Hello,

Please find below the first edition of a new weekly newsletter from the
Ubuntu Foundations Team. It contains highlights from the week, information
about the state of the Ubuntu development archive, and other news from the
Foundations Team.

Sincerely,

The Ubuntu Foundations Team

*Thursday June 15, 2017*

Introduction

This newsletter is to provide a status update from the Ubuntu Foundations
Team.

Hi all,

Starting last month, Debian has been discussing dropping net-tools[1], which
prompted me to review its status in Ubuntu. This package, which provides
various commands like ifconfig and netstat, is currently part of
ubuntu-minimal. However, the tools in this package are largely considered
superseded by iproute2, providing 'ip' and 'ss' tools that interface much
better with modern kernels. And iproute2 is also part of ubuntu-minimal.

Is there a reason to keep net-tools in ubuntu-minimal, or should we remove
it from the minimal set for 17.04?

Hi all,

With the changes to how build-dependencies are handled for main, it makes
sense also to propagate these changes to packagesets.

Hi all,

Prompted by the previous discussions on this list about
python2 on the desktop and build-depends out of main, I looked around a bit
at what was keeping various python2 packages still in main.

Hi all,

The g++5 transition is in progress now in wily-proposed. Library packages
in main that need package renames have all been staged, and most
reverse-dependencies of these libraries have been rebuilt. Libraries in
universe have mostly also been staged, but many of them have not yet had
rebuilds triggered for their reverse-dependencies.

For libraries in main, I've identified a number of reverse-dependencies that
are going to need a bit of attention in order to resolve these transitions.
Help resolving these is appreciated.

Forwarding to ubuntu-devel for reference. Cheers!

Hi folks,

So the Ubuntu desktop image has not been building on powerpc for roughly a
month at this point, due to build failures in particular subcomponents of
the unity stack.

Hi folks,

Now that Debian jessie is open for development, and a few packages
(lsb/insserv/sysvinit/debhelper) have been updated in saucy, at long last
there is an implementation of upstart support in Debian that's compatible
with Ubuntu.

This means that it's now possible to forward our patches for upstart job
support to Debian! When doing merges this cycle on packages that ship
upstart jobs, I would encourage you to look at whether these are in a state
to be forwarded upstream.

Before forwarding upstart jobs, there are a few things to be aware of.

Dear developers,

Recent bug reports suggest that the Ubuntu installer for Windows, Wubi, is
not currently in very good shape for a release:

13.04 installer doesn't create user account
<a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704" title="https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704">https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704</a>

Wubi fails to detect 12.04.2 and 13.04 AMD64 ISO
<a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770" title="https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770">https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770</a>

Combined with the fact that Wubi has not been updated to work with Windows 8
(bug #1125604), and the focus on mobile client over desktop, the Foundations
team does not expect Wubi to be in a releasable state for 13.04.

I am therefore proposing to drop Wubi from

Dear developers,

When the armhf architecture was introduced in Ubuntu for 12.04 LTS, it was
with the intention of transitioning our ARM builds entirely from armel to
armhf, to take advantage of this more efficient hard-float ABI on the
supported ARMv7 targets. We achieved this in 12.04, with all released
images shipping as armhf instead of armel.

Now, after a transitional overlap, it's time to take the next step and drop
the armel architecture from Ubuntu. We will shortly be removing armel from
the raring archive.

Dear developers,

As part of ongoing efforts to reduce the number of images we ship for
Ubuntu, and to make the desktop image more useful in a variety of scenarios,
Dmitrijs Ledkovs has been hard at work in quantal adding support for LVM,
cryptsetup, and RAID to ubiquity.

The good news is that this means today we already have support in ubiquity
for cryptsetup and LVM in the guided partitioner, with manual partitioning
support soon to follow.

Canonical provided an update earlier today on our plans for implementing
compatibility with UEFI's new "Secure Boot" mechanism in Ubuntu:

<a href="http://blog.canonical.com/2012/06/22/an-update-on-ubuntu-and-secure-boot/" title="http://blog.canonical.com/2012/06/22/an-update-on-ubuntu-and-secure-boot/">http://blog.canonical.com/2012/06/22/an-update-on-ubuntu-and-secure-boot/</a>

I'd like to provide a brief update on the technical details of this
implementation so that people have some idea of what's happening.

Boot loader selection
=====================

UEFI Secure Boot allows users to install their own keys and sign boot
loaders themselves, and in that case the boot loader can do whatever the
user is comfortable with.

Dear developers,

At UDS-O in Budapest a year ago, there was much discussion about the future
of the plumbing stack in Ubuntu; with buzz about systemd and about GNOME
changing to depend on it, many asked if Ubuntu would stick with upstart or
switch to systemd. The decision at the time was to stick with upstart
through 12.04, and revisit the question after that.

