gmane.linux.ubuntu.motu

Regarding MOTU FAQ

Bhavani Shankar R — 2012-05-21T17:08:31

Hi team,

With regards to  the above subject, there was a discussion in one of
MOTU sessions in UDS about updating/cleaning up the present MOTU FAQ
page.

So I have come up with the content as in the below page

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/FAQ/New_Draft

Any suggestions/comments/additions welcome

Regards and Thanks,

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Daniel Holbach — 2012-05-21T13:40:44

Hello everybody,

On 19.04.2012 16:44, Daniel Holbach wrote:

at UDS we had two great meetings and many of your participated remotely
as well. It was very encouraging to see that many of you were passionate
about MOTU and had ideas to bring back energy to the team. Thanks
everyone for that!

If you have a look at

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/other-q-motu-bof

you can see some of the ideas which were discussed and work items which
were agreed on this cycle.

First of all we are going to have regular meetings again, in which we
should be able to hash out more specific plans. See the separate
announcement for more details on the meetings.

Have a great day,
 Daniel

Reinstated MOTU Meetings

Daniel Holbach — 2012-05-21T13:36:45

Hello everybody,

at UDS we decided to hold MOTU meetings again. For now we will meet
every 2nd and 4th Thursday in #ubuntu-meeting at 16:00 UTC.

The first one this cycle is going to be at

  24th May, 16:00 UTC

and we hope to see you all there.


We will use these meetings to coordinate development activities
throughout the cycle and give development sub-teams a venue to give
updates and coordinate their work.

If you'd like to bring up a topic for discussion, please add it to
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Meetings

Have a great day,
 Daniel

Re: MediaWiki package maintainers: please join mediawiki-distributors

Andrew Starr-Bochicchio — 2012-05-16T18:03:13

Sounds like a great initiative. Currently, Ubuntu syncs our mediawiki
package unmodified from Debian. I'd encourage you to contact the
maintainers there as well: Mediawiki Maintenance Team
<pkg-mediawiki-devel-XbBxUvOt3X2LieD7tvxI8l/i77bcL1HB< at >public.gmane.org>

Thanks,

MediaWiki package maintainers: please join mediawiki-distributors

Mark A. Hershberger — 2012-05-16T14:45:54

Executive Summary:

Please join mediawiki-distributors
(https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-distributors)
so that we can work more closely together to make a better, more secure
MediaWiki package.

Details:

Last week, one of the maintainers for Fedora's MediaWiki package
opened a bug about licensing issues with different parts of the MediaWiki
package (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/36747).

The problem has been addressed, but I'd like to use this opportunity to
start working more closely with MediaWiki packagers from all Linux
distribution packagers.  Daniel Zahn has been scanning existing MediaWiki
installations (http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/) and we've found an
incredible number of sites with old, probably insecure installations.

In the past we (MediaWiki hackers) have discouraged people from using
packages provided by Linux distributions since they were out of date or
worked sub-optimally.  We felt people who used packages were not getting
the most out of their MediaWiki installation.

While this may have been true, it has left a huge number of MediaWiki
installations out-of-date and not likely to be upgraded soon or at all.

To get around this problem, I'd like to start working more closely with
packagers of MediaWiki for different Linux distributions.  My hope is
that we can then ask people to install a MediaWiki package with their
package manager and be confident that it will remain (relatively)
secure.

I set up the mediawiki-distributors mailing list
(https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-distributors)
for this coordination.  It should be This list should be very low
volume and be directly related to the issues of those who package and
distribute MediaWiki.  You should feel free to post about any problems
you come across packaging MediaWiki, but I'll try to keep all
discussion on-topic.

I'm interested in your thoughts.

TOR package update !

ZEROF — 2012-05-16T13:56:34

Hi people,

I write you to see if, and when you can update Ubuntu repository for TOR.
Because as i checked new version fix some security problems etc...hope that
you can add their new package version 0.2.2.35-1 for natty in your
repository !

