I'm keen to try and write more about the things that I work on as part of my job at Canonical. In order to get started I wanted to write a summary of some of the things that I have done, as well as a little about what I am …

The deadline for students to submit their applications to Google for Summer of Code is imminent.

If you were waiting for the last minute to submit, that is now!

If you are mentor and have the perfect student you have been working with, check with them that they have submitted …

As you've probably heard by now, Ubuntu has been accepted to Google Summer of Code this year. We're currently at the point where we are looking for students to take part and the mentors to pair with them to make the proposal. We have some ideas on the wiki, but …

The Bazaar package importer is a service that we run to allow people to use Bazaar for Ubuntu development by importing any source package uploads in to bzr. It's not something that most Ubuntu developers will interact with directly, but is of increasing importance.

I've spent a lot of time …

David, it's interesting that you posted about that, as it's something I've been toying with for the last couple of years. For the last few months I've been (very) slowly experimenting in my free time with an approach that I think works well, and I think it's time to tell …

You may well have heard about it (on this blog especially), but though I spend lots of my time involved with it and talking to people about it, there may be some people who aren't entirely sure what we are doing with the Ubuntu Distributed Development initiative, or what we …

One of the new things that is going to be in karmic is that the kerneloops daemon will be installed and running by default. This tool, created by Arjan van de Ven, watches the kernel logs for problems. It has a companion service, kerneloops.org which aggregates reports of these …

I've just implemented the most requested feature in bzr-builder (Hi Ted), command support.

Sometimes you need to run a particular command to prepare a branch of your project for packaging (e.g. autoreconf). I think this should generally go in your build target, but not everyone agrees, and sometimes there …

I recently gave a talk to some fellow Canonical employees about where we are with the "Distributed Development" project. For that I made a screencast showing some of the Launchpad Codehosting features that you can now use for Ubuntu. Thanks to the Launchpad team for making this happen. We're still …

As well as seeing use of PPAs for providing bug fixes, new upstream versions, proposed packages, testing etc., we are also seeing them used for providing daily builds of packages. For instance Fabien Tassin provides daily builds of lots of Mozilla-related packages and snapshots of Chromium in his various PPAs …

Jo Shields posts about his intention to propose switching Rhythmbox for Banshee in Karmic. (I'm trying to convince him to apply to be a MOTU, or at least an Ubuntu member, so he can be on Planet Ubuntu.) He's not the first to suggest it, but he is in the …

Jaunty just froze a little bit more, with the last few normal uploads being done. From here on in it's mainly about getting the CDs perfect for release, which will hopefully go smoothly.

Over the last few days there have been a number of people working on Universe to get …

The second installment of Developer News went out on Monday, and boy was it hard work. It's great to see so much going on, but it does make preparing the summary time consuming. Thanks a lot to Stefan Lesicnik for his help in preparing this one. As well as having …

Yesterday as part of Ubuntu Developer Week I gave a session entitled "Bazaar for Packaging". At the last minute I decided to change the session somewhat, so that it would show how things would work if you were to use bzr to modify an Ubuntu package once Distributed Development is …

After an idea from bigon on #launchpad today I threw together a tool using the Launchpad API. I've christened this tool ppamadison. It does the same thing as rmadison, but for PPAs. You tell it who's PPA to examine, and what source package to get the information for, and it …

This morning I announced the availability of bzr branches for every source package in Ubuntu.

This is exciting, and I hope the first step in revolutionising the way we develop Ubuntu. I believe it will lead to an increase in efficiency, and give us interesting new ways to collaborate.

There's …

After some discussions in the last week or so I decided to finally get around to something that I have been promising for ages: making a screencast about what is good about having packages in bzr. It's basically just me rambling for almost 20 minutes, so don't expect anything slick …

The server team asked me to write a blog post to ask for help removing the use of "multiuser" as an argument to update-rc.d. This used to be the way that we sped up the shutdown time a little, but we've changed the approach now.

This is great, as …