With 12.04 more or less in the bag, the gears have started to turn for
planning 12.10 and beyond.

Hi folks,

Back at last UDS in November, we discussed whether it was time to switch to
presenting 64-bit images as the default image for desktop, like they already
are for server, now that all new desktop hardware is 64-bit and multiarch is
a reality.

There was a rough consensus at UDS that the blockers were solved, but that
the question should be taken to ubuntu-devel to gather more input.

Hi folks,

With precise now open, I've wasted no time in doing away with the ia32-libs
package.

The following may be of interest to some folks here. Since Ubuntu (by way
of Debian) relies on the FHS to ensure consistent policy of how our
filesystem is put together, a healthy FHS spec is important to us. If
you're interested, please subscribe to the mailing list to help make sure
Ubuntu's needs are represented in the standards process.

Thanks,

Hi folks,

The qemu-kvm package in natty is in good shape for KVM users, but doesn't
work very well for anyone who wants to use it for emulation of non-x86
architectures.

A couple weeks ago I sat down with the Linaro toolchain engineers and the
Ubuntu server team to talk through how we can fix this without disrupting
the KVM support, given that most of the work for supporting other targets of
interest (e.g., ARM) is done on a very different upstream branch from the
qemu-kvm branch.

Hi all,

At UDS in Dallas, it was proposed that we run a round of removals of those
binary packages from sources that fail to build in lucid, so that we would
enter the LTS release clean and no users would wind up installing binary
packages that it would be impossible for us to provide security support for.

<a href="https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-lucid-supportable-binaries" title="https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-lucid-supportable-binaries">https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/foundations-lucid-supporta...</a>

Although it's taken longer than expected to get the list of removal
candidates together, I believe this is still the right thing for us to do
for Lucid, since anything on this list not only was failing

=== Scott James Remnant ===

* In bed with Flu monday/tuesday :-(
* Fixed the rsyslog 100% CPU issue; due to the design of rsyslogd it wasn't possible to have it refuse to drop permissions, instead I had to make it disable the klog plugin if a zero-byte read() returned -EPERM
* Patched Upstart to mount /proc and /sys itself on boot, solving all the annoying issues where things like mountall and ureadahead need it
* usb-modeswitch discussion
* Helping OEM team out with issues related to Plymouth
* Been working on Plymouth's VT issues, and trying to understand the complex interplay between

Hi folks,

As you're merging packages for karmic, you may run across one of the many
packages in Ubuntu that carries a delta to pull in the postfix MTA instead
of exim4. The good news is, there's now a way to send these changes
upstream to Debian, so that we don't have to carry this delta anymore!

Debian bug #508644, while not entirely closed out, has been addressed by the
maintainers of the exim4 package declaring exim4-daemon-light Provides:
default-mta.

This definitely didn't happen for me (or, as far as I can tell from bug
report frequency, the vast majority of users?)

Nope - uswsusp is in universe, and is not the supported suspend method.

The reason given in the changelog is:

uswsusp (0.6~cvs20070618-1ubuntu2) gutsy; urgency=low

* Don't build s2ram. It's not sensible on Ubuntu.

-- Matthew Garrett < ... at srcf dot ucam.org> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:47:18 +0100

Unfortunately that doesn't explain much.

That seems like a reasonable option if it's practical.

Hi folks,

Here are the meeting minutes from the August 29 release meeting,
also available in the wiki at
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseTeam/Meeting/2008-08-29>.

== Present ==

* Colin Watson (cjwatson)
* David Mandala (davidm)
* Rick Clark (dendrobates)
* Henrik Omma (heno_)
* Loïc Minier (lool)
* Matt Zimmerman (mdz)
* Steve Langasek (slangasek) - chair
* Pete Graner (pgraner)
* Jonathan Riddell (Riddell)
* Scott Kitterman (ScottK-laptop)

== Apologies ==

* Martin Pitt
* Sarah Hobbs
* Scott James Remnant

== Agenda ==
* Milestoned bugs
* <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/" title="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/">https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/</a>

Hi folks,

Please find below the meeting minutes from the August 8 release meeting,
also available in the wiki at
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseTeam/Meeting/2008-08-08>.

Alpha-4 is past now of course, but you may find this a useful record of how
we got there, as well as a helpful reminder of any still-outstanding issues.

== Present ==

* Alexander Sack (asac)
* Ben Collins (BenC)
* Bryce Harrington (bryce)
* Colin Watson (cjwatson)
* Rick Clark (dendrobates)
* Henrik Omma (heno)
* Dustin Kirkland (kirkland)
* Loïc Minier (lool)
* Michael Vogt (mvo)
* Emmet Hikory (persia)
* Pete