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

Just took the plunge, using the excellent bandwidth and local mirror at UDS: `Just took the plunge, using the excellent bandwidth and local mirror at UDS: ` Nothing blew up in my face, so it seems today is a good day to die^Wupgrade.

On a rather calm ten-hour flight to Orlando I once again did some pygobject, udisks, and Apport hacking (It’s scary how productive one can be when not constantly being interrupted by IRC, email, etc). One more visible change amongst these was finally fixing a five year old five-digit bug to integrate apport-retrace into the GUI, now that it does not potentially wreck your installation any more. If the apport-retrace package is installed, the crash detail dialog will show a new “Examine locally” button: ... Read More

7 years ago, The Ubuntu 4.10 “The Warty Warthog” was announced. A huge congrats to the community, Canonical, and especially Mark for getting so far from “there” to “here”. This brings back old memories of my first conference in Oxford in August, the great-great-grandfather to what is UDS these days. Back then, there was no company, no Launchpad, no Blueprints, no work items, no detailled plans, just a bunch of ideas, BoFs, and this was a third of the entire crowd: ... Read More

Ich habe gerade Gestatten, Elite zu Ende gelesen (ging schnell, hab erst gestern angefangen). War im Grunde genommen nichts wirklich Neues, was man nicht irgendwie schon gewusst oder geahnt hätte. Aber die gut recherchierte und bewiesene Vehemenz, mit der sich die Oberschicht abschottet und sich selbst als eine Art neuer Adel erhält und das vielbeschworene Leistungsprinzip untergräbt war dann doch schon recht schockierend für mich. Eine der “Elite”-Schulen die dort unter die Lupe genommen wird — Schloss Neubeuern — haben wir auf unserer Sommerradtour gesehen. ... Read More

Hot on the heels of the PostgreSQL 9.1.0 release I am happy to announce that the final version is now packaged for Debian unstable, the current Ubuntu development version “Oneiric”, and also in my Ubuntu backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10, and 11.04. Enjoy trying out all the cool new features like builtin synchronous replication or per-column collation settings for correctly handling international strings, or an even finer-grained access control for large environments. ... Read More

PostgreSQL 9.1 has had its first release candidate out for some two weeks without major problem reports, so it’s time to promote this more heavily. If you use PostgreSQL, now is the time to try it out and report problems. We always strive to minimize the number of major versions which we have to support. They not only mean more maintenance for developers, but also more upgrade cycles for the users. ... Read More

The tool to reprocess an Apport crash report to produce a symbolic stack trace, apport-retrace, has been pretty hard to use on a developer system so far: It either installed the packages from the crash report, plus its debug symbol packages (“ddebs”) into the running system (which frequently caused problems like broken dependencies), or it required setting up a chroot and using apport-chroot with fakechroot and fakeroot. I’m happy to announce that with Apport 1. ... Read More