New/updated applications in fl:2-devel
iwlwifi-3945-ucode to close #FL-2451
nvidia to close #FL-2453 and #FL-2454
wine updated 1.1.44
django-ratings updated to git repo
nted updated 1.10.6
open-vm-tools updated 2010.03.20
kvm-kernel updated 2.6.33.3
mkinitrd updated 6.0.93
amaya 11.3.1
Xorg updated 7.5 xorg-server 1.8.0
transmission updated 1.93

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. Infrastructure updates
  2. Changing from Pidgin to Empathy
  3. Status update
• Next meeting agenda

Announcements:

• Web site updated to latest WordPress for security reasons.
• Mark Trompell has a working Xfce Lite Edition and gave away a couple of prerelease CDs last week. One fedora guy took some too and promised to show Foresight at his LUG.

Proposed members/developers:

• jyr as developer. Accepted unanimously. Congratulations jyr!
• fayek as member and developer. Accepted unanimously. Congratulations fayek!

Proposed Topics:

1. Infrastructure updates
   • mull, smerp and gxti are working on getting https back.
   • doniphon gave dev access to JohnWelborn and blairzajac, from Sony Pictures Imageworks. They are an rPath customer and are using Foresight as their base desktop. They have already made a bunch of contributions.
   • The council unanimously decided to give ermo, afranke and tforsman admin rights in the wiki to be able to clean up spammers and fix structure in few sections.
2. Changing from Pidgin to Empathy
   • Both are already packaged.
   • Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora all moved to Empathy this cycle. We are in ‘minor’ releases mood at the moment so this is less important to us.
   • A smooth way to handle existing user (Pidgin) data migration is mandatory. Empathy has an import dialog, so this is not a problem.
   • Xfce Edition will keep Pidgin unless Mark__T gets a chance to closely look at Empathy at its dependencies.
   • Shipping Empathy in stock groups while not stopping shipping Pidgin by default too has been proposed. Shipping both by default is not such a good idea because, from a user perspective, it’s confusing to have two apps that do the same thing.
   • It’s been decided that we should make a list of pros and cons and reconsider Empathy for GNOME 2.30.
3. Status update
   1. Our trees are in a minimally sane state. A big promote/update already happened to fl:2 with no major issues. GNOME 2.28.1 / FL 2.3.0 already in fl:2-qa.
   2. Latest gnome et al are in fl:2-qa, which is relatively close to actual 2-devel. Main issue is that the PackageKit UI in qa doesn’t work. Mark__T fixed it somewhat in fl:2-devel but now updates through it come in chunks which is suboptimal. mull is gonna look at it too. Mark__T planned to have a look at our PackageKit backend too and try to somewhat fill the missing backend features mid term (as conary allows to fill them).
   3. Anaconda front is going forward. Kudos to mull, Mark__T and mkj. ermo offered to jump into anaconda too. Extlinux doesn’t support ext4 yet (it works with ext4 but you can’t install on ext4). Looking at syslinux mailing list, it seems that won’t be introduced before syslinux 4. So even with new anaconda, we probably need to make sure /boot isn’t ext4.
   4. Mobile editions are frozen, and forums in a sort of ‘zombie mode’. We should propose people to consider redirects from the mobile editions to main FL for now and a clear announcement on that, and also to drop forums and concentrate on wiki (until we have more man power).
   5. Informal talks are ongoing about what Foresight Linux 3 should be. We need to get it right. Reinventing the wheel given current level of available resources is not an option. The main issue is to jump into something that we (for a minimal/sustainable/predictable value of we) can maintain/develop. More than throwing package after package, main emphasis is on workflow and package/groups lifetime maintenance. That means taking advantage of tools like mirrorball, of not yet available conary features, thinkering with new concepts like reposight, etc. mkj suggests that, in order to take advantage of rPath development, automation for Foresight Linux 3 development be done via extending mirrorball. doniphon suggests that people interested in this topic read http://bitbucket.org/antonio.meireles/reposight/src/tip/README and have a look at http://bitbucket.org/antonio.meireles/reposight/ where there’s food for thought. The goal is to make things more smooth and with less single points of failure, allowing us to just add value instead of redoing stuff that was already done elsewhere. We would have much more granularity and a metadata driven workflow. It has been considered that we just call rpmbuild from a factory/superclass to build straigh from 3rd party repos the stuff we need but not want/care enough to directly maintain.
   6. doniphon’s main worries are
      1. how to get things manageable/supportable on the long term?
      2. how would we differentiate?
   7. We need to have a look at Fedora Community which is a web tool to help package maintainers. We could extend that and use it. It would also be great if the vcs-pkg project made more noise. Things like setting/translating package descriptions shouldn’t be done at the distro level.