Thank you !

http://www.backbox.org
http://www.my-exploit.com

Re: Hello world ! My Introduction

Daniel Holbach — 2012-05-14T12:51:31

Hello Joseph,

On 07.05.2012 21:19, Joseph Mills wrote:

welcome to the Ubuntu Development world and thanks for your introduction!

Did you succeed in finding things you were interested doing? If not, we
are going to announce some bug fixing initiatives in the next few weeks
which will hopefully help you (and others) finding stuff to work on, if
you haven't found anything of particular interest to you already. :)

Have a great day,
 Daniel

Re: new virtualbox version for 12.04 available

Alessandro Menti — 2012-05-13T08:48:06

Il 12/05/2012 12:18, Werner Gerritsen ha scritto:
Hi Werner,
all Ubuntu updates can be divided - generally speaking - into two
categories.
1) Stable release updates: these are updates that fix high-importance
bugs (e.g. security vulnerabilities, loss of data, unusable
applications). They require a rigorous testing procedure and the change
made must always be the smallest possible one (only the lines of code
fixing the bugs are added or modified, no additional functionality is
introduced), so that the chance of causing further errors is minimized
(this is especially important in case an Ubuntu installation is part of
a corporate/business environment, where reliability is critical). (See
[1] for details).
2) Backports: these are updates that add new functionalities, but may
change the way features work or not be fully stable. For this reason,
they are not enabled by default, and the repository must be added
manually in Software Sources. (See [2]).

There are some exceptions to this classification, such as the Firefox
updates.

Because of the need to ensure stability detailed above, the existing
version of VirtualBox will probably not be updated, unless there are
serious bugs. However, this package could be a good candidate for
backporting.

First, you should ensure that the latest release of VirtualBox is
present in the development version of Ubuntu. In this case, a quick
search ([3]) reveals that the relevant update has already been done, so
there's nothing else to do for that.

Second, install the ubuntu-dev-tools package, open a terminal and use
the "requestbackport" tool (available from Ubuntu 12.04 onwards) to file
the backport request. The tool should guide you through the process and
send the request to Launchpad, where the Backporters Team will be able
to process it.

(As a side note, if you don't mind using proprietary software and you
can comply with the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation license [4],
you could also add the official Oracle repository to your software
sources - see [5], especially the section "Debian-based Linux
distributions").

Hope this helps,
Alessandro Menti

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBackports
[3] http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/quantal/virtualbox
[4] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL
[5] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

new virtualbox version for 12.04 available

Werner Gerritsen — 2012-05-12T10:18:34

Hi people

I saw that a new virtualbox version
virtualbox-4.1_4.1.14-77440~Ubuntu~precise_i386 for Ubuntu 12.04 is
available.
My question to you:

  * How goes this version to be released in the ubuntu repository for 12.04?
  * What I do make this happen?

I can do a manual installing of it, but I think it should be automated
via repository so no other person becomes trouble with th eold version.

Thank for a short answer

Best Regards
Werner

Werner Gerritsen
Pâturage Dessous 31
2716 Sornetan

Re: sks 1.1.3

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre — 2012-05-10T20:28:19

Hi,

Have you sent this to the Debian maintainer as well? I can already see
that there is already a bug open in Debian for updating the package to
version 1.1.3; so it's probably worth contacting the maintainer to see
if they need help.

We get the Ubuntu package directly, without changes, from Debian, so
as soon as changes land there, it will be easy to sync and get into
Ubuntu.

Regards,

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl-GeWIH/nMZzLQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org
4096R/EE018C93 1967 8F7D 03A1 8F38 732E  FF82 C126 33E1 EE01 8C93

sks 1.1.3

Jens Leinenbach — 2012-05-10T17:38:51

Hi,

At the moment, nobody seems to care about the bugs for this package for
Ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/sks/+bugs

I am on the SKS developer mailing list and posted a SKS 1.1.3 patch for
Debian/Ubuntu so that it should be easy to create a package now.
If you are interested in an up-to-date package for Debian, please get
this patch for SKS 1.1.3:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/sks-devel/2012-05/msg00018.html

Let me know if you need help.


