I’d like to renew my call for participation: please pick an Ubuntu bug, find docs if you need them, attempt to fix it and explain to me what you did, what you tried, what worked, what didn’t in an email to daniel holbach ubuntu com.

I’ll post about the result in a couple of days.

Ubuntu Developer Week is back again, which means five days of action-packed IRC sessions where you learn more about hacking on Ubuntu, developing Ubuntu and how to interact with other projects.

We’ll have a fantastic time from July 12th 2010 to July 16th 2010, great speakers, interesting sessions, lots of good questions and great people who get to know each other.

If you’re new to Ubuntu Developer Week and what it is, check out the general page, how to join in and how it all works.

Our sessions cover:

• Getting involved with Ubuntu development, becoming a Kubuntu Ninja, Authoring Upstart jobs, Working With Translations, Having fun with Packaging QA
• How Daily Builds work, Operation Cleansweep, Setting up a validation dashboard, Working with Merge Proposals, Working with Django, Adopting an Upstream, Forwarding Bugs and Patches Upstream
• How to work with Debian, Ubuntu Server, Xubuntu and Edubuntu goodness, Kernel Triage
• Widgetcraft, QT Quick, QML
• Desktop goodness, Application Indicators, Rocking Papercuts
• Lots of FUN

DIGG IT!

Guess who brings the awesomeness to you? It’s these people:

Daniel Holbach Harald Sitter Sébastien Bacher Steve Langasek Rohan Garg David Planella Jonathan Riddell Iain Lane Zygmunt Krynicki Nigel Babu Pedro Villavicencio Jorge O. Castro Ted Gould Jeremy Foshee Didier Roche Vish Thierry Carrez Charlie Kravetz Martin Albisetti Michael Hall Jonathan Carter Andrea Colangelo Andrea Gasparini Lorenzo de Liso Rhonda

If you haven’t seen loco.ubuntu.com yet, click here.

It’s what we call the LoCo Directory and where more and more data of our Local Community teams goes. In the beginning we started with just a simple list of LoCo teams and additional data they can put there. After some time we added the functionality to put events in there too. It’s awesome and the work the whole team put into it is just amazing. The good thing is that we all hang out in #ubuntu-locoteams, do code reviews together and learn from each other. It’s a fantastic project.

To continue the great story and plan our next steps a bit, we’ll meet in #ubuntu-meeting (irc.freenode.net) on July 8th, 14:00 UTC.

Topics we’d like to talk about:

• explain the project to new interested contributors
• review the list of open bugs and reprioritise for the next 2 or 3 releases
• general Q&A

If you know a bit about Django, Python, Web development or are keen to learn about it and be part of a fantastic project that powers a great and fantastic part of our community, be there and talk to us.

(Also if you microblog about this and other LoCo stuff, use the #locoteams hashtag.)

State of things: Operation Cleansweep

Operation Cleansweep is in full swing and we’re slowly but steadily working our way through 2000 patches. You should be part of this! It’s easy and a lot of fun. Join #ubuntu-reviews on irc.freenode.net and just check out our review guide. The process is quite straight-forward.

I thought it’d help to have a look at a few patches together and see how the process works, so here we go. Consider these few bugs and what was done there:

• 544242 This bug was opened with a patch provided by the reporter. It was subscribed by the subscription script with the patchtag. The patch was forwarded upstream, and recieved the patch-forwarded-upstream tag. After upstream accepted this patch, it recieved the patch-accepted-upstream tag and is ready to be fixed in Ubuntu.
• 33288 The initial patch tag was changed to patch-needswork based on upstream comments.
• 523349 The patch was forwarded to Debian and accepted there (patch-accepted-debian).
• 544242 The patch was forwarded to Upstream GNOME (patch-forwaded-upstream) and after some discussion accepted (patch-accepted-upstream) there.
• 462193 The patch was forwarded to Debian (because it just contained changes to the debian/ directory) and accepted there.

That’s not too bad now, is it? Join in on the fun and make Ubuntu and upstream projects rock even harder!

Watch out for the Ubuntu Developer Week announcement, we’ll have a couple of great sessions about this topic too!