Next meeting agenda:

• To debate a more specific Foresight Linux 3 roadmap and set of deadlines.

The Foresight wiki is undergoing maintenance (bug fix and feature upgrade to support WYSIWYG editing with WebKit based browsers such as Google Chrome, Safan and the GNOME epiphany browser).

Thank you for your patience.

About BleachBit

BleachBit quickly frees disk space, removes hidden junk, and easily guards your privacy. Erase cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, remove unused localizations, shred logs, and delete temporary files.

Interview

Can you tell little about yourself?

When a young teenager I started programming for fun in Pascal. Before I ever heard of open source or GNU, I published my first open source software in 1996 in C for Windows and OS/2.

Programming is an great hobby: it costs nothing, allows creativity, requires problem solving like for puzzles, and can help other people.

I work in a technical role at a large non-profit organization that loves Microsoft. At home I use Linux, which I’ve used for about 9 years.

I’ve used Fedora since version 1, and before that Mandrake (before it was Mandriva).

How did you start with bleachbit, when did bleachbit get created?

Most of the software I had written was command line interface or web interface. Years ago I had used a GUI application in wxWidgets with C++, but since then, I learned Python.

When BleachBit started, I was interested in learning GTK+ using Python (PyGTK). One advantage of PyGTK is it is standard on all desktop Linux systems, and Python saves the programmer significant effort over older languages such as C++.

I combined the desire to learn PyGTK with a perceived vacuum in the Linux world for a safe, easy-to-use, powerful cleaning tool, so in a short time I released the first version of BleachBit 0.1.0 on December 24, 2008.

How many hours do you work on Bleachbit each day/week?

It varies but lately about one hour a day. Less than half the time is spent coding. Testing, packaging, advertising, managing translations, managing tickets (usually feature requests), and answering questions requires a lot of time.

Whats your main target for bleachbit, Windows or Linux users?

Each platform’s users offers something unique. BleachBit was originally written for Linux. By using PyGTK, BleachBit is better suited for Linux: Linux already has PyGTK, but the PyGTK dependencies add about 6MB to the Windows installer. On Linux, there is less competition from similar software, though some Linux power users are slow to accept BleachBit because they think they can achieve the same results with simple scripts. My challenge: run your script and then see what else BleachBit finds.

Though there is more competition from similar, well-established software on Windows, there are many more Windows users in the world:
even a small slice of a big pie represents many users. Windows users need more open source alternatives to proprietary software to open doors to Linux. Also Windows users are more likely to link to the BleachBit web site (which is appreciated) because many Linux users instead install BleachBit from a repository (using conary, APT, Yum, etc.) without visiting the web site.

BleachBit still lacks a few features and polish for Windows. For example, Windows users expect to see Windows file dialogs, but instead they see the GTK+ file dialogs.

Which dist do you think uses bleachbit most?

In a short time of the first BleachBit release, I quickly learned Ubuntu definitely exceeds all other Linux distributions and Windows
too. Ubuntu’s dominance is especially clear in the download statistics.

What makes Bleachbit so special?