Cheers
Jens

Hello world ! My Introduction

Joseph Mills — 2012-05-07T19:19:23

Hello there I am very happy to have found this mailing list and am very
happy too help out anywhere that I can.

some things that you might want too know about me

########################
Ratings of my strengths
########################

Programming languages
################
******
fluent
******
none yet

************
Intermediate
************
c

C++

gcc

g++

lua

ruby

C#

make
******
Poor
******
Java
D


Web design
##########
Fluent
******
php
HTML
CSS
Perl
markdown

************
Intermediate
************
JavaScript
jquary
asp classicasp.net
************
Poor
************
coldfusion


Scripting
#############
Fluent
********
AWK
Bash
zsh
POSIX
CSh
Perl
sh
************
Intermediate
************
python
ASH
LISP
XUL
****
Poor
****
Power Shell




I would like to help anywhere that I can if there is EVER anything
that needs too be done (grunt work) I am more then happy to help out.
If anyone could send me as many links as they can think about too help
me with well helping out. I would really like that.


Thanks for taking the time too read this and I look forward to helping
out in anyway possible.

thanks

Joseph Mills


http://wiki.ubuntu.com/josephmills

https://launchpad.net/~josephjamesmills

Thanks again.

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

txwikinger — 2012-05-05T18:41:17

Servus Daniel,

This topic seem to crop up for every UDS lately :-)

I remember having expressed my feelings already a couple of times about 
this, however, here we go again.

If you look at my wiki-page on Ubuntu, you will see that I originally 
stated my goal was to become a MOTU.
However, over the last 5 year, the goal post seem to have been moved 
constantly and a couple of life-changing
events in my life certainly give me more time for it.

Nevertheless, I have created/updated/maintained about 60 packages in 
that time. However, because of different reasons, I felt less and less 
compelled to pursue MOTU membership.

In some way, it seemed to develop more to be an award/trophy to get the 
"badge". I am not interested in that. The reason to be a MOTU for me is 
the responsibility/ability to be able to help, not to get another patch 
for the Ubuntu-Eagle-Scout Uniform. When I first got involved, people 
were invited to be MOTUs. I understand that that process was maybe not 
so objective, however, the way of application felt even less objective 
due to no public objective criteria.

Given, perception is subjective, and objective it may be different now, 
however, perception reality for whoever has the perception.

Furthermore, I worked often on KDE packages which have been in the main 
archive. Hence, MOTU would not really made a difference, and we often 
heard to rather become Kubuntu-devs than MOTUs. I also have to say that 
the workflow seemed more inclusive in the Kubuntu team, so even without 
upload rights, I was always able to contribute easily.

In addition, I have found I was able to contribute by using my own ppa. 
Due to this, it felt for the last couple of years a lot easier for me 
and my limited time, to work around the inability to upload as a MOTU, 
and instead of using time not available in my life to rather spend the 
time to be constructive in the areas I have access to.

Not every Ubuntu contributor has unlimited time available. So if you 
want to attract people like me, you might want to consider how to allow 
people to more efficiently be able to contribute. If I have to do 100s 
of packages in a couple of month to meet some criteria, it is not 
possible for me to meet.

Anyhow, just my 2cents... hope it helps,

Ralph (txwikinger)


On 12-04-19 10:44 AM, Daniel Holbach wrote:

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Michael Bienia — 2012-05-05T13:00:19

Hello,

 
At much as I don't like the idea myself (being a long-time MOTU and like
to keep MOTU as tradition), but perhaps it gets slowly time to
"dissolve" MOTU (or parts of it like lists or IRC channel) and merge it
into the more general dev "resources". I'm not saying that MOTU should
stop doing what it is doing, but to continue doing it in those "bigger"
teams.  This moves shouldn't necessarily happen during quantal but
perhaps during the r-series or s-series if the trend of the last
series continues (less fresh MOTUS, existing MOTUs get sucked up into RL
or other tasks).

