Michael Bienia wrote:
snip
Indepenent of how hard you make it to break an installation, there will
be someone who managed to break it nonetheless and expects from you to
unbreak it. And at the same time you will annoy experienced users who
know what they are doing.
I don't follow this part.
Michael Bienia wrote:
On 2009-08-05 12:55:04 +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
Michael Bienia wrote:
snip
Indepenent of how hard you make it to break an installation, there will
be someone who managed to break it nonetheless and expects from you to
unbreak it. And at the same time you will annoy
You make a good point about breakage when packages are downgraded. But
it seems a little disingenuous for us to bend over backwards to make
unsupported upgrades possible (adding a software sources menu item,
putting PPAs in Launchpad, creating /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and so on),
then for us
I've found a bug (or maybe it's a feature request) in apt (or maybe it's
in software-properties-gtk). I'd like to get people's opinions about
where this is best reported, and what the report should say.
When you add a repository to your computer, then remove that repository,
it's not obvious
Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
The fact that there is nobody willing to reply (I posted a similar
message one year ago, so this is certainly not a matter of time) can
mean only two things:
1) on this list, nobody knows the answer. I think this is likely. Then,
the custom search should be
Hi Vincenzo,
You might have more luck if you describe your changes as feature
requests. Whether or not you personally think they're bugs, calling
them new features should avoid the always been that way reaction from
developers.
You might also want to try helping out with the improved me too
I think the FAQ/flowchart/chatroom model could work very well in other
places, but the Signpost is just about pointing people in the right
direction - providing solutions is outside our modest scope.
You've already got a chatroom in #ubuntu, so the next thing is to start
writing answers. I
I think the model we're heading towards with the signpost is that the
wiki page contains questions that have been asked before, while IRC and
the wiki discussion page are for new questions.
If it works, I think #ubuntu might want to look at the signpost model.
Being able to click I have a
Evan wrote:
Launchpad is for bug reporting and tracking, beyond that I have no idea
where the actual division of responsibilities lies. Perhaps clarifying
that (ex: Wiki is for Howtos only, forums are only for ...) and then
providing a meta-support page for each topic would help. So
The Ubuntu community is growing, and as Evan mentioned, our current
channels of communication can only support a finite rate of messages.
So there are only two possible solutions: increase the supply of
meat-bandwidth, or decrease the demand. Other posts have interesting
ideas about
Martin Pitt wrote:
Andrew Sayers [2009-06-22 19:04 +0100]:
There's currently a big push to make Empathy the default IM client in
Karmic, even though the version in Jaunty still has grave issues - for
example, MSN doesn't work at all for me[1].
We don't propose to retroactively default
Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
Andrew Sayers wrote on 23/06/09 17:55:
We're constantly trying to make the Ubuntu installation process simpler.
And explaining the Popularity Contest in an understandable way, in the
installer which is completely out of context, would be quite difficult.
As part
Nicolò Chieffo wrote:
you should use git master before giving points ;)
Could you give us some idea of when a testable version will land in
Karmic? We've got two months left until the final decision on whether
this becomes as significant a part of Ubuntu as Firefox or OpenOffice,
so it would
This argument must have been had before, but recent events have prompted
me to suggest it anyway:
The submit statistical information page in System
Administration Software Sources Statistics should be
presented during the installation process. The box should
Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
On Tuesday 23 June 2009 1:36:21 pm Siegfried-Angel wrote:
If I remember correctly there is already such an option in the installer.
I think he wants it to be more prominent, not hidden behind advanced, that
way it gets more use.
I wasn't aware of the feature, so
Caroline Ford wrote:
2009/6/23 Andrew Sayers andrew-ubuntu-de...@pileofstuff.org:
IMHO, the best solution would be to enable popcon by default in
alpha/beta versions, and as Mackenzie says, make it more prominent for
everyone else.
This could have a transformative effect on the development
There's currently a big push to make Empathy the default IM client in
Karmic, even though the version in Jaunty still has grave issues - for
example, MSN doesn't work at all for me[1].
The plan is to make sure that these bugs are all fixed in time for
Karmic, but what's the backup plan if
Peteris Krisjanis wrote:
I like this idea. This could be not only limited to Pidgin, but other
software, like Xchat, for example.