BleachBit is free (as in speech), cross platform, safe, easy, quick, convenient, well translated, actively developed, and includes many advanced features such as free disk space wiping, CleanerML (an XML markup for writing your own cleaners), and vacuuming Firefox and Google Chrome.

Any big feature that’s coming to bleachbit in near future?

I’m planning the second generation of CleanerML and a generic feature to find a whole new category of junk files that no other software
finds. These features will help pave the foundation for BleachBit version 1.0.0.

Also, this week I’ll be releasing the first bonus cleaner package, which provides additional cleaners that were not yet eligible for
inclusion in the main package.

What do you know about Foresight Linux?

I first heard about Foresight Linux when I noticed BleachBit in its repository. I see Foresight uses a unique package manager and
provides fast updates.

Thank you for your time and good luck with BleachBit in the future.

And I wish you well for Foresight Linux.

Best regards, Tomas Forsman

Fresh start of Foresight Linux newsletter. It’s time to let the users what’s going on and what’s coming in the near future. Our newsletters were scarce in the past few months but we’re working on it and this will be improved with more regular updates from now on. We hope our users will find our newsletter useful and give a hint on what’s happening inside Foresight.

// Tomas Forsman

Development

Gnome 2.28 is currently inside development repository. Still some minor issues, but relative stable. We can’t promise when it will be in stable repo, but we hope within a week or two.

New applications have been added, such as: Unetbootin, Moovida Media Center, nfoview, Taskcoash and more. Some are still under testing, but will soon be available.

Wiki

Boots (Fedora Remix), has now a own space in Foresight Wiki.

Foresighters

We interviewed Andrew Ziem, Developer and creator of BleachBit application. Whole interview here

You can install it easily with packagekit or though Terminal with this command: sudo conary update bleachbit

Community News

A number of new members have officially joined the Foresight community due to their outstanding contributions to Foresight.
For more information on becoming a Foresight member, see this page on the Foresight Wiki.

Join the Foresight Community

Foresight users and developers are active on a number of different social networking sites.

• Share your musical tastes and favorite artists with other Foresight users in the Foresight group on Last.fm. Banshee, Foresight’s default music manager, has built in support for Last.fm.
• Follow a few Foresight developers every waking moment via Twitter or via identi.ca.
• Share pictures of your Foresight Linux desktop at the Foresight Linux Flickr group.
• Join the Foresight Linux group on Facebook.
• Add Planet Foresight Linux to your bookmarks or favorite feed reader, such as Liferea, to read blog updates from Foresight Developers.
• Join us at internet relay chat (irc). The Foresight Linux channels are hosted by the Freenode IRC network. #foresight

Contribute to the Foresight Linux Newsletter

Have a package or piece of software you want to share in the newsletter? Send it in! We are always looking for more writers or contributors, and building the newsletter is a collaborative process using the Foresight Linux Newsletter wiki. We are also looking for volunteers to interview people in the Foresight and GNOME communities, links to news articles on the web or in print regarding Foresight Linux, and all the other content that makes up the newsletter.

Have thoughts or comments on the newsletter? Email tforsman@foresightlinux.se and your letter may be published in the next issue!

Homepage: http://www.foresightlinux.org

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. Work on the foresightlinux.org WP website
  2. Roadmap for short term (2.1.2 and 2.2)
  3. Wide repo cleanup
  4. Scheduling sprints
  5. Status for DEV space on the wiki
  6. Foresight artwork licenses
  7. Membership renewal?
• Next weeks agenda

Announcements:

• Og Maciel has updated WP to 2.8.3 (latest version)

Proposed members/developers:

• afranke was accepted as member. Congratulations to afranke!
• Jyr was accepted as member. Congratulations to Jyr!