We’re at 14% now, but we need help. Join Operation Cleansweep today.

Last week saw these changes:

• Total bugs with patches: 2270 (-5)
• Reviewed patches: 310 (+20)

Details:

• Bugs with ‘patch-needswork’: 80 (+3)
• Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-upstream’: 119 (+11)
• Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-debian’: 33 (+6)
• Bugs with ‘indicator-application’: 44 (0)
• Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-upstream’: 48 (-2)
• Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-debian’: 12 (0)
• Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-upstream’: 11 (-1)
• Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-debian’: 1 (+1)

We want to make it easy to get involved in Ubuntu on a broad basis, but also make it easy to just go ahead and do something as a drive-by contribution.

At UDS we talked a lot about making it easy to just go and fix a bug that bothers you. We did a couple of improvements to our documentation and some other bits here and there.

What I now need is your feedback. It’d be super-sweet if you never just went and fixed a bug in Ubuntu, you now just tried to do that. I don’t want to give too many instructions, because I want to see how you go about finding docs, which tools you use, what you do to make it happen, so the instructions are thus:

• Wear your hardhat.
• Remember an Ubuntu bug that bothered you or find one you’d like to work on
• Take notes. It’s important that you note down what exactly you tried to do, what worked and what didn’t work. We want to fix the process harder and make it super-smooth.
• Add a comment to this blog entry or mail dholbach at ubuntu dot com with your findings.

Thanks a bunch in advance. This is an awesome opportunity for you to not only fix a bug in Ubuntu, but also help fix the process involved.

I’ll report the findings in a couple of weeks.

… sounds like a daunting challenge, but actually it’s quite doable, because we’ll be a lot of people and we’ll have help from upstream project and the Debian project to make an informed decision about these fixes.

The goal of Operation Cleansweep is to have a look at all the bugs with patches in Launchpad and guide them through the patch review process. Come, join us in #ubuntu-reviews on irc.freenode.net and help to make all the black go red in the countdown meter below:

If you’re not afraid of having a look at patches, trying them and getting in touch with other people about them, this is a fantastic way to get involved!

I’m very happy with the plans of the Ubuntu NGO team this cycle. In short we want to:

• have more regular meetings – once a month
• get an overview of NGO-related blueprints in maverick (http://hexmode.openweblog.com/538142.html)
• come up with specific questions for interviews
• work on stats/feedback from the interviews – find out what works very well for NGO – tools they’ve built on their own
• put together spec and blog, post to mailing list announcing Manifest and create branch to make it easier for others to contribute
• document set-up and install for common applications for NGOs
• create Facebook group
• investigate if there’s “NGO Planet websites” somewhere
• find list of groups of websites and list of organisations
• See if NGOs would consider document their work – best practices

If you’re interested in stuff that non-profits, NGOs and charities do, in Ubuntu and making the world a better place. Join the team and the mailing list and contribute!

For a few development cycles we have been working on reorganising the Ubuntu archive and developer permissions. There were a lot of changes that were suggested and discussed and it proved to be quite a bit of work.

We completed a huge chunk of it and because there are many misconceptions about it, here’s a list of changes that are implemented today:

• Ubuntu developers can apply for upload rights for one or more specific packages. This is very interesting for upstream or Debian maintainers or simply people who are interested in just a very narrow selection of packages.
• We created a list of package sets. This concept works great for teams that are interested simply in a subset of packages, ie: kubuntu, ubuntu-server, ubuntu-desktop, etc. You can query them via the Launchpad API. Also can you apply for upload rights for those.
• Because of these changes, we merged ubuntu-main-sponsors and ubuntu-universe-sponsors into ubuntu-sponsors. Here a view that explains who can upload which packages. (Process docs.)
• Also did we merge motu-sru into ubuntu-sru. (Process docs.)
• Also did we merge motu-release into ubuntu-release. (Process docs.)

These changes will give us much more flexibility in giving teams more liberties to maintain packages efficiently. Also do the changes above make it easier for contributors, because for things like sponsorship, SRU and release decisions they just get in touch with one team, no matter which package set the package maybe be in in the end.

Thanks everybody for your hard work on this!