- the MOTU IRC channel:
  The traffic is much lower than compared to a couple years before (when
  I joined MOTU). Currently the few traffic is mostly only two
  categories:
  - development release related
    This traffic could move to #ubuntu-devel which isn't high-traffic
    anymore either.
  - packaging questions
    As those questions are currently split between #ubuntu-motu and
    #ubuntu-packaging (and sometimes happening in both channels at the
    same time), it would be good to merge this traffic into one channel
    (#ubuntu-packaging).

- the MOTU mailing list:
  The list is very low traffic and sort of dieing. There are only really
  a few really MOTU-related topics. The other mails are either requests
  for packaging new versions or bug reports. Both should be better filed
  as bugs and those mails are seldom answered or result in any tasks
  performed.
  The few really MOTU-related traffic could move to the ubuntu-devel
  mailing list (if it isn't already CCed there).

- the MOTU LP team
  This should be kept as it's still performing its function and will so
  for the forseeable future. Although ArchiveReorg tried to merge it
  into core-dev, this didn't happen and I don't expect that the status
  of MOTU will change very soon (during r-, q- or s-series).


I think we have to be realistic: the good times of MOTU are past, MOTU
won't die in the next 3 Ubuntu releases, but I don't expect that MOTU
gets a flood of new MOTUs either.
IMHO the traffic on the IRC channel and mailing list don't warrant to be
seperated anymore, it should be about time to think into merging them
into more general channels or lists.

Michael

Re: dfu-programmer 0.5.4 v.s. 0.5.1

Alessandro Menti — 2012-05-04T12:57:17

Hello Rafal,
thanks for your report.

As this list is meant only for discussion and not for bug reporting, I
suggest you file a bug at Launchpad (see [1]), so we will be able to
keep track of it and forward your report to the creator of
dfu-programmer if we're able to reproduce it.

(In the meantime, I have looked at the bug tracker for dfu-programmer
and have found a similar problem occurring with another chip - [2],
perhaps something like that is occurring in your case as well.)

Thanks,
Alessandro Menti

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dfu-programmer/+filebug
[2]
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3409559&group_id=147246&atid=767783

dfu-programmer 0.5.4 v.s. 0.5.1

Rafal Powierski — 2012-05-04T10:52:34

Dear Package Maintainer (Team)

there is a problem with dfu-programmer for "precise"
rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ uname -a
Linux rafal-desktop 3.2.0-24-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 08:43:22 UTC 
2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ dfu-programmer atmega32u4 version
dfu-programmer 0.5.4
rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ sudo dfu-programmer atmega32u4 erase
rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ sudo dfu-programmer atmega32u4 flash cdc.a90
Error while flashing.

***it is not working
***but the package from ubuntu 11.10 is working...

Removing dfu-programmer ...

Unpacking dfu-programmer (from dfu-programmer_0.5.1-1_amd64.deb) ...
Setting up dfu-programmer (0.5.1-1) ...

rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ dfu-programmer atmega32u4 version
dfu-programmer 0.5.1
rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ sudo dfu-programmer atmega32u4 erase
rafal< at >rafal-desktop:~$ sudo dfu-programmer atmega32u4 flash cdc.a90
Validating...
4618 bytes used (14.09%)



Best Regards,
Rafal

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Daniel Holbach — 2012-05-04T08:59:30

Hello everybody,

thanks Andrew for reviving the thread again. :)

On 04.05.2012 02:05, Stefano Rivera wrote:

I agree with this sentiment. What MOTU I feel lacks most is a sense of
team spirit. Sure, MOTU consists of a lot of people, who know and value
each other, some of you found friends here. Still a general sense of
joint achievement is missing.



Maybe we should set ourselves some goals again, and track their progress
in MOTU meetings. We haven't done any of those meetings in a long while
and I feel they might help a lot to agree on things we want to do
together. It also wouldn't limit the chance to discuss and plan to one
UDS session you might or might not make it to. :-)

When I mention 'goals' above, I'm referring to things like bringing down
the number of open *verse merges, handling the libxyz transition, and
maybe teaming up with the Debian QA team to sort out some of the more
pressing issues identified by lintian.

