Ubuntu News

The Ubuntu Server team would like to get your feedback on whether the packages listed below should be demoted to universe or promoted to main.

Since Lucid is an LTS release the Ubuntu Server team conducted a critical review of the current contents of the server related seeds in order to free some space on the -server CD and to reduce the number of packages we’ll be maintaining for 5 years. Some packages are not necessary, might be abandoned and thus should be demoted to universe. Some packages are brought up in main by recommends while they should just be suggested. Some very useful packages are missing and should be promoted to main.

The list of packages considered is tracked in a wiki page and included below.  You can either edit the wiki page with your comments or reply to this thread.

• nis
• elinks
• lm-sensors
• sensord
• cricket
• radvd
• logwatch: logcheck provides the same functionality
• vlock
• lilo
• libxp6
• redhat-cluster-suite: not properly maintained
• virt-manager
• backuppc: bacula is the backup solution in main
• racoon
• ipsec-tools
• siege
• minicom: cu is tiny and trivial to support, but doesn’t support error correction
• openssh-blacklist, openssl-blacklist: needs further consideration by cjwatson
• analog: awstats is also in main – upstream much more active.
• nut-hal-drivers: see Halsectomy

• oidentd
• tdb-tools: for samba cluster
• ctdb: for samba cluster
• acl
• nginx: 6.21 percent market share according to Netcraft
• kernel-package: remove from -server iso

• kernel-package: remove from -server iso (stays in main thanks to platform.lucid/supported-development).

Are you a Linux server expert? Do you love automated testing? Are you excited about the new opportunities the cloud is bringing? Are you familiar with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud? Do you love Ubuntu Server Edition?

In the Canonical QA team we are seeking a self-motivated individual looking to help improving the quality of Ubuntu Server Edition and its related products (Ubuntu EC2 images, UEC, etc.). The position plays a key role in the Ubuntu Server release process and its responsibilities include, among others, writing test cases and test scripts, working with hardware partners and defining and applying procedures for efficient bug triaging.

If you think you could be person we are looking for, read the job description and apply today!

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION from previous meeting

ACTION: ttx to review status of bugs the following bugs for any missing info

• 455625: lacking some reproduction, the Eucalyptus team marked it invalid
• 460085: missing some feedback from the Eucalyptus team, basically the results of their long-standing rampart tests
• 461156: fixed in Lucid, SRU pending

ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication

• Done at: http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/a-selection-of-easy-merges-from-the-ubuntu-server-team/

• Will be sent to mailing list as well

Check blueprint status and progress for the week (jib)

• Feature Definition Freeze is this week.
  • All Alpha2-targed blueprints must be approved by then.

  • All non-Alpha2 blueprints will have at least summary, rationale & user story in the spec, and any notes taken from UDS

• Non Alpha2, but ready for review:
  • other-cloud-providers
  • vmbuilder-multiple-outputs
• To track progress during Alpha2, we will:

  • use http://www.piware.de/workitems/server/lucid-alpha2/report.html for global tracking

  • do a quick summary of status in the meeting for each alpha2 spec, starting next meeting

Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs: http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/team-assigned/canonical-server-assigned-bug-tasks.html (jib)

• Nothing assigned to team

Weekly SRU review (mathiaz)

• eucalyptus “the CC is returning incorrect networkIndex values on describeInstances” [Critical,Fix committed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/454405

• php5 “Need to upgrade integrated zip module” [Undecided,Fix released] https://launchpad.net/bugs/485760

• krb5 “Strange behavior of libkrb5 since karmic …” [Undecided,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/489418

2009 Server Survey announce: http://nicolas.barcet.com/drupal/en/2009-server-survey-announce

Nick Barcet announced the 2009 Server Survey. To improve exposure, any of you that can republish the announce on a loco planet or some other means do relay the info in the next couple weeks. So far, the plan is to keep the survey up at least until mid-january. Nick will shortly send an email to the server ML with the same information.

