Half a year ago I blogged about the changed expectancies and processes to improve quality of the development release which we discussed at the UDS in Orlando: A promise that we don’t break the development version, regressions are not to be tolerated, acceptance criteria for Canonical upstreams. For that we introduced the Stable+1 team, actually did some reversions of broken packages, our QA team set up rigorous daily installation image and upgrade tests, and the code development process for Unity and related project was changed to enforce buildability and passing automatic tests with each and every change to trunk. ... Read More

I just released a new pygobject version 3.1.92, for this week’s GNOME 3.3.92. This was my first-ever GNOME release (yay!), so please bear with me. One highlight of this release is the new pygtkcompat module, contributed by Johan Dahlin. It provides backwards compatibility to pygtk far beyond to what the Gtk overrrides do, and also includes some shims for the old static webkit, gudev, and other modules. You can, and have to, enable them individually: ... Read More

Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption in Ubuntu is to provide an easy tool to hunt down which programs and devices are to blame for inordinate power consumption. powertop’s interactive mode is pretty good for this if you are sitting in a train and want to tweak some knobs to max out battery life, but we need something more reproducible and noninteractive for developers who want to file proper bug reports. ... Read More

Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption is to identify processes which keep waking up the disk even when the computer is idle. This already resulted in a few bug reports (and some fixes, too), but we only really just began with this. Unfortunately there is no really good tool to trace file access events system-wide. powertop claims to, but its output is both very incomplete, and also wrong (e. ... Read More

PackageKit has a “WhatProvides” API for mapping distribution independent concepts to particular package names. For example, you could ask “which packages provide a decoder for AC3 audio files? $ pkcon what-provides "gstreamer0.10(decoder-audio/ac3)" [...] Installed gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-0.10.30.2-2ubuntu2.amd64 GStreamer plugins from the "good" set Available gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-0.10.18-3ubuntu4.amd64 GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set This is the kind of question your video player would ask the system if it encounters a video it cannot play. ... Read More

Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better. ... Read More

On my 8 hour train ride to Budapest last Sunday I finally worked on making libxklavier introspectable. Thanks to Sergey’s fast review the code now landed in trunk. I sent a couple of refinements to the bug report still, but those are mostly just icing on the cake, the main functionality of getting and setting keyboard layouts is working nicely now (see the example script).

I’m the release engineer in charge for Precise Alpha 1 which is currently being prepared. I must say, this has been a real joy! The fruits of the new QA paradigm and strategy and the new Stable+1 maintenance team have already achieved remarkable results: The archive consistency reports like component-mismatches, uninstallability, etc. now appear about 20 minutes earlier than in oneiric. CD image builds can now happen 30 minutes earlier after the publisher start, and are much quicker now due to moving to newer machines. ... Read More

Apport and the retracer bot in the Canonical data center have provided server-side automatic closing of duplicate crash report bugs for quite a long time. As we have only kept Apport crash detection enabled in the development release, we got away with this as bugs usually did not get so many duplicates that they became unmanageable. Also, the number of duplicates provided a nice hint to how urgent and widespread a crash actually was. ... Read More

I arrived back home in Augsburg, from last week’s Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL. As this is a quality/LTS cycle, we pretty much already knew in advance what to do (bug fixing, bug fixing, some boot speed, and did I mention bug fixing?), but still we had many highly interesting and exciting sessions this time, not so much about what we are going to do, but how we are going to build 12. ... Read More