What I work on

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 …

more ...

Summer of Code Student Application Deadline

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 …

more ...


The Bazaar Package Importer

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 …

more ...

Project Cambria

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 …

more ...

Ubuntu Distributed Development Overview

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 …

more ...

Kerneloops enabled by default in Karmic

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 …

more ...

Command support in bzr-builder

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 …

more ...

Distributed Development Video

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 …

more ...

Daily Builds

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 …

more ...


Jaunty's almost ready

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 …

more ...


Fixing an Ubuntu bug with Bazaar

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 …

more ...

ppamadison

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 …

more ...

Bazaar branches of Ubuntu

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 …

more ...

REVU

Quality of packages not in Debian

While Ubuntu takes most of its packages from Debian, it does contain a few that are not in Debian, for one reason or another. One common reason is simply that someone wanted a package that wasn't in Debian, and packaged it and requested its …

more ...

Some advantages of having packages in Bazaar

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 …

more ...

Making Intrepid Solid

Making Intrepid Solid

With feature freeze now in effect the bulk of the big changes in Intrepid should now be done. There will still be new features entering the archive with the appropriate exceptions, but the rate will slow as we move forward.

Now we really need to focus on …

more ...

Help needed

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 …

more ...