Ubuntu Lucid Developer Summit First Day Part One

Day 0 – Sunday

Sunday was a relaxing day before the start of UDS. The primary function of UDS is to formulate plans for the next Ubuntu release. But it’s also a great opportunity to catch up with friends who you only usually speak to online. There’s also plenty of time for corridor conversations, quick meetings and plenty of socialising. I don’t remember every conversation I had, but many were very productive. I learn just as much in the corridors of the hotel as I do in the planned formal sessions.

Day 1 – Monday

The day started with plenary sessions in the ballroom introduced by Jono Bacon. First up was Mark Shuttleworth’s plenary in which he talked about the focus for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid). Mark highlighted the importance of maintainability and upgradability. As this is an LTS release we’re going to have to ensure it’s possible for users to upgrade from the previous LTS (8.04) and the previous non-LTS release (9.10) to 10.0 smoothly. In addition Mark suggested that we may put some beta/RC software in the release in the same way Firefox went in 8.04, and that we have to be brave and confident that we can support what we put in 10.04 given it’s supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server.

Mark highlighted some interesting stats including “70% of users are upgrades and not fresh installs (as best as we can tell)” so he suggested we should ensure the upgrade experience is smooth, that we should “make it a treat”. He also said there were about 60,000 contributors to Ubuntu, and that we (attendees to UDS) were around 300 in number, and represented the diversity of that community.

Jono Bacon came back on stage and explained the way UDS works. He talked about the 1 hour sessions we have scheduled, and how efficient we need to make that hour. This was illustrated with the story of a guy living in Africa who walks 3.5 hours to an internet cafe to contribute for 1 hour to Ubuntu, then walk another 3.5 hours back. Jono brought the week into focus and used his talk to coach people on making the absolute most of each session.

Finally Jono introduced the leads of the various tracks and teams represented at UDS. Each lead gave a summary of their aims for this UDS, and how they’d be working during the week:-

Pete Graner leading the kernel track kicked off by describing the ’service’ model approach. Members of his team would be in “virtual teams” (foundations, desktop, server) and be embedded within the other tracks, representing the kernel team. A couple of tidbits Pete mentioned included the proposal to allow “Lucid+1 kernels on Lucid”. Once Lucid – 10.04 (LTS) is released it’s supported for 5 years on the server over that time new hardware is released which may not be supported on the default kernel 10.04 ships with. This plan would allow for kernels built for 10.10 to be run on 10.04, to enable features not shipped in the original LTS.

Robbie Williamson leading the foundations track gave us a shopping list of things his team would be focussing on. This includes boot, installer, software centre, toolchain, grub and security. He re-iterated the plan to implement 10 second boot on the reference hardware of a Dell mini 10 ssd laptop. There will be collaboration between the foundations team and the dx team to help make boot experience quick and clean. There will also be sessions about the Software Centre and some plumbing sessions too.

Matt Zimmerman (Canonical CTO) leads the server track this week. With 8 releases of Ubuntu server it’s grown into a general server OS. Matt was keen to point out that Ubuntu is the “best to use on Amazon EC2″, that it “does private cloud” which “works out of the box”. There would be significant emphasis on infrastructure and testing this week.

Dave Mandella heads the mobile track this week and was very keen to point out that “ARM is the focus” given this is the “3rd cycle of ARM” and that “ARM is in most phones”, it’s a “strong platform” and “we’re supporting it”. There would be focus for the mobile team on device tree, and the browser. Ubuntu Netbook Remix will be renamed Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Marjo Mercado heads up the QA team. He outlined that they would be using a similar approach to the kernel team this week, embedding themselves in other tracks in a service approach. There will be significant “focus on quality due to Lucid being an LTS” release.

Rick Spencer heads the desktop track and was quick to point out that Ubuntu is “Arguably Best desktop available on any technology anywhere”. This provoked cheers from the attendees of course! The focus for the desktop team is to take the high priority work items and get them done first. Rick indicated that “risky things should be done before Alpha 2″, and that the team should “tag risky things”. There’s a focus on making the desktop “sticky”. There’s a lot of new people trying out Ubuntu, and “we want them to stick with it”. Focussing on the “end user perspective” as this needs to be “supportable over the long term”. Rick also recommended that the desktop team should “look out for other teams, what they’re trying to achieve”, for example couch, boot, mobile, and “do an awesome job helping those other teams”.

Finally Jono wrapped up the plenary session by talking about the community track. Some of the sessions for this week will include planning, roadmaps, better representation of locos in Ubuntu and translations. The community track will also look at working more on the LoCo Directory – a web based resource to make it easier to find nearby LoCo Teams.