In-between sessions I had discussions with many many folks and I’m happy to say there was renewed and much interest in the Packaging Guide.

Heroes like Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, Leo Iannacone, Joseph Mills and others have contributed suggestions, code, ideas and text bits to improve the packaging guide, and that’s on top of what was discussed in the session we had.

During the session we identified a number of areas of focus. In no particular order, there’s:

• Include the Packaging Guide in Ubuntu
• Translate it in as many languages as possible
• Merge the Wiki documentation into the guide
• Do user-testing of the guide
• Do an editorial review of all the content

Also in many other sessions, the Packaging Guide was usually deemed the best place to educate new contributors about how things work, which is great.

What happened this week (outside of sessions) already was:

• Andrew trimmed down our CSS usage a lot.
• Andrew reviewed debian/copyright, so we get closer to get it into Ubuntu.
• Leo worked on nice new side-bar.
• I split up the package into various variants of the guide.
• I removed some embedded java script bits.
• …and lots more.

This level of activity is fascinating and bodes well for a great 12.10 cycle.

What I love most about the guide is that everybody can help us if you have just a little bit of interest in Ubuntu Development. Let’s have a quick look at some bugs you could help out with, if you’re interested.

Here’s some ‘bitesize’ bugs, I hope we can you interest in:

1. #885315 traditional-packaging.html is empty, but linked to
2. #885317 add info how to get in touch with other developers, find work, etc
3. #890273 Explain that it’s helpful to split up big changes into multiple commits
4. #922576 Encourage new contributors to check out code and toy around
5. #792495 apt-cache included in basic packaging software section
6. #841946 Advertise ‘setup-packaging-environment’ in getting-set-up article
7. #950227 Use ‘bzr lp-propose’ instead of ‘bzr lp-open’
8. #973887 patches-to-packages refers/links to non existing loom information
9. #997753 documentation typo: “intial” should be “initial”
10. #816427 Mention http://screenshots.debian.net/upload in the packaging-from-scratch sections
11. #978493 “bzr commit” should be “debcommit” in fixing-a-bug.html

Obviously, there’s more bugs and there’s a blueprint to subscribe to. Feel free to grab a bug and help out, or catch us on IRC and find out how you can get involved.

Update: I forgot to mention John Kim, who has contributed a bunch of bug reports with his experience. Great work, John!

At the same time understandable, but also worrying is the look at our sponsoring page:

Silently with all the release freezes in place, the number of open sponsorship items has crept up to ~70 again.

If you are an Ubuntu developer or can help out with reviewing patches, please head to the sponsoring queue and help out. Many contributors and Ubuntu users are going to appreciate it. (Docs can be found here.)

I have been in the Ubuntu Developer camp for most of Ubuntu’s life as a project, so the mindset of “App developers? Why don’t they just set up an open source project and get it packaged?” or “Apps? We have packages.” is what I have heard a couple of times already and is what I would probably have answered some years ago myself.

The power of the Open Source community and having open projects is immense. We all have seen it many times: a thought, a great idea, some dedicated contributors, good communication and a friendly community can achieve amazing things. This happens every single day.

We are well aware of how things work in the Open Source world and we have recently seen the success of our great work: millions of users, who have never dabbled in Open Source before, today enjoy Ubuntu (or other pieces of Free Software) and rely on it. We have managed to reach out to an entirely new demographic and continue to grow our user base.

With new demographics there are new expectations and new responsibilities. Consider my father for example. He follows what’s going on in the Ubuntu world, but will occasionally point out to me that an app he’s interested in buying does not exist for Ubuntu. The last I remember him talking about was a good language learning course.

With new form factors and devices running Ubuntu (you know, TVs, tablets, phones, watches, cars, coffee machines, hoverboards and the like), there are going to be thousands of useful helper tools out there which might not be available for Ubuntu yet. Add to that the growing number of content providers (magazines, books, maps, music, etc.) which users yet can’t easily get “for Ubuntu”.

This is the world we are looking at today and it becomes obvious that apps should be a first-class citizen in Ubuntu. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for making everyone who shows the slightest interest in working on Ubuntu itself an Ubuntu developer and member of our community, also because I feel that everyone who is part of this has a lot to gain, personally and for their particular project. It just shouldn’t be a strict requirement because it won’t scale.

A number of teams have been working very hard on making seamless apps in Ubuntu a reality and that’s just great to see. It’s a hard problem to solve because it involves so many different important pieces. Keep up the good work everyone!

At UDS I’m definitely going to (among other sessions, I’ll blog about later on) attend these sessions to see what we can do about making apps in Ubuntu more exciting and something that just works:

• Packaging Requirements for Apps in Ubuntu
• Review of the ARB process using MyApps
• MyApps submission experience and expectations for upstreams

Hope to see you there!

