possibility of customising your font dpi settings to improve monitor display. I’m now using 100 dpi on this monitor; which makes text easier to read.

The volume applet also got an overhaul. Double-clicking the applet now mutes your computer instead of summoning the volume control. For that you’ll have to use the context menu. The slider has been made horizontal and under it a check-box for muting and a button for launching volume control have been added. Volume control itself hasn’t been changed, something I had expected, since some screenshots of earlier alpha’s showed a different one.

Conclusion

Other people already complained about 9.04 introducing a lot less than could be reasonable be expected from a new release. Although I do think some nice things were added to this version — being able to get the latest version of software from the official repositories rather than PPAs is nice — I tend to generally agree with those people. If you compare it to previous releases, this version doesn’t add that much. Yes, Ubuntu works with a six months release schedule, but that hasn’t stopped use before. FeatureFreeze was already at February the 19th, so nothing big is going to land before the release.
When Ubuntu 9.04 was announced the expectations were running high, but it turns out that it’s just an in-between release. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. I hope 9.10 is going to make up for this release, which, although it’s certainly not a bad one and improves Ubuntu definitely, is quite moderate.

Anyway, I’ve joined 5 A Day and Bugsquad again and requested a membership for the Ubuntu BugControl team. I still have to talk to bdmurray, he’s currently marked as away in IRC, so I’ll have to wait or mail him.