Proposed Topics:

1. Foresightlinux.org website:
   • Doniphon suggested that we adapt the ‘epic texts’ on the website to reality.
   • Afranke and ermo are in the process of cleaning up and streamlining the website.
   • Doniphon also asked if we could help condense his vision for Foresight into a few paragraphs on the website.
2. Roadmap for short term (2.1.2 and 2.2):
   • Short term, we focus on 2.1.2, which is going to be the final release w/GNOME 2.26.
   • Mark__T will likely release a xfce respin once 2.1.2 is released.
   • Apart from doniphon evolving his vision of FL:3 on the -devel ML, we will stop talking about FL:3 in favour of 2.1.2 and 2.2.x. 2.2 will likely be an interim release w/GNOME 2.28.
   • The aim is to incorporate some of the ideas for FL:3 in 2.2.x; as doniphon put it, he’s a reformist – not a revolutionnaire.
3. Wide repo cleanup:
   • Mark__T wanted clarification on what ‘wide repo cleanups’ mean and doniphon explained that he was primarily referring to user facing apps – both the ones we ship per default and the alternatives (tforsman has been extremely prolific on the packaging front).
   • Doniphon is currently basically the only one who touches base OS packages, so they are in fairly good shape.
   • The cleanup involves:
     - Removing dead packages (packages with no maintainer-ship and no upstream)
     - Fix packages that currently do not work (or remove them)
     - Finish incomplete packages
     - This would be a golden opportunity for a sprint w/coaching of new devs
   • How do we organize the cleanup?
     • Jesse mentioned that currently, we’re just picking up random bits, which doesn’t feel too productive to him.
     • It would be nice to have a target to aim for (i.e. a sprint)
     • How about creating a list/table of user facing packages on the wiki, where we mark their status (working/needs love) and default/optional and link the list to issues in JIRA?
     • Could we automagically mine the package database for recipes that have not been touched in a while and list them? (Mark__T had some ideas for this)
     • Perhaps we could even give packages some meta-data in preparation for FL:3 as part of this data mining? (also Mark__T)
     • Do we need to add more repos (i.e. for games)? (tforsman)
     • Would it be good to have each package have an owner? So that someone feels responsible for each package? We already have the packager field in JIRA …(Mark__T)
     • Doniphon pointed out that ‘packager’ will be handled via meta-data in the furture
4. Sprints for 2.1.2
   • Reiterate that afranke and ermo are doing a website sprint to clean it up for the coming release (afranke has cleaned up 2.1.1 release notes – see IT-85)
   • The first sprint for 2.1.2 is to create a wiki page in the DEV workspace and populate by hand a table (or several tables) containing the (user facing) packages that constitue FL 2.1.2
   • There should be a maintainer field (you are all encouraged to step up )
   • It should be noted whether the package is to be in the default (gnome/xfce/kde/etc.) install/spin
   • It should contain a status field, with a link to JIRA if the status is not ‘working’ (define the other field values as appropriate by consensus between developers)
   • Create scripts w/short usage info to mine information about packages (Mark__T, doniphon for starters)
   • We encourage everyone to reach out to semi-active developers and let them know that we have a well defined sprint where we ‘get things done’ and that they get a chance to get up to speed and help make 2.1.2 a great release and that their input will be invaluable in improving foresight going forward.
5. Status for the DEV space on the wiki:
   • Most people rated the current DEV wiki landing page around or below 5 (10 = perfect, 1 = awful)
   • It’s not up to date
   • We need to massage doniphon’s vision and philosophy from the -devel ML into easy to digest sentences stating the overarching developer goals
   • We need to update the ‘Grab a Task’ page (and make it a priority)
   • ‘random’ and ‘no clear pattern’ are our enemies
   • Jesse indirectly suggested that we try to create/update rough guidelines for the art and discipline of packaging
6. Foresight Artwork (Mark__T from last meeting):
   • Who does/knows the artwork for Foresight?
   • What licenses are used?
   • Wouldn’t it be a good idea to relicense stuff under a wikipedia friendly license?
7. Renewing memberships (deferred to next meeting):
   • Are all the people on the Request Membership page up to date?
   • Shouldn’t some of them renew their developer membership?

