Gauvain :: Blog

L'AIL, Association Isépienne du Libre organise du 7 au 12 Mai 2007 leur semaine du libre qui (je cite)

a pour but de présenter et de faire découvrir les logiciels Libres à une majorité d'élèves, professeurs et visiteurs ne les connaissant pas ou peu.

Ce sera l'occasion pour moi de faire une petite présentation des avantages des logiciels libres, et une bonne occasion de me souvenir pourquoi je suis toujours utilisateur de Linux ;)

REVU is the web tool we use to review packages proposed by Ubuntu community packagers. Since the end of Edgy development period, the number of packages waiting there for a comment as increased a *lot*. According to several persons who tried to get a package included on Ubuntu, it seems to be very difficult to achieve this (see comments on bugs 104654 and 106854). Let's be honest, we (MOTUs) have a serious problem.

Serious because the opinion that users have on MOTUs might become worse and worse if we don't find a solution.

Maybe the main problem is to find why the packages list on REVU is so huge. We thought (and most of us still think) that lack of human power is the reason. I'm sure it's not. We are more than 60 MOTUs in the team, only 5 or 6 of have done reviews recently. The reasons I see, as a reviewer, are:

• reviewing can be boring. When you've already looked at dozens of packages, writing "please update to gutsy, standards-version are x.y.z, ubuntu version should be..." once again is just discouraging. These elements are obviously part of the things newcomers don't necessarily know and that should be reviewed. Giving comment access to MOTU hopefuls (only MOTUs can comment on REVU for the moment) would allow them to practice on reviewing, and would allow MOTUs to spend some time on the packaging details.
• no easy way to follow up. When a package update or a comment is done on REVU, a mail is sent on the motu-reviewers list. So we receive mails for *everything* that happens. It's hard, or at least not really convenient to see what happens on the package you reviewed, especially if you've reviewed a bunch of them in a day. It won't be easy to implement, but I'm sure that using LP to be subscribed to the packages you've reviewed, to be mailed (with a debdiff attached) once an update has been done, etc... could make the package tracking easier.
• packagers behaviour.
  • Have a look at the dates of commented packages on REVU. Some of them has been commented months ago, are almost ready to go in the archive, but are not updated! What could we do in this case?
  • Please bug us! When I've uploaded my first packages on REVU (during breezy dev cycle IIRC), I was on IRC as soon as possible to ask for reviews. If packagers don't tell us about their packages, we won't look at them. Show us that you care about your packages.
  • When a reviewer comments a package and finds 4 things that need a fix, a new package upload with only 1 change is useless and more annoying than everything else.
• we (MOTUs) don't know everything. I've never reviewed C# nor java packages because I know nothing about these languages and their policies. It's certainly a blocker. In some cases, we need to have specialized reviewers (BTW, why do we have so much C# packages on REVU?).

I don't pretend that all these reasons are good ones, all this needs discussion and reflexion. I only would like to make the Universe world a really cool place to work on. Including new packages is one of the most used way to get involved in Ubuntu development, let's not make things worse than they are now.

PS: bddebian has done such a great job on reviews! Thanks Barry!

I've updated the blog to the latest Dotclear beta. The url have not been kept so update your feed reader :)

Je viens de tomber sur cet effrayant article (qui date de 2004, certes).

Plus d'un million d'entre nous vont utiliser ce genre de machine pour les présidentielles 2007, et je ne pense pas qu'on ait plus de garanties de sécurité (sécurité au sens large : bugs, failles matérielles, qui me dit que le code n'est pas écrit en faveur de quelqu'un – code propriétaire, évidemment –, que se passe-t-il en cas de coupure de courant...) qu'en 2004.

J'ai du mal à faire confiance aux candidats, si en plus je ne peux pas être sûr que mon vote soit réellement pris en compte comme je le pense, la crise d'anarchie ne va pas tarder à arriver ;)

NB : Je pense que j'aurais la même réaction si le code était libre.

Linutop is a small computer designed to browse the internet (but you can actually use it to do a lot of things: a small server, a presentation box, an ssh client when your wife steals your laptop...).

Laurent and Fred who work on the Linutop project have chosen to use Xubuntu as the default distribution. It's provided on a bootable USB stick. It's not exactly a default Xubuntu version, but a slightly modified Edgy desktop image. It comes with the AMD Geode graphic driver installed , a modified default configuration, the possibility for the user to save his settings, less applications installed...

I you have the occasion to test it – or even better, the occasion to buy it :) – don't hesitate!

I've just release XfKC 0.0.2 (bug fixes release).

I've just released XfKC 0.0.1. It still has some bugs, but works ;)

More infos...

#ubuntu-fr-classroom est la "salle de classe" Ubuntu, où 3 sessions sur les notions de packaging/compilation ont eu lieux. C'est aussi le point de rendez-vous de tous les geeks ubunteros francophones envieux de discuter développement d'Ubuntu.

Notre racoon97 national a cité ce chan dans un article sur Ubuntu Edgy, paru dans le magasine Linux+DVD de Novembre 2006 ! Bien plus qu'une simple allusion à un canal IRC, c'est aussi montrer que la communauté Ubuntu est vraiment active, intéressée et intéressante.

Grand merci à Jean-Michel (oui, oui, il s'appelle comme ça notre racoon97), et souhaitons longue vie à #ubuntu-fr-classroom ;)

Ma connexion internet m'ayant lâchement abandonné samedi pour la session sur CDBS, le cours est reporté à ce vendredi 3 novembre 2006 à 18h00 UTC (19h00 heure française).