Saturday, July 9, 2011

Teamwork!

Kudos to the Kubuntu packaging team, who are doing so much with so little! By so much, I mean that they are not only packaging all of KDE 4.7 release candidate, but also the 4.6 updates. With JR Riddell off working on Bazaar for Canonical, it's been a tremendous job for an all-volunteer crew. Many of these folks are in school, doing a Google Summer of Code project, or have summer jobs too.

I've seen them really challenged not only to get the software packaged so it builds and runs, but also running down licensing information, which is sometimes difficult to find or confusing to provide. Yet they have been so fun to watch, as they joke back and forth in IRC while working at top speed, and checking one another's work.

If you've ever thought about learning to package, or know how but have been taking a break, stop by #kubuntu-devel and offer your help. You will find work waiting for you.

Thanks again, Kubuntu team. You totally rock!

3 comments:

  1. Hello,

    so by now all points mentioned here:
    http://www.jonobacon.org/2008/02/01/canonical-and-kde/

    are not true anymore?

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  2. Thanks for the post, its good to hear that there is still activity behind the scenes.

    Kubuntu has always had an impressive track record when it came to packaging the latest versions of KDE. So, I found it quite worrisome when Beta 1 & 2 came and went without a word. And then RC 1 was also met with silence...

    I understand that things happen, and that it's not always possible to deliver everything on time, but I really wish that they had put up a notice letting us know KDE was going to be delayed. Somehow the silence is far worse than any bad news could ever be, because it makes us (or me at the very least) feel as though we're not part of the community.

    But anyway, thanks for that small insight into what's happening behind the scenes. Let them know that we are rooting for them and hope they succeed in their plans to take over the world.

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  3. @Tom -- wow, that's an old post by jono. The one part that is no longer true is that ShipIt is dead. Official LoCos, however, still get all the CDs they require. Riddell is merely taking a cycle in a different part of Canonical, at his own request. We've always been a community-driven part of Ubuntu, and that hasn't changed.

    @StephanG - I wish you had written to the devel list or come into the devel channel and said something about your worries. I'll speak up about putting something on Kubuntu.org to tell people what's up. There was a lot of work that the packagers didn't expect, and it was just plain slower than usual. Silence isn't good, I agree.

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