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. The future of Foresight
  2. Team Leads
  3. Hardware for testing
  4. Packaging contest
  5. Infrastructure updates
• Next weeks agenda

Announcements:

• Web site updated to WordPress 2.8.2 (thanks for the push afranke)
• Release notes for the latest versions of all editions have been posted to the blog and links to them have been added on the corresponding pages (by afranke)

Proposed members/developers:

• Int as developer. Accepted unanimously. Congratulations int!

Proposed Topics:

1. The future of Foresight
   • Much of this topic was merely a recap of a longer discussion Og Maciel and doniphon had during the week.
   • Create a new roadmap which emphasizes (down)scaling the platform and keep packages we can support on our own.
     • Update existing wiki ‘roadmap’ page – it REALLY needs some love (see: http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/DEV/Foresight+Linux+Development)
   • Create and document procedures for developers and contributors (where? Wiki?)
     • Get people committed/involved into working on areas that currently only Antonio is doing (redundancy)
     • How much time/effort can one realistically dedicate to this, daily. if we donate 1hr daily, with proper management we can get this _right_. point is there is no viable alternative to the model we propose.
   • Long term focus: End goal is creating a rolling release distro that focuses on being user and developer friendly! (Update project vision/goal statement?!)
   • Short term focus for FL:3 (next 3 months):
     • Revised/scalable tree (with new toolchain)
     • ALL packages in a known state
     • Get metadata/pkgKit right
     • Commits/repo actions must go through jira (procedure is not documented yet)
     • Only two types of bugs:
       a) either specific to the tools we use
       b) upstream ones.
   • Short term focus for FL:2
     • See (current) fl:2-devel as engineering. fl:2-qa and moves to fl:2 are the QA domain of business
     • Basically we need ppl with ati/nv/intel video cards to test updates. People with spare boxes to test install media in bare metal, with kvm setups, and to test migrations from older groups. + we need people to ack that bugs we claim fixed are really fixed
     • Get a viable QA team with well-defined processes to speed up moving from 2-devel -> 2-qa -> fl:2
     • (tforsman and doniphon) Update our graphviz package, which can be used to create state diagrams of workflows (see example workflow at http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracWorkflow)
   • Questions/comments from the floor:
     • jesse: how can we define ‘things we can support’?
       doniphon: if our users need/use those tools we need to find a way to engage them and keep them working/useful!
     • tforsman: will there be a problem to change fl:2 to fl:3 ?  like fl:1 to fl:2 was?
       doniphon: no, not that big. we learned a few tricks. I think it’s pretty safe to say that we don’t want to have problems with back compatibility.
     • Mark__T: we need to roughly define what QA looks like
       OgMaciel: I have ideas for that Mark__T (Og does QA for rPath)
     • Who can promote?: Ken, doniphon and mkj (who is also a foresight dev)
2. Team Leads
   • OgMaciel will go into bed with Xorg (for testing)
   • We need a Java guy. Any takers?
   • We need a mono guy
     - ermo will establish contact to dnielsen wrt. mono
   • Mark__T will take a stab at anaconda
   • Doniphon would like to see someone adopt the Jiranemo JIRA python adapter (he’s got plans for it)
   • We need a security officer to handle CVEs
     - doniphon will get in touch with smithj
   • Someone needs to step up and cheerleader the forums
3. Hardware for testing
   • OgMaciel will try to get a box for testing
   • Doniphon will draw up a checklist for hardware testing
4. Packaging Contest
   • OgMaciel will ping Ken on an e-mail Ken said he sent to PCutler, which pcutler cannot find.
   • We need to get this thing closed!
5. Infrastructure updates
   • Afranke updated release notes
   • He proposed that we ‘collapse’ and streamline the sections with ‘how to get (in touch|help|involved)’ in both release notes and on the website.
   • He proposed that in general, we lighten up the text on the website as much as possible (ermo will help with this).
   • OgMaciel requested that we create tickets in JIRA w/ short summary and add him as listener for relevant changes (see [IT-85])
   • OgMaciel requested that we keep website discussions in -qa, per [IT-69]
6. Deferred topics:

It’s still in heavy development, but you can still find it usefull. So install it from terminal:

sudo conary update mistelix –install-label foresight.rpath.org@fl:-devel

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. Membership renewals
  2. Toolchain update
  3. FITS and workflow
  4. Tasks and roles
  5. Reschedule Council meetings
  6. Set up ISO mirrors
  7. Empathy vs Pidgin
  8. Infrastructure overview
• Next weeks agenda

Announcements:

• (Og Maciel) pscott has fixed the web frontend for our Mercurial repositories which can now be accessed via hg.foresightlinux.org as well as the secondary www.foresightlinux.org/hg address.
  - pscott noted that he is keeping an eye out for 404 errors in the logs.
• (Og Maciel) Hostmasks for all approved developers and members have been created.
• (Og Maciel) The new website based on Word Press is now published! I stumbled on a few permission issues initially due to the fact that (apparently) pages created by an admin cannot be edited by anyone else. I ended up creating an editor role account for me and assigned all but one existing pages to this user. I have created editor and admin accounts for the following users:
  • Admins: OgMaciel, doniphon, pcutler and pscott
  • Editors: afranke, ermo and TForsman

  Everyone is encouraged to lend a hand with getting the new site vetted

• (Og Maciel) Minutes for last week’s Council meeting were published to the new web site as a blog post instead of placed in the wiki. This is the first time we do it this way and I’d be very interested in what people thing. I feel that people can send their comments or any corrections as a comment and we can edit. Also, as only people with accounts in the web site can edit posts, it will help us mantain the validity of official announcements.
• (Og Maciel) The process of getting the new web site up and running involved the migration (as in conary migrate) of the existing server to the Lamp Appliance repository, all blessed by doniphon who was around to advise me.
  - Og Maciel had to setup MySQL with a password for the root user, which he will make available to the council later.

Proposed Topics:

1. Membership renewals (TForsman)
   • TForsman renewed as developer by quorum. (pcutler, doniphon, OgMaciel)
   • (OgMaciel) Don’t we need a paragraph on renewal on either of:

     http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/community/Home

     http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/community/Becoming+a+Member

     http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/community/Becoming+a+Developer

   • Links from website to wiki on membership needs to be checked
   • The onus is on the Council to send out membership expiration notices
   • Any (well behaved member/developer who re-applies on their own is automatically accepted?
2. Toolchain progress (doniphon)
   • doniphon was happy to report that the latest toolchain build completed with no errors.
   • Testing of the new toolchain still remains.
   • Discuss toolchain and in particular the issue of how to build the x86 flavour (sse vs. sse2 re. Athlon XP) on list – see FL-1437
3. FITS and workflow
   • Ongoing, draft by doniphon sent to pscott
   • Recommend that a draft be circulated on the -devel list for transparency?
4. Tasks and roles
   • Not started yet. The Council will get this going.
   • pscott and doniphon suggested that this meshes with FITS and workflow
5. Reschedule meetings (MarkT)
   • MarkT cannot attend Council meetings on Fridays, which is inconvenient considering that he is a member of the Council
   • The Council will work on finding a more suitable time for the meeting
   • Next meeting is tentatively scheduled for July 14th
6. Set up ISO mirrors (Ken)
   • The monkey was thrown around and no resolution was made
   • This needs to be done, preferrably yesterday. Any takers?
7. Empathy vs. Pidgin (Ken)
   • Ken will announce it on -devel when he’s got Empathy ready for testing
8. Infrastructure documentation (ermo, IT-83)
   • ermo has documented MLs and examined DNS records. He will update http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/teams/Foresight+Infrastructure as appropriate
   • Discussion deferred to next meeting