To remedy some of this, we set up the Developer Advisory Team. We figured that (among other things) reaching out to new contributors who just got their first fix into Ubuntu to thank them, encourage them and ask for their feedback would help us a lot in terms of bringing them into the fold and finding out what current stumbling blocks are.

The team consists of Andrea Colangelo, Andrew Starr-Bochcchio, Bhavani Shankar, Christophe Sauthier, Evan Broder and myself. We’ve been working together for a few weeks now and been reaching out to many contributors to Ubuntu development.

We collected the feedback and put together a report which summarises the experience of new contributors. If you’re in the thick of process definitions, documentations, backlog of review queues and the like it’s very easy to only concentrate on things which are broken or could be improved.

I’d like to take the time to quote a few of the super positive responses we received:

• “Developers always respond very friendly.”
• “I’m also very much impressed by the smoothness of online collaboration through launchpad and bzr (wow, would not have thought I’d be praising bzr at some point ). Branching a project to fix a bug and getting that visible to the project’s developers is effortless and lets me concentrate on the actual work.”
• “Had heard about reviews taking a long time, but didn’t find it to be the case.”
• “I really enjoyed getting to see my contributions go through the whole cycle from inclusion to available update. Seeing the process was interesting, as I had not known the different stages previously, and it was exciting to realize that a bug fix (simple, but there nonetheless) could go from a proposed fix to being available for installation in just over 24 hrs.”
• “Much easier than I had expected. I had always assumed that one had to be an official packager to apply a patch to a package and submit it. Overall, it was a surprisingly painless process.”
• “I think the most positive part of the experience to date has been the realization that the Ubuntu community cares enough to engage in this kind of feedback solicitation. That is simply unparalleled in other projects, and a testament to the many solid reasons so many prefer Ubuntu.”
• “Overall, the entire was quite enriching and engaging. To be frank, I was desperately waiting for an opportunity to fix an easy bug for quite some time. And, so when I eventually found one, I was overly joyed. Given another opportunity, I will surely contribute again to Ubuntu development.”
• “The people. Good response from other people, great impression about the whole community.”
• “Contributing to free and open source projects makes me excited. It is great that I can paticipate and improve Ubuntu. I feel awesome when my work is released. Also I was glad when people found out their problem doesn’t exist in new release.”

Everybody who helps make this happen on a daily basis: give yourself a pat on the back. I’m proud of what we achieve together, and so should you!

Check out the full report if you want to get into the details of the feedback.

If you have comments yourself or suggestions for improvements, leave your comment below.

1. Liquid V 002 – Calibre – Drowning In You
2. Jungle Cakes 008 – Ed Solo & Ghostline – Ghost Town feat. DJ Concept
3. Congo Natty 020DG – Top Cat & Rebel MC – Police In Helicopter (Serial Killaz VIP Mix)
4. Digital Soundboy 024R – Breakage ft. Roots Manuva – Run ‘Em Out (Benny Page Remix)
5. Mad Decent 143 – Zeds Dead – Undah Yuh Skirt Feat. Mavado
6. RAM 091 – Mind Vortex – Onslaught
7. OWSLA 001 – Porter Robinson – Spitfire (Kill The Noise Remix)
8. Bad Taste 015DD – Blokhe4d – Gutter Queen
9. MTA 009 – Nero – Crush On You (Knife Party Remix)
10. Red Light 004 – Neonlight & Hedj – Hammerhead
11. Hospital 194DDS – Camo & Krooked – Funk You
12. Maximum Boost 027 – Doctor P – Sweet Shop  (Friction vs Camo & Krooked DnB Mix)
13. Critical 057EP – Enei – Movin Fast
14. Digital Soundboy 037 – Breakage ft. Jess Mills – Fighting Fire (Loadstar Remix)
15. MTA CS001 – Chase And Status & Sub Focus – Flashing Lights (S.P.Y Remix)
16. Hospital 112CD – Logistics – Shooting Star
17. Innerground 038 – DJ Marky & Makoto – Aquarius feat. Deeizm

The Ubuntu Development team has always been good at creating new TODO lists (merges, Debian RC bugs, build failures, heaps of different bug lists and much much more), but you need to know what you are looking for.

Enter Harvest. We created it so it merely aggregates opportunities for Ubuntu developers in a simple web interface. You can select opportunity types and specific sets of packages to narrow down opportunities based on your interests.

If you got some spare time, are interested in Ubuntu development and would like to help, you would do the Ubuntu world a great favour by doing one of the following:

If you are an Ubuntu developer or would like to become one: trying it out and commenting below with your experience. (Bugs can be filed here.)