Go ahead, create blueprint for this.
With apologies for the delay, please see:
Thanks for these links. Now you remind me, I do remember a flurry of
activity in August, which I'd put out of my mind when it didn't get any
traction.
I'll try to listen in during the next UDS, but it looks like there
aren't many archives kept around for those of us that want to go in and
I guess my previous message wasn't clear - I'm not making an argument
here from personal preference, I'm trying to file a bug in Ubuntu
itself. Specifically, that dropping Pidgin will cause a regression in
the user experience for migraters.
I'm also not arguing that migraters are incapable of
Hi Dan,
About halfway through this reply, a compromise occurred to me: get
migration-assistant to install Pidgin if it's detected. If that works,
it would get rid of many of the issues I've been complaining about, at
least for migraters that plan to dual boot. This post covers some
As promised, this reply will concentrate on working around problems
faced by migraters by patching migration-assistant. I would be willing
to put programming time into the ideas suggested here.
As I stated in another post, the best Linux migration strategy involves
two stages: new apps/same
I got halfway through a project that would solve broadly the same
problems as your /etc/issue proposal. It faltered when Launchpad kept
attaching the blueprint to Drupal and the merge proposal didn't go anywhere.
The would-be blueprint is still available[1], the bug in Launchpad has
been
Hi Mark,
I think I understand now why you and the list have been butting heads so
much. I'd like to present my theory, then explain how you can be more
productive in advocating to developers.
At a Fortune 500 company, I would expect that advocacy is very political
- it's important to create
Christopher Chan wrote:
These are about 'standards'. Can there really be a technical argument
between using say the metric system versus the foot/yard or the ounce/pound?
Yes:
1) state your technical requirements
2) state the relevant properties of each standard
3) argue about which
Mike Jones wrote:
This discussion has gone on long enough that I'm no longer able to tell
what we are discussing.
Neal posted a GNOME bug report
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554172) which I think sums up
the issues really well.
I agree with Evan that there are two issues:
a)
Assessment of PPAs sounds to me like peer review. That would be a big
job to implement, but IMHO benefits would go far beyond a web of trust.
Of course, I'm not volunteering to do it :)
- Andrew
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Scott James Remnant wrote:
On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 08:57 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
Max Bowsher [2009-06-01 23:41 +0100]:
To my mind, the power-of-2 grouping is sufficiently intrinsic to the
nature of bytes, whilst the kibi mebi gibi tebi stuff not only sounds
and looks stupid, but loses a
snip - using million and mln rather than mega and MB)
Scott James Remnant wrote:
... this is yet another strange postfix or unit that users would
have to learn.
735.2 MB is not confusing if it means ~735,200,000 bytes.
That's a good point for the short form, so long as the UI spells out
Scott James Remnant wrote:
What would you use for the thousand million bytes case? :)
HINT: the meaning of billion differs between thousand million and
million million depending on your location.
Most people in the metric-speaking world know what Kilo means, and have
proved themselves
That grab a friend experiment is one of those posts where my inner
science geek betrays me. I chose kilo and mega instead of mega
and giga so that I would be less likely to skew the experiment by
asking the same exact question twice in a row with different phrasing.
A more robust methodology
Jan Claeys wrote:
A lot of people run unstable during alpha beta, but many do it in a VM
or on an old spare system. That doesn't help find regressions that are
hardware-related, of course, and in general those systems might not see
the same sort of use that people's main computers see.
Regressions occur in Ubuntu releases. As mentioned elsewhere, this is
to be expected, and may be for the best. But if you've spent 6 months
getting Intrepid just how you like it, starting over again with Jaunty
can be a pain.
