Daniel Holbach’s blog - Latest Comments

Re: UDS is a great time…

dakira — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:35:12 -0000

Hi Daniel.. I'm hard at work but I'll have some time tonight to demonstrate the problem. I'll reply here again once I have it ready. Thanks for the interest.

Re: UDS is a great time…

dholbach — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:23:55 -0000

Can you quote a specific case which doesn't work for you?

Re: UDS is a great time…

dakira — Sat, 12 May 2012 10:24:26 -0000

I'd love some update on the "Fixing a bug in Ubuntu". Following the steps described there does not work as some tools have changed (like edit-patch).

Re: UDS is a great time…

dholbach — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:50:25 -0000

Yes, awesome. Thanks a lot for your contributions there. I totally forgot to mention it. Please continue to share your feedback in bug reports, it's appreciated! :)

Re: UDS is a great time…

John Kim — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:00:09 -0000

During this week, I have been extracting, if not "user-testing" as much as I could from the Package guide. I'm happy that the team really discussed these matters very extensively and look toward the next direction.

Now, the package guide could become a little more streamlined. Perhaps, it can be disjointed at times (e.g. The "Fixing a Bug" section is slightly ambivalent and causes some confusion.). But nonetheless, we hope to fix that soon.

As a recently inspired wannabe MOTU member, I really enjoyed the sessions, seeing how veteran developers really care about us next-in-line kids to be capable of packaging and bug fixing.

Re: India

Vibhav Pant — Sat, 05 May 2012 11:59:31 -0000

Chandigarh! The place of my birth!

Re: The importance of apps in Ubuntu

dholbach — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:25:24 -0000

The software center ships: 1) all packages in Ubuntu, 2) free (no $, open license) apps, 3) commercial apps - basically everything you have a "deb http://..." line for.

1) I spent most of my time as an Ubuntu contributor on, 2) is what I'll try to help out with next cycle.

There's your freedom right there. Also you have the freedom to not choose to use non-free software.

Re: The importance of apps in Ubuntu

mangecoeur — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:08:20 -0000

Amen to that. To premtively ward off potential criticism: It wouldn't mean you couldn't use any of the millions of UI toolkits etc. But Ubuntu really needs an "official" UI toolkit, dev environment, set of build and package tools. There's no need to invent much that's new either - means taking the tools out there, making sure they all work together 100% of the time, providing clear docs in one place (even if that's just aggregating docs from several projects).

And above all it means being able to make a rock solid guarantee. Being able to promise that if you use this tool, your app will look native and well integrated, your development will go smoothly, your app will run on these versions of Ubuntu, you will be able to submit it to the software centre, and if there's a bug on Ubuntu's end that will be looked into and fixed so that your app dev process can continue smoothly.

What you want I guess is that a dev can install ubuntu, install the "Ubuntu SDK" from the software centre, start a tutorial project and be inspired to shout out loud "Sweet! This rocks!".

Re: The importance of apps in Ubuntu

Fabian — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:15:05 -0000

How about freedom and licensing such apps under a free license? I wish you write again some time about this and mention how it's possible to make money while publishing your source code. It's like the USC is focusing on paid, non-free apps only.

Re: The importance of apps in Ubuntu

daengbo — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:18:00 -0000

> They want a 'blessed' toolchain and documented SDK, like Visual Studio and Xcode.
Thank you! I have been screaming this since before 8.04, seemingly in the wilderness and to the wind. Canonical needs a preferred IDE, toolkit, and language combination, all backed by beginner documentation and with strong ties to the Ubuntu APIs.
Example of one of my tirades: http://blog.ibeentoubuntu.com/...
These days, I believe that Ubuntu should just go all-QT5, with Unity-2D as the default environment, using the great QT dev tools and tutorials as a base.

Re: The importance of apps in Ubuntu

Fabio Rafael da Rosa — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:19:58 -0000

How about the development tools ? I do agree that Apps are what Ubuntu needs for crossing the chasm, but, there is a lack of development tools for the average developer, the kind that just want to fire up Visual Basic and have a quick ' n dirt up and running. I do quickly as a _reaaallyyy_ fantastic tool.. but.... I must say.. non-unix developers are usually allergic to command line. And, gedit as the main editor, is not enough. I lacks the basic, like completion, at least. I know there are other tools, lots of them. But, the average developer, the one that only do paid development during work hours, and don't like touching computers at free time, don't want lots of tools. They want a 'blessed' toolchain and documented SDK, like Visual Studio and Xcode. The same kind of developer that , today, develop tons of applications for iPhone and Android, because they have what they want. I don' t think we can reach that class of developers until we provide that, and I do believe that Quickly _must_ be in it's hearth.

Re: The importance of apps in Ubuntu

Stefan — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:08:53 -0000

Many apps will probably not be developed from scratch with gtk, but ported from other platforms or developed with other tools (pygame, xulrunner, kivy, ...). Unity integration is in principle possible for those tools, because dbus is at the core of most unity specific features (app menu, launcher menus, ...). However, what is completely missing is documentation of the protocols used.
So currently there are two options: either use the newest version of gtk/qt or forget about unity integration. This is not a very good situation. While delevoper.ubuntu.com looks nice, it really needs some work in terms of actual content. The specific content I'm talking about can at the moment only be provided by Canonical employees, who wrote the undocumented components of unity. Providing this documentation will probably help to get more apps to ubuntu.

Re: Making sure code gets reviewed in Ubuntu

track a cell phone — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:07:33 -0000

As far as i know, new contributors who don’t have upload rights to Ubuntu yet get their
code reviewed and their packages uploaded by Ubuntu developers. This
process is called sponsoring.

Re: What new development contributors have to say

Kevin Carillo — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 17:00:06 -0000

Definitely some good initiative as I have the feeling that FLOSS communities in general lack some clear understanding about the newcomer side of the story. I have a feeling that more efforts shall be spent in exploring the actual newcomer experience. Well done for the study and report. I am currently doinf some research on developing a socialization model for FLOSS newcomers (PhD). I am trying to understand the relationship of a newcomer experience and his/her citizenship behaviours in the community (helping, civic virtue, advocating and others). Let me know if you want to hear about it.

Again well done for the study. Ubuntu is doing a tremendous job at getting newcomers involved.

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

dholbach — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:53:45 -0000

Sure, I didn't mean to say "you're doing it wrong". :-)

For somebody who is interested in getting started with Ubuntu development and doesn't have a clear target in front of them (like writing a new app), I'd still recommend working on a few packages to get their feet wet and learn more gradually.

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

pavolzetor — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:41:46 -0000

Yes, but I love learning new things, but I give you example, in GDBus, I found signals example after long time googling in one project source code for python, when I improve my skills, I am going to write some guide or so.

Or, simple thing like Drag and Drop, I do not know how to make it to have it animated for whole widget, and so on.

I have started with fixing bug ;-)

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

dholbach — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:25:32 -0000

Good idea.

It's hard to automatically detect difficulty level automatically, but if we do have the information - we should be allow categorising by it. I filed https://bugs.launchpad.net/har... about this.

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

dholbach — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:20:37 -0000

Personally I found it easiest to get started slowly. Fix some small bug in a random package and take it from there. If you want to create a new project or package a big project from scratch, it is indeed going to be harder because you will likely have to grasp many new technologies at the same time.

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

Rocketcoder — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:07:40 -0000

The difficulty level would be a nice thing to categorize the bugs by.

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

pavolzetor — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:03:06 -0000

To be honest, if you develop something new (little different), it is quite hard to start (probably on every OS), there is missing documentation for GDBus with examples, also Gtk needs massive overhaul (toolkit and docs).
Packaging is quite hard (I mean, when you start from scratch and you need to google and look into other projects)

But I loved hangout and it encouraged me to work harder on my project :)

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

dholbach — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:48:45 -0000

No no that's fine. It's a reaffirmation of what might be important for Harvest hackers to look into. :-)

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

Marcel — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:45:20 -0000

well, well, I should have had a look at the bug reports first ;)

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

dholbach — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:40:32 -0000

Regarding 1) we have https://bugs.launchpad.net/har... filed, and I agree it should be fixed. I'll ping the folks on that bug again.

Regarding 2) your assessment is correct. It would definitely take a bit more work to get it up and running. https://bugs.launchpad.net/har... discusses some of the bits involved, but there's no clear way forward planned yet.

Re: If only I had known what needs to be done…

Marcel — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:17:52 -0000

First: thumbs up for this project!

I have two improvements to suggest, though:
1) The bug number is a quite useless piece of information, the bug title would be much more useful! The only (indirect) use I take out of the bug number is a rough estimation of the age of the bug -- but of course a direct value for this would be even more simple.
2) This is probably a bit more work, but it would be nice to have a better idea of what skills are needed, most importantly, what programming language is used. This would make harvest more similar to sites like https://openhatch.org/ -- the programming language info should be available via debtags, isn't it?

Re: Ubuntu is NOT part of Google Summer of Code 2011

dholbach — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:11:14 -0000

Unfortunately not: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archi... :-(