Tasks from daily community roundtable sessions

Provider-agnostic descriptions of what a given cloud provides, intersects with constraints

Discussion of design issues you may have in your software.

Coding to do in Quantal

Rationale: Multiple teams are working on reports using .json files obtained from Arsenal. We're looking for a better way to maintain a stateful, historical bug database without stressing the launchpad server. Goal: Agree in a way of persisting launchpad data "locally", being that the source of data for reports. Implement that.

Running LibreOffice 3.6 testsuites on Ubuntu Q for continuous integration.

Déjà Dup Backup Tool has some ambitious long-term changes. This is a discussion of what we can do this cycle, what people can do to help, and feedback about both the current state and planned changes.

Started during the P cycle, the Developer Advisory Team has been reaching to development contributors and while things have worked out quite well, there are surely things we can improve. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperAdvisoryTeam Agenda: - team meetings - outreach - improve feedback collection process - get notified about contributor status changes (active→inactive, new→experienced) - following up with contributors who don't reply - avoiding trello craziness

The App Review Board and its processes were put in place 1.5 years ago. It's time to review how policies and requirements have been working out for us. Daniel H put together some discussion about a key point of these policise, the /opt requirement, at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OptRequirement which can provide a basis for the discussion

This session is intended to gather feedback from current users of the ubuntu-qa-tools code, including vm-tools and dl-ubuntu-test-iso. We would like to get the tools packaged for wider use, and ensure their continued maintenance.

This blueprint captures all the ongoing tasks that the Platform QA team is going to be doing during Q, set the focus for the coming 6 months in terms of QA ongoing activities, such as keep running test cases, triaging problems, etc.

Review the processes & how the ARB team is doing.

Review of the kernel configuration for Q 12.10. This will concentrate on confirming the policy for various option types as well as new options. For major new options, we will discuss and confirm the selection of each.

Review the existing Unity developer documentation, identify areas for improvement

Initramfs is used for getting the root filesystem mounted and passing control the real init on the real root fs. Once the kernel boots, it passes control to the init in the initramfs. This init then runs scripts that are responsible for checking if the root device is configured properly and capable of mounting the root fs on it. In parallel, behind the scenes, udev runs and uses the help of blkid to run "admin" scripts like "mdadm", "lvm", "cryptsetup" to configure the root device. This is all event based, i.e the devices are configured as and when they become available. However the exception to this is configuring the LUKS devices, which are configured using cryptsetup. The script that runs cryptsetup, first checks up if the device which is to be configured as an encrypted device, is available. If not then it waits for some time and then it checks again if the device is available or not. If not then it will simply give up and get the user to a busybox prompt. If the device is available, then cryptsetup is called and the device is configured as a LUKS device. Once the device is available a udev event is generated and again, udev runs blkid and calls whatever admin script needs to be called if any other subsystem is stacked on top of this LUKS device. While all this is good, there are two observations to be made here: a. The invocation of cryptsetup is procedural and not completely event based. b. There is a repeatition of code for mounting, checking filesystems, crypt devices, LVM devices and so on - one code path is found in upstart jobs and the other in initramfs. So one idea that lets you remove this duplication and at the same time enables the LUKS devices in an event based fashion, is to make the initramfs event based in the true sense, by bringing in upstart in initramfs. This means that we copy the jobs in /etc/init/ in initramfs and run them at boot time. This brings in the simplicity, elegance and robustness of upstart in initramfs and also gives you more flexibility to handle the events in a way that you want

Session to discuss where DEX -- making sure patches from Ubuntu and other derivatives are getting back upstream, and reducing Ubuntu/Debian divergence -- should be focusing work. See here for some discussion: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.derivatives/866

Discuss the integration of PowerNap into OpenCompute, and gather ideas for its roadmap.

Tasks from daily community roundtable sessions

Our release notes and technical overview could use a bit of tuning. Part of this is to be clear on the goals they are serving. Session is for discussion of the goals, and ways we can approach better, more automated generation of the content for them. (Leveraging blueprints completion notes, etc.)