So how about we offer the user the opportunity to `cp -l /bin /etc
There are a few general points that I thought were worth highlighting:
There is a gulf between the way that developers and non-developers see
the world. This is reflected in their interests, their speech, and
their approach to issues. While Ubuntu has many ingenious
technologies to improve
Hi all,
The results are now available for a survey looking at the ratio of
signal to noise on this mailing list. I'd like to thank the people
that responded, and I hope it kicks off a productive debate. The
results are available at http://www.pileofstuff.org/ubuntu-survey/
I generally find
Fergal Daly wrote:
Anyway, I'm curious, is this really a developer list? I subscribed
because it was the only way to _contact_ ubuntu developers and I've
seen lots of people use it for that. So maybe it has more technical
users than the average but that's not the same thing as being a
I've written up a blueprint for a potential solution to the c-a-b
problem. For some reason, Launchpad attaches this blueprint to
loco-drupal no matter what I tell it, so it's available here:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/loco-drupal/+spec/blue-screen-of-life
If someone else would like to try
If you just want to disable certain large packages, could you do some
sort of pinning arrangement on them? You should be able to configure
apt so that it (for example) prefers an older version of OOo to an
updated one, but likes a security fix better still. See
To be honest, I never really understood the focus on technological
solutions to this problem. The user being monitored will always try to
fight their way out of the box, and will often succeed (e.g. by
downloading a live CD and using that).
When you start locking down every avenue for
I have created a survey looking at this list's signal:noise ratio at
http://pileofstuff.org/ubuntu-survey/ - please take a few minutes to
fill it in, so we can better decide how to tackle the issue.
Ubuntu developers tend to complain about the ratio of signal to noise on
the Ubuntu-devel-discuss
Loïc Martin wrote:
While I'm no Shakespeare, I'm confused with the formulation:
I'm [somehow confident] that other people would consider these
examples of noise.
Good point - I've now changed it to ... consider these to be examples
of noise. Is that alright?
- Andrew
--
Martin Owens wrote:
Grumbling developers aren't good, no, but then I've also seen how
developers treat and think of their users in the most distasteful ways
on other lists.
I think this gets to an important issue - the survey didn't test the
degree to which people would hold back from
Markus Hitter wrote:
snip - developers don't want to hear people complaining
It's an interesting theory, and should be possible to test if enough
developers respond. We could look at the correlation between people
identifying themselves as developers and identifying bugs, mistakes,
Thank you for the detailed review. I've made some changes based on it,
which I'll explain below.
I've made the language in section 1 a bit more subjective. I'm not sure
whether you were meaning that the [] boxes should be for numeric input,
but I've left them as drop-down boxes because numbers
Hi Chris,
Thanks for this - it's good to have some definitive information :)
Do you know why Sun asked for their branding on a product with a
different feature set to their own? It seems to me like this would
cause confusion (as evidenced by this thread), and would give some
measure of support
As I mentioned at the start, my interest in this is rather indirect - I
don't expect to ever write OO.o code, and probably don't understand the
issues as well as people closer to the situation. As such, I'm
evaluating the arguers more than the argument, and trying to work out
what sorts of things
Speaking as someone with a strictly armchair interest in this topic, I'd
like to make a few observations here -
The way (non-Sun) people talk about OO.o reminds me of the way people
used to talk about the pre-Firefox Mozilla project - worthy and
important, but with low developer morale due to an
tchomby wrote:
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 09:43:16PM +, Sam Tygier wrote:
The mac os solution is to have a 'enforce permissions on this device' option
(in the info/properties of the device). maybe this could be implemented in a
similar way to the .is_audio_player file [0].
A checkbox in
I wouldn't normally comment, but I think it's important to put some
perspective to the earlier argument about users creating noise on the list.
When someone with an @ubuntu.com address responds to a reasonable
question with a flame like this, without actually suggesting a solution
to the
Sarah - this should make sense on its own, but it builds on an idea I
suggested in
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-November/006250.html
which you might provide a little background to this post.
3) There are plenty of other hardware regressions by which I am affected
Stephan Hermann wrote:
On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 11:56 +0100, Markus Hitter wrote:
- Allow downgrades. This should help narrowing potential causes of
the trouble.
This is something I don't understand.
When I upgrade to a new release, I always think (or is it knowing): Ok,
for the next 4
Scott Kitterman wrote:
On Wednesday 22 October 2008 09:07, Ethan Baldridge wrote:
snip - package git should install Git, not GIT
You would think that, but the package git predates the existance of Git the
DVCS, so until it's removed/renamed, no.
Scott K
How about changing the package's
This is a bit OT, but you can get e-mails out of just about anything by
apt-getting an IMAP server and uploading your old mail from your client
of anti-choice. It's not exactly a newbie-friendly solution, but it's
how I rescued my e-mails from Outlook back in the day.
