Monday, June 18, 2012

Let's Roll with 12.10


As a consequence of our daily quality efforts, some very interesting developments have taken place for 12.10.

First, while knocking around UDS, it occured to me in a bit of a flash that all of the effort that we invest in freezing the archives to make Alphas and Beta releases for Ubuntu is wasted work that slows down our velocity. We have daily quality and we have started using -proposed in the development release, so the chance of having an uninstallable image is greatly reduced.

(you can read the discussion on @ubuntu-devel)

So, why do we have Alphas and Betas? After some discussion, it seems to come down to:

  1. Because we want to encourage widespread testing by community members on a variety of hardware at a regular cadence
  2. Because we want targets for features and bug fixes
  3. Because we need to test our ISO production capabilities
  4. Because we always had them

Does all the effort in freezing the archive actually help? I don't think so. In fact, I think it is counter-productive.

  1. We can do the same testing with daily images. Furthermore, we can do that testing at a cadence of our liking, or even out of cadence if we want to squeeze in a special test run at some point. The ISO tracker nicely accomedates this now.
  2. Freezing the archive, by definition, *stops* packages and therefore bug fixes and features from getting uploaded. 
  3. Surely we don't need to slow down everyone's work so that we can try producing ISOs, and surely we don't need to do it so often and early.
  4. Of course, "because we always did" is not much of a reason.

It seems that what is needed is a regular cadence of deep and broad testing by the community to augment our automated tests, along with trial runs to ensure that our ISO building tools and process are working. Thefore, I propose we:

  1. Stop with the alphas and betas and win back all of the development effort
  2. Increase the cadence of "ISO testing" to whatever we want or whatever the community team can manage
  3. Spin a trial ISO near what is not beta time
  4. Spin ISOs for release candidates

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

«Bonjour Le Monde»


Pardonnez-mois pour le massacre d'une belle langue ...

Je rêvais de donner un cours de la progrommation en français. Ce cours aurait deux objectifs. Le premier objectif est l'introduction du monde de la programmation. Le secondaire objectif est la pratique au français pour mois. Les etudes apprennent la programmation, et j'apprends à parler plus français.

Donc, je vous présente:
La Programmation pour Les Debutantes Absolus, En Mauvais Français

Je vais donner le cours dues fois par semmainne, dans la soir. Aussi, je vais avoir les heures de beaureau pour les questions et pour les discussions.

Nous allons utiliser Apprendre à programmer avec Python. Je vais couvre duex chaptre chaque classe, mais nous allons arrêter en chapter 12 ou avant. Donc, le cours sera en l'environ de tois semmaine.

Nous allons utiliser Google Hangouts pour les classes. Donc, c'est neccesaire d'avoir un webcam et microphone, mais le cours est gratuit. Aussi, le cours utilise ubuntu, naturalement ;)

En fin, j'ai besoin trouver les étudiants. Si vous voulez commencer à apprendre la programmation (et m'aidez avec français), vous pouvez laisser un comment ici, ou vous pouvez me trouver dans irc (rickspencer3 sur freendoe), ou m'envoyer un email. Après je trouve les ètudiants, nous allons trouver les bons heures pour les classes.