Summary

Long time no see! The last update on lizards is now over 2 months old and a lot of stuff happened. The Boosters have finished two Milestones: The build service project overview and the integration of web-apps with a common theme. Both results are awesome and enable people to be more productive. The build service project overview helps project maintainers, like Coolo for openSUSE:Factory, to keep up to date on what happens in their project. The overview includes things like packages that are not building, packages with a diff to the devel project and packages with a pending request. You know what’s the best part of this? To make the build service project overview possible we have put a lot of general work into the OBS webclient. So much that the webclient changes will be a big part of the upcoming OBS 2.0 release. The other Milestone we finished is the integration of our web-apps with a common theme: bento. Once we deployed bento to our apps everybody can navigate the opensuse web with a nice, task oriented design and find information where one expects them.

Events

The LinuxTag 2010 programm is final and online. We have 6 talks accepted ranging from packaging to kernel hacking. Most of them on Saturday which is traditionally the strongest day.

• Ruby on Rails in der openSUSE.org Infrastruktur – Thomas Schmidt
• Kernel Mode Setting – a Change in Paradigms for the Graphics Driver Stack – Egbert Eich
• The road to GNOME 3.0 Vincent Untz /Johannes Schmid
• Distribution Image building with KIWI – Christopher Hofmann
• The live A-Z Guide to openSUSE Contribution – Henne Vogelsang/Vincent Untz
• The Free Software Hell And How To Escape It – Adrian Schröter/Henne Vogelsang

We also got accepted as project for a booth and are currently working on the booth setup and program. Stay tuned for more news to come around this topic. Other events that we boosted are the Tokamak4 plasma hacking sprint Will successfully organized in our office. Vincent went to a GNOME Usability and a GSettings Hackfest. He also covered Solutions Linux 2010. Pavol, Michal and Petr went to the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010, Installfest.cz and LinuxExpo. Klaas to openExpo in Switzerland and a KDE Finance sprint in Frankfurt. Oh and Google Summer of Code sadly didn’t work out this year, maybe next time. As you can see we were busy event bees!

Milestones

We are currently trying to reach 3 Milestones. The Squad that is trying to create Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation is progressing nicely. They fixed a lot of issues with mediawiki and Bento for the new wiki instance, transfered and re-worked the general wiki documentation so that people can help with the general transition and they also moved content like the Build Service pages and started with the Packaging side of things. The general focus is still on groundwork. The squad wants to transfer all the developer documentation as an example on how a topic in the new wiki should look and feel like. The next steps will be finishing that off and then to help with the attraction of contributors to the general transition.

Another squad is working on improving openFATE, especially to make it really usable for the screening team. In the end they want to have a new role of screener in the feature workflow. The role can change the status and reassign features between products. The first sprints where spend on educating themselves about the architecture of FATE and the structure of the web-app. The squad then worked on the proxy which is by now already passing changes through to the keeper. The next steps include changes to the web-app and hermes for reporting. During the course of these sprints discussions about introducing more roles and new features happened so the Milestone probably will get more Goals in the future.

The third squad is currently in transition away from the Bento/Umbrella milestone. The development of the theme for the Build Service, the Download Portal and the Wiki are done. They are currently working on a wrap-up post that will show you all the cool stuff. The remaining tasks of deploying all the services, and helping to create themes for openFATE, the Forums and our WordPress instances are new Milestones. Which Milestone this squad does next is not decided yet.

General Things

First of all some general things. We are currently evaluating a project management tool called Retrospectiva. It supposed help us with two things: Keeping track of our work and inform people, in depth, about it. The first part is coming along pretty nicely already. In December we met and agreed on terminology and a way to use the tool. We will work on Milestones, that consist of one or more Goals which consist one or more Stories. Each Milestone can have one or more Sprints which are time boxes stretching for  2 weeks. In the last couple of weeks Michal pushed some patches that implemented features we missed upstream. Henne transfered all data from our test project to the one we want to seriously use now. And Darix is working on the deployment of the new version to the community.o.o host which is currently prepared by Berthold Gunreben from the Autobuild Team as a XEN instance. Of course there are still several things to do. The squad leaders need to take care of their milestone descriptions to be very specific and from the customers view so people can actually understand them. Also we have to check the transferred data that got migrated and darix needs to deploy the head branch and push Berthold to finish the server. Because of our general goal to create a lot of buzz about what we do we need to attach a default story “make buzz about it” to every goal. Michal is looking into that.

For everybody’s favourite FOSS show FOSDEM in February we are ready to go. Boosters have 4 talks on the distro devroom’s schedule:

• Klaas: Hermes message dispatching
• Coolo: Clicfs as perfect live cd file system
• Vincent: Working with GNOME upstream
• Pavol: RPM packaging collaboration

Another show in desperate need on Booster Talks is LinuxTag 2010. Their call for papers is running and every booster shoud put in a talk! There are instructions on the CFP about what they are interested in, what topics they want to focus on, what is expected of speakers and how to submit a talk. So all of us are currently thinking about what we could talk about to the FOSS community.

In general we talked a lot about how we can make more buzz about what we do.  We agreed that the least we can do is to write something to our own mailinglist so other boosters are aware of what you are doing. The next steps would be to keep the parts of the project up to date that you are working in (OBS, Wiki, Web) via reports to their mailinglist and then tell the world what you do via your blog/lizards/news. Henne got the action item to push out our sprint meeting minutes to other channels than our own mailinglist. And NO goal should be closed without reporting about it to the world. We also have to think about how to use Retrospectiva for this.

Standup Meetings

We also run so called Standup Meetings where every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planning to do in the next sprint and what currently blocks them.

For the Centralized Developer Documentation squad this was for the first sprint this year:

What we have done:
The general wiki transition has gone forward. There are transition guidelines, the new instance is deployed, working and tested. Currently there are some bugs blocking the transition related to some extensions. Nearly all the templates are in place and the wiki meta documentation is starting to shape up.

What we want to do:
We will create a portal and go on from there. Collect all developer documentation and transfer it to the new instance.

What is blocking us:
The bugs that block the general transition.

The Factory Status Page squad also had a lot to report:

What we have done:
80% of the milestone is done. The old factory page that coolo implemented is nearly transferred into the OBS. It’s not “live” in the master branch yet but deployed on the staging instance of the OBS web client. The development also introduced some new features in general like requests for the project page, build status popups for submit requests or the forward submit requests button.

What we want to do:
Smaller things: code cleanup, get some more information onto the page without showing it by default. Outdated package version information

What is blocking us:
We don’t want to and can’t be in the 1.7 release so we are waiting with merging until this is out of the door. But before we have to split some things like the new css and so on.

The squad that cares about unifying the openSUSE web experience (they call it Umbrella Project) reported the following:