- Andrew
--
I like the idea of a FUSE interface to GConf, and I could see extending
the idea to some sort of configFS - I seem to remember the ReiserFS guys
talking about a similar idea years ago, before recent events overtook
them. I think an interface that involves opening
Could you spell out some specific issues that this would solve? For
example, are you looking to avoid two packages overwriting each other's
files in ~/? If so, can you give an example of that happening?
- Andrew
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I think we've all had that idea at one time or another, but sadly it's
based on a misunderstanding of how the community works.
Steve Jobs stood atop the mountain and commanded that Mac developers
jump to plists, and everyone jumped because that's how Apple development
works. If Mark Shuttleworth
I don't like fixed width pages personally (my computer should do what I
want, not what someone else wants me to want), but you can appease more
reasonable people by changing width: NNNpx statements to width: NNem
or max-width: NNem.
Using em rather than px fixes the width at a certain number of
I think there's an elephant in this room - why are we running fsck at all?
a) If it's to detect corruption due to software errors, fsck should be
linked up to apport, and reported (semi-)automatically.
b) If it's to check for dying hardware[1], it can be disabled for all
but the oldest hard
gone as far as I can go with this idea - if someone with more of a
clue is interested, could you suggest the best way of solving this issue?
- Andrew
#!/bin/sh
# Check filesystems without rebooting, using LVM
# Andrew Sayers, 14 August 2008
# [EMAIL PROTECTED]
#
# This script aims to be FS
Phillip Susi wrote:
The snapshot was never mounted in the first place, so there is no need
to unmount it.
As you mentioned before however, any files changed since the snapshot
was made will be lost when you reboot and merge the snapshot back to the
main volume.
Either I'm not making
Alexander Jones wrote:
PLEASE redirect your efforts towards online fscking. This whole idea
is absolutely horrible.
How so?
- Andrew
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Xavier Claessens wrote:
What do you mean by merging? The code is totally different, it's
impossible to merge together.
Xavier Claessens
I'm talking more about merging the projects than the codebases - finding
a way that you can all work on a single project that would satisfy users
and
Matt Zimmerman wrote:
The LVM solution isn't viable anyway; there's no guarantee that the metadata
on disk is in any way consistent while the filesystem is mounted. The
problem in your test isn't only that the filesystem is changing from
underneath it, it's also that it may not have been
Alexander Jones wrote:
2008/8/10 Luke L [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Pidgin works terrificly, and is stable. Ekiga covers the rest. This would be
a pretty big switch in terms of volume of users, and Intrepid is only 2.5
months away. I believe this should be put on hold.
Saying that Ekiga meets the
Xavier Claessens wrote:
I doubt the contest is meaningful for packages installed by default...
Having pidgin/ekiga installed does not mean actually using it. Or am I
wrong?
Xavier Claessens.
You'd be right if I referenced the list sorted by the number of people
who installed the package
I'm a bit confused about the desired outcome of this proposal. From the
discussion, it seems to be an attempt to get more developers looking at
a new messaging framework with the potential to do all sorts of weird
and wonderful things. If so, then replacing Pidgin as the default IM
client seems
George Farris wrote:
Lets start again. Yes, contrary to popular geek culture, there are
people that would like to:
A) Install a home server from CD
B) Login and be presented with a list of options for configuring that
server
C) Not have to understand how to run the server at the guts
Could this be related to the infamous bug #196277? To my untrained eye,
it looks rather like the issues described by Frantisek Fuka in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/196277
- Andrew
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Partitioning is one of those topics that you can argue round forever
without any danger of reaching agreement about the general case. I'm
not sure what arguments you've read about the / + /home approach, but
I found a recent discussion on this list fairly interesting:
Przemysław Kulczycki wrote:
Recently I've noticed that Ubuntu (or just Gnome) doesn't have a run
program menu entry like in Windows' Start menu.
I don't think every user will magically know the alt+f2 shortcut.
I think this menu item should be added to the Applications menu, above
or below
There are several people looking into this problem in different ways -
mostly building on existing frameworks such as telepathy. From a
technological point-of-view, the problem is that securely sharing a
desktop when both people are potentially behind NAT firewalls and
haven't shared public keys
Thanks - I've updated that whole page now, including this section. I've
removed the implementation section, because it's just out-of-date
documentation now there's an actual implementation to refer to. Is
there anything else you'd like me to add/remove/change?