Open discussion

• Spamassassin – 3.3.0 will hit beta “soon”, Daviey emailed the DM to ask if he wants to work together to get the package updated.

• Mdz & sabdlf covered server specs for Lucid yesterday. Sabdfl was very pleased with the work that was put in.

Agree on next meeting date and time

• Several people would prefer the meeting to be slightly later in the day. ACTION on jos to coordinate with Maria & Kirkland to find a more suitable hour if possible.

• Until further notice, next meeting will be on Wednesday, December 9th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Now that UDS has ended one of the tasks Ubuntu developers focus on is merging packages from Debian. As Lucid will be an LTS release, packages from testing (instead of unstable) will be pulled in. Here is a selection of packages from the Ubuntu Server team that look easy to get you started on merges:

• rabbitmq-server ( main )

• procmail ( main )

• libcommons-attributes-java ( main )

• libaopalliance-java ( main )

• jruby1.2 ( main )

• hsqldb ( main )

• facter ( main )

• corosync ( main )

• aide ( main )

• strongswan ( universe )
• setools ( universe )
• ldapscripts ( universe )
• heimdal ( universe )
• glassfish ( universe )
• boinc ( universe )

Some merges may already have been done. Other may turn out to be sync requests. And if you run out of packages to merge you can just head over to Merge-O-Matic to get the full list of packages waiting for your merging skills!

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION from previous meeting

ACTION: ttx to review status of bugs 455625, 460085 and 461156 for any missing info ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication

Check blueprint status and progress for the week (mdz)

mdz reminded that the list of blueprints is used to track plans for Lucid. The focus is now on drafting the specifications after last week discussions at UDS. Work items should also be added to the blueprint whiteboard so that a burn down chart can be generated during the cycle. Once the wiki page is written and the work items have been defined the status of the blueprint should be set to Review.

All of the blueprints should be ready for review first thing Monday morning.

Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs: http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/team-assigned/canonical-server-assigned-bug-tasks.html (mdz)

Nothing was assigned to the team. Most of the bugs seemed to be SRU-related.

Work items tracking (mdz)

mathiaz asked how to handle work items that can’t be defined up-front as they depends on completion of existing work items. mdz suggested to create work items for each of the proposed changes. If some of them can be skipped, it’s easy to skip them later, but we don’t want to forget any. The most important thing is that the list is at approximately the right level of granularity, so that we make steady progress through the list. Work items need to fit into a 1-2 day chunk of work.

Weekly SRU review (mathiaz)

Only the hardy nomination list had one bug to be reviewed. The last two weeks of fixed bugs have also been reviewed for potential SRUs.

Spamassassin update

ScottK asked about the status of Spamassassin in Lucid. mathiaz replied that Daviey had been investigating the situation with upstream. He also suggested to define work items in the associated blueprint even if the drafter doesn’t plan to do the work. Documenting what needs to be done may help in getting things moved forward by other people.

Agree on next meeting date and time

kirkland to discuss a new time slot with maria.

Next meeting will be on Wednesday, December 2nd at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

• kirkland to add a recipe covering virsh to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/VirtManager: Done

• nurmi to investigate bug 455625: Deferred

ACTION: nurmi to help investigate/validate/fix bugs 455625, 460085 and 461156

• Daviey to investigate spamassassin status in lucid: Done

• mathiaz to update the fridge: Done

UDS: server track planning

mdz will schedule the server track before the end of the week. To make sure he doesn’t miss your blueprint, please name it server-lucid-* and set him as approver. There can be two parallel sessions in the server track (as with other tracks), so you should subscribe to the blueprints you are interested in to try to avoid scheduling conflicts.

Merging, merging, merging

Lucid is open for merging, which is a great way to learn packaging for starters. Since compiling a list of easy merges seemed to help last time, mathiaz will compile it again this time and blog about it.

ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication

Open Discussion

nijaba mentioned bug 450044, which allowed to spot that ubuntu-server was not a bug contact for euca2ools (now fixed). Most of the crew is expected to enjoy the great(?) texan winter in Dallas next week.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next week is UDS Lucid, so next meeting will be on Wednesday, November 25th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week's Bug Day target is *drum roll please* Nautilus!

* 50 New Bugs need a hug
* 50 Incomplete Bugs need a status check
* 34 Confirmed Bugs need a review
* 17 Bugs to be send upstream

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!
* Thursday 12th November 2009
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20091112

Are you looking for a way to start giving some love back to your
adorable Ubuntu Project?
Did you ever wonder what Triage is? Want to learn about that?
This is a perfect time!, Everybody can help in a Bug Day!
open your IRC Client and go to #ubuntu-bugs (FreeNode)
the BugSquad will be happy to help you to start contributing!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good
work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the
Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

We are always looking for new tasks or ideas for the Bug Days, if you
have one
add it to the Planning page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/Planning

If you're new to all this, head to
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

• kirkland to finish adapting help.ubuntu.com VM recipe(s?) to use libvirt: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/VirtManager

ACTION: kirkland to add a recipe covering virsh to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/VirtManager

• nurmi to investigate bug 455625

ACTION: nurmi to investigate bug 455625

UDS Lucid preparation

ttx created a wiki page for 10.04 input from server team. mathiaz reminded that there will two tracks dedicated to the Server team like the last UDS.

Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs

A discussion about adding python-software-properties to ubuntu-standard took place. soren noted that if the request was to add the package to the default server install adding it to ubuntu-standard may not be the best place. zul will look into that with the Fondation team.

ScottK mentioned that it looked like courier was pretty badly broken at the moment and in need of at least a serious triage effort.

Eucalyptus Karmic SRU

mathiaz announced that a first round of bug fixes for UEC in Karmic had been prepared. Packages are being uploaded to -proposed. Help in testing them will be welcome once they’re accepted by the SRU team.

Daily EC2 images

smoser reminded that ‘daily’ images of karmic for EC2 are now automatically published twice weekly. Image removal is now covered by the new policy In short, 5 builds of each release/arch are kept in ‘testing’ (daily builds). When a build ‘falls off’, it is made private for 30 days before deletion. This policy covers kernels and ramdisks in ‘-testing’ also. The code is available in LP – feedback is welcome!

spamassassin review

ScottK pointed to the state of spamassassin in Lucid: the upstream project hasn’t done a new release in over a year. Questions about its fate (leave it stale, switch to svn snapshot, other solution) should be discussed during UDS.

ACTION: Daviey to investigate spamassassin status in lucid

Agree on next meeting date and time

ACTION: mathiaz to update the fridge

Next meeting will be on Wednesday, November 11th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week's Bug Day target is *drum roll please* Gwibber!

* 61 New Bugs need a hug
* 7 Incomplete Bugs need a status check
* 17 Confirmed Bugs need a review

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!
* Thursday 05 November 2009
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20091105

Are you looking for a way to start giving some love back to your
adorable Ubuntu Project?
Did you ever wonder what Triage is? Want to learn about that?
This is a perfect time!, Everybody can help in a Bug Day!
open your IRC Client and go to #ubuntu-bugs (FreeNode)
the BugSquad will be happy to help you to start contributing!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good
work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the
Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

We are always looking for new tasks or ideas for the Bug Days, if you
have one
add it to the Planning page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/Planning

If you're new to all this, head to
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs

We’ve come to the end of another exciting release cycle, friends – and we have a great release to show for it. Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released! Read more about its great new features in the press releases for the http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-910">Desktop edition and Server edition, and browse the technical overview.

At the same time, the 9.10 versions of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio were released.

Please also see the Release Notes for a list of known problems to watch out for on upgrade or install.

The Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) beta is ready for your downloads! See http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta for a list of mirrors, and for suggestions on how to participate in testing for the Ubuntu 9.10 final release.