One piece of feedback we have received in the Dev Advisory Team was that
newcomers are looking for specific targets to work on. To me it sounds
like working together on some of these initiatives would kill a couple
of birds with one stone. From an organisational POV this shouldn't be
too much work either.



I could imagine that more social cohesion and joint achievements can go
a long way here.

Have a great day,
 Daniel

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Andrew Starr-Bochicchio — 2012-05-04T01:18:20

Well, I'm glad to see that my ping to this thread generated some
discussion. I went ahead and registered:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/other-q-motu-bof

Thanks!

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Benjamin Kerensa — 2012-05-04T01:02:40

I hope to apply for MOTU during the Q-Cycle and my motivation is in fact
to help with
some of the "gardening" that Stefano speaks of along with getting more
needs-packaging
work done. I think it would also be interesting to mentor other
individuals interested in the
path to becoming a MOTU.

I'm still waiting for the right opportunity to apply but maybe this
cycle maybe next... I guess
I will know when the time is right but I would love to be apart of the
group and helping it evolve.

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Stefano Rivera — 2012-05-04T00:05:17

Hi Andrew (2012.05.03_20:59:19_+0200)

I agree with that reasoning. I don't think we have much of a team
identity, rather than just being a bunch of people who care about
unseeded.

It feels wrong to have to attract members by quilting them into helping
us, or make helping us a pre-requisite for them getting things done.
But I don't know how we should attract the type of people who enjoy
archive gardening.

Personally, my catalyst for MOTUing was wanting to get a package into
Ubuntu in a hurry before lucid released. It went through Debian, but
wanted to make sure I could help it along as much as possible in Ubuntu,
as a freeze was imminent.  So I sat down and learned how to do some MOTU
things, did a few merges, and discovered this was a whole lot of fun.


I like to think I spend a fair bit of time on this, and when it comes to
chatting, I think most of us do. When people make the effort to get
involved, we're quite good at this. The IRC channels are very friendly,
and the patch pilots (not that MOTU can claim credit here) are making
sure everything gets reviewed soonish.  Sure, not everyone who does some
uploads sticks around, but I assume some people find it's not their
thing.

I think the problem is that we aren't getting that many new faces.
Even when do get people saying they want to help, most of the time, we
don't have a good project for them. Without a personal motivation to get
a new package in or something like that, I think it's harder to find the
energy to get into it.


We (the DMB) do apply some pressure on PPU applicants, but by the time
they've got to us, it's too late the to persuade them that they should
become MOTUs. And yes, PPU serves a purpose, many of them probably
shouldn't become MOTUs.


I think that's a fairly good description of us these days.


Not as far as I know, please do.

If we didn't have a MOTU session, it'd be a sign that it's all over.
Then again, a sad MOTU session isn't much better :/

SR

Re: What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

Fabrice Coutadeur — 2012-05-03T20:22:04

Hi,

I'm not going to UDS either, but I wanted to share some thoughts about
the MOTU team with you:
I think that MOTU has still a great role to play in keeping the
Unseeded part of the archive in a good shape, to ensure that the less
looked part of Ubuntu is still usable. There are a lot of people that
depends and uses unseeded applications  and this is also part of
Ubuntu.
In that sense, I see MOTU more like a kind of 'QA' team than 'developpers'.

My only concern is about new comers: we are loosing people because of
real life events (I'm less active than before because of that) and I
don't feel like we are able to replace them.
I first came to Ubuntu because I wanted an app to be packaged for
Ubuntu and I thought that the right way was to help first with other
packages to get some credibility before having it uploaded.
Now, the 'recommended' path is to go thru Debian, meaning that we
redirect possible new contributors to Debian. I know that having
people just dropping some random application in Ubuntu without
maintaining it afterward is not good either, but I feel like we are
loosing some possible direct contributors that way.

My 2 cts.

Fabrice

2012/5/3 Scott Kitterman <ubuntu-NQ6842lX5deaMJb+Lgu22Q< at >public.gmane.org>: