So far our common practice has been to toss everything new into the development release until Feature Freeze and then try and clean up most of the fallout. Me and many other developers have always cried for having more time for fixing long-standing bugs and not introducing breakage in the first place. It seems that now with 12.04, Ubuntu/Canonical are actually getting serious about it.

(Any resemblance to that postcard from the Kennedy Space Center which I went to last Sunday is of course absolutely unintended and purely coincidental ).

The mission statement is now to have working ISOs, stable → development, and daily intra-development upgrades every day, quick and regular cleanup of uninstallable packages, component-mismatches, NBS etc., backed by a new “stable +1″ team backed by three people on a rotational shift.

QA team is now setting up daily automatic smoketesting of the installer and other packages which have tests. For the latter we’ll convert some packages to the DEP-8, the proposed format for running autopkgtest on (I’ll do udisks, postgresql-common, pygobject, apport, and jockey soon).

We’ll try do put uploads which might break something (like new libraries) to a staging area first, against which we can run test suites of reverse dependencies before it lands in the new release. As doing this on a large scale still requires infrastructure to be created, we’ll only exercise it for a few packages by uploading to precise-proposed first, but this has a high potential for extension.

We want to commit to fixing major breakage within 3 hours of development time, or otherwise revert the faulty package to the previous version (unless that aggravates problems, such as file conflicts).

Finally, for Canonical upstreams we are introducing “acceptance criteria”, which will hopefully significantly raise the quality and lower the regressions of each Unity etc. release.

So, the mission is clear. In practice we’ll probably have to make some real-life concessions, and Murphy’s law dictates that there still will be some breakage, but we can learn from that as we go.

Let’s build 12.04 LTS!

Nothing blew up in my face, so it seems today is a good day to die^Wupgrade.

This brings back old memories of my first conference in Oxford in August, the great-great-grandfather to what is UDS these days. Back then, there was no company, no Launchpad, no Blueprints, no work items, no detailled plans, just a bunch of ideas, BoFs, and this was a third of the entire crowd:

Back then we worked on the famous TRLS technology (“Totally Rad Laptop Support”) and were proud when we got the ThinkPads to suspend once. During that conference I wrote pmount to provide automatic mounting of USB sticks in a safe manner. Those were the days…

But I can also safely say that there are some things that haven’t changed. Even though both the community and the company (which changed away from www.no-name-yet.com recently) grew by two magnitudes since then, we still have the same serious attitude, stern look, and formal attire as we had back then:

We are professionals, really!

I savely arrived in our hotel in Dallas, Texas this afternoon, after a rather uneventful 14 hour trip from Dresden via Frankfurt. On the way I emptied my laptop battery with some small hacking and catching up on bug report email, and did a lot of reading. I also tried to watch Harry Potter 6, but the headphones they give you were so hideous that I hardly understood anything, so I gave up after some ten minutes.

In the early evening a small group of us went to the center to have a light Mexican style dinner (yummy), and someone came up with the monster above. Was quite an experience, veeery comfortable interior with leather couches and champagner glasses. Almost as comfortable as on my bicycle at home.

Naturally I feel the jetlag and are pretty groggy now, but I still managed to stay conscious until now, after having a beer and two hours of chatting in the bar. It’s so great to see everyone again!

I’m looking forward to the Ubuntu Developer Summit next week.