If you have a great idea on how it could be further simplified, extended or improved, write up your idea and link to it in the comments.

If you are a web developer: please get in touch. Harvest is written using Django and Python and it’s super-easy to extend, improve and fix it – so if you are looking for something to help out with, this might be a great opportunity for you.

Please consider helping out, your contributions will not only help you make better use of Harvest, but many other developers and new contributors as well.

(If you tried it out and it works perfectly for you, let us know too. )

Two years ago when we were struggling with getting code reviewed, we put in place “patch pilots”, a great concept we borrowed from the Bazaar team. We set up a monthly schedule and Canonical provided 4 hours per month per engineer with upload rights to make sure code gets reviewed. This has helped a lot.

Getting closer to the 12.04 release, it looks like we need to put some extra effort in and need some help.

That’s right we have been hovering around 50 for a while now, dealt with many incoming new requests, but still we don’t get down to 0. If you can review code, please help out.

We all are interested in getting new developers on board. This only works if we review each other’s work, gain each other’s trust and give each other advice.

The Sponsorship queue is where a lot of exchange about this happens and where knowledge is passed on. Help out by reviewing today and help grow our community this way.

This is one of the most valuable contributions to Ubuntu! This matters to all of us.

If you want to see at once glance how we are doing and who’s all helping out, head over to our one glance sponsoring page. (Patches to make it look more Ubuntu-y are very welcome!)

Check the instructions for code review (with lots of tips and tricks) and get your name on the page as well!

The Ubuntu developers, so everyone who builds Ubuntu, integrates pieces to work nicely with each other, maintains packages and produces the distribution we all love, everyone is interested in this kind of feedback.

User testing of the Ubuntu Development process has, if it happened, always been ad-hoc and isolated. This is the reason why we want to look into this again and figure out which parts of the work-flows need to be improved.

Have you thought about contributing to Ubuntu Development before? Did you like the thought of helping improve the distribution millions of users love? If you did, you might be interested in this User Testing initiative. You will only have to read our documentation and send your feedback to . We in turn will make sure your feedback is put up for discussion and fixed eventually. Also will we will help you on your way if you should get stuck.

This initiative is not to be confused with mentoring. We are not going to do your homework for you or package your app. Instead this will provide a great way for you to get started where you can share your experience with Ubuntu developers, who can help you along, while you provide valuable feedback. Your feedback will be treated confidentially and only published in an anonymised and summarised fashion.

What you need to do? Simple:

• Send a mail to  introducing yourself.
• Read the Ubuntu Development documentation and start fixing Ubuntu bugs.
• Let us know how it goes.

This is an experiment we will do until the release of Ubuntu 12.04 (April 26th). This should give us food for thought for the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit and depending on the success of the initiative, we will continue it.

Follow @ubuntudev on twitter.com, identi.ca, Google+ or facebook.com to find out more about this initiative and others.

• Thursday, 15 March 2012, 16:00:00 UTC
• Friday, 16 March 2012, 08:00:00 UTC
• Friday, 16 March 2012, 14:00:00 UTC

If you haven’t dived into Ubuntu Development yet, but you’re interested, please check out our Ubuntu Development guide! Hang out with us here.

Yesterday I did a free-for-all hangout, using the new “named hangout” feature of Google+. It’s basically like a chat room with a fixed URL, where you can discuss whatever is on your mind. The idea was to create an opportunity to ask and answer questions in a more personal way without having the feeling of interrupting “more important” discussions.

This was a great experience! I didn’t count all nationalities, but I picked up we had people from South Africa, India, Taiwan, Bulgaria, USA at the same time. This was simply awesome.

Above it looks like I was hanging out with 35 people at the same time. This wasn’t the case. Unfortunately the hard limit is still 10 people at a time. There are “celebrity hangouts”, where you can record the event and have more people listening in, but unfortunately this takes away the opportunity to get involved.

Sometimes I did have to mute people whose microphone was not set up properly (one time I think heard a rooster in the background), but generally I feel we fared very well.

Many of the people in the hangouts were great Ubuntu fans and thanked for the work Ubuntu developers and contributors in general are doing. It was really heart-warming. Some had programmed before, even in Open Source projects and were keen to help out. So with the screen-sharing functionality I was able to demo how to fix a simple bug which was great.

Thanks also to Evan Broder and Andrew Mitchell who jumped in and answered a few questions as well.

I think I will keep these as an institution for now and announce events over the @ubuntudev twitter/identi.ca/facebook/google+ accounts. If you should ever want to do a hangout session, use the ubuntu-dev hangout, do it and let me know in advance, so I can post this more publicly.

If you have any experience with events like this and have some new ideas, please comment below!

Thanks again every one – this is just a great way to be in touch with the world-wide community of Ubuntu lovers!