06 November 2012, 11:33
Ubuntu developers plan the road to Ubuntu 13.04
At the
Ubuntu Developer Summit[1] (UDS) that took place in
Copenhagen last week, the developer community for Canonical's Linux
distribution laid down the goals for the next release of the project,
expected in April of next year. This information is now publicly
available thanks to the work of Ubuntu community member
Alan Bell[2], who extracted the meeting notes from the Etherpad instance used at the summit.
All in all, the developers set themselves 1,023
action items[3], 75 of which are
classed[4]
as "essential". Notable themes for the upcoming development cycle are
changes in the quality assurance and release process of the
distribution, the development of an Ubuntu SDK and an effort to
streamline the submissions of applications for inclusion in the
repositories. Several sessions also dealt with improving Ubuntu as a
gaming platform.
After deciding to
drop alpha releases[5] and concentrate more
on "smoke testing" and automated tools like the UI testing framework
AutoPilot, the developers also proposed a
new release process[6]
that iterates over merging fixes, testing and freezes every two weeks.
The developers have also been discussing the creation of an Ubuntu SDK,
although the
meeting notes on this topic[7] do not mention much
detail beyond the scope of the planned development kit. To go hand in
hand with this, the review process for the
Ubuntu App Developer programme[8] is also
being worked on[9] to make it easier for developers to submit their applications for inclusion in the distribution.
With discussions within the upstream GNOME project pointing towards a
stop on development for the GNOME Fallback Mode very soon, the Ubuntu
developers have
decided[10] to plan for this eventuality and
become less reliant on upstream code from Fallback Mode. Unity currently
uses parts of the panel and several indicators from that code base and
the developers plan to ship their own stand-alone versions or migrate to
different technologies.
Other notable topics at the UDS included improving the performance of
several gaming engines on Ubuntu, including the preparation for a
possible switch to the Wayland display server and a push to fix support
for NVIDIA's hybrid Optimus graphics cards, a topic that famously
raised Linus Torvald's ire[11] earlier in the year. The developers are also working on the
Ubuntu TV implementation[12] and are undertaking a
complete rewrite[13] of the Quickly development framework.
URL of this Article:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Ubuntu-developers-plan-the-road-to-Ubuntu-13-04-1744228.html