Because popularity contest data is
We had a discussion in early May about creating a simple mechanism to
make over-the-phone tech support easier. At the time, our (and
especially my) focus was on recovery from a situation where X wouldn't
start. I've put some time into the project since we talked about it, so
if there's anyone
There's one serious security concern I have about the remote help
assistant which I'm not sure how to work around: at present, it sends
the helper's username in plaintext over the Internet, and strongly hints
that they're running an SSH server. That's not a problem if you have
proper security in
This e-mail summarises a discussion in #ubuntu-motu between myself,
ScottK and persia. I'll first explain the general problem, then suggest
a messy solution to a surprisingly messy problem. Most of these ideas
are not my own, and in fact had to be explained to me at some length, so
please don't
If you're amenable to extra scripts being suggested, I'll submit a bug
report(s) as and when it's relevant.
You're right about requiring a user choice, but I'm a bit concerned that
users are going to be confronted with a collection of options that they
don't understand, where one of them is known
When important filesystems (like /usr and /home) fail to mount, Ubuntu
currently tries to carry on regardless, leading to confusing
higher-level errors. Ubuntu's /etc/fstab uses UUID=blah to make failed
mounts less likely, but it also means that it's impossible to mount
anything when udev fails
(starting a new sub-thread for a new proposal)
I'm currently swinging back towards remote recovery and remote help
being distinct problems that need different solutions. There are three
reasons for that:
1) As I mentioned in a previous post, remote recovery needs to be done
in an extremely
Justin,
I agree that a single solution would be best, but I can't see how to
make it work in the case of a system that's mostly broken. However, it
looks like it's going to be an evidentiary question - either we can make
it work or we can't. How would you feel about the following working
On the other hand, I'm wrong about that :)
I've just discovered a package called socat, which is an extremely
general command line tool for creating connections between things - more
so even than netcat. It's in Universe, so it's presumably not that much
of an ask to have it upgraded to main. I
Having looked quickly at cryptcat, it seems like some interfaces would
be best served by cryptcat+socat, so that you can get security and a
pseudo-terminal. To generalise your idea even further, how about a
bidding system? For example, say the expert asks for a forward remote
shell on the
We're certainly getting there!
I haven't yet given up hope of doing this with a shell script
(evidentiary question again). The benefit of a shell script is that it
leaves open the possibility of packaging a lite version of the program
as a single architecture-neutral file, so that we can support
Okay, I've got the auction part of the dash adventure completed. In
principle, the rest should be relatively easy. The code isn't vastly
useful or commented so far, it's just a proof of concept really.
The script doesn't prune unlikely matches (e.g. socat+ssh when ssh is
already provided),
I've now updated the page that Pedro kindly started at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Recovery/Remote - this includes all the ideas
I've got so far. This is my first Ubuntu development thing, so yes, any
help very much appreciated!
You're quite right that the people you have to worry about aren't the
.
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At this point, I'm trying to walk the line between unrealistic wouldn't
it be great if... type ideas and overly-strict reliance on solving the
specific problem I have in my head, so I'd like to go back to first
principles for a moment. Please tell me if any of these are false:
1) It's common for
Based on this evidence, does anybody object to a bug report being filed
against openssh-server, saying that password authentication should be
disabled by default? Of course, that leaves all my ideas in serious
trouble, but that's a secondary matter.
- Andrew
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. They can then read the password in ~/password, and
sudo whatever they need to sudo.
9) Remove the remote-recovery user and delete their home directory
- Andrew Sayers
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https
to Debian?
- Andrew Sayers
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Milosz Derezynski wrote:
There is IMO no real need for a random password; instead, the user of
the machine to be recovered should be allowed to enter a password which
he then can tell to the user recovering the machine remotely. This
doesn't neccessarily have to be more insecure; a random
Milosz Derezynski wrote:
It could work if after the package is skipped apt recreates the
dependency list; this might be bad to oversee though (especially without
a GUI), however adding a printout a la These packages were originally
meant to be installed: $PACKAGES Since package $PACKAGE was
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