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UDS Copenhagen, Day 2

After the breakfast, the second day of UDS started with the familiar Community roundtable which again had some interesting discussions. The one single thing that caught me that there wasn’t a roundtable in the room, not even a non-round-table… (There was one at the leadership mini-summit later though!)

Right after the community session and some bad jokes, I was up to some UTAH training. UTAH in itself is about automating some tests so you don’t need to go through programmatically easy things manually. It’s something the Xubuntu team definitely should look at for R and try to improve until the next LTS, which would definitely benefit from automated testing.

The UTAH training would have lasted for two sessions, but I jumped off the middle to talk about best practices, tips and tricks for LoCos. Even if I haven’t been (yet) active with my LoCo. The discussion kind of went from best practices to biggest similar problems, but it was still interesting and eye-opening session. Maybe I really should start working with the Finnish LoCo…

Finally, the last morning session for Tuesday was the first planning session for Xubuntu R. We went through most of the development-side issues in the session, including a few new things we would like to introduce for R. Namely, the new display dialog to control your monitors, MenuLibre over Alacarte and finally, better and more secure screen locking.

In addition to those new parts, we discussed about SRUing the new documentation to 12.04 with some needed modifications, fixing some long-standing bugs as well as tracking Xubuntu-specific bugs better. There was also some general discussion on the future of Xubuntu along with some considerations and concerns for the following releases, including GTK2 and Wayland stuff. We will definitely keep these discussions going when seeing each other, and if time allows, the other Xubuntu planning session too. In the end, we will (need to) move the discussion to the mailing list, IRC and other mediums as appropriate.

Last but not the least, we took a Xubuntu team photo!

Leadership mini-summit

The whole afternoon was reserved for the leadership mini-summit. In the summit, we discussed various topics, including but not limited to difficult situations in community teams, training successors to teams and encouraging as well as appreciating localness in the local community teams.

We also thought there should be a better way to collect the monthly team reports since as it is now, too many teams aren’t sending the reports. To be exact, some teams, including Xubuntu, haven’t been doing these reports in months, and that needs to change.

So, for the best of all of us, I promised to work on a proof of concept version of a simple web interface that collects team reports and outputs them in a nice format. I actually think we might want several output format, to paste on a wiki, text document and whatever else. Easy enough to do that when you’ve already gathered all the information.

Evening activities

After the sessions I planned to attend the Ubuntu Testing Extravaganza, but I stayed a bit too long in the hotel room relaxing that I missed the beer and pizza. I popped in to listen to the lightning talks, but soon enough we decided to take the metro downtown and grab some dinner. It was really nice to get out of the hotel even for a short while and acknowledge that yes, there is still life outside UDS as well!

Now I’m back to the hotel room and I’m about to start hacking a bit on the team reports web interface, or at least planning it.

Generally so far the athmosphere has been fantastic. I also think my expectations regarding productivity are in a reasonable level and there won’t be any major disappointments after getting back home from UDS. You will also have my word that I will do all I can to get the work items I’ve committed to done in a sensible timespan to get things actually progressing as well as to leave enough time for others to take their actions depending on my work items.

Until tomorrow, take care.

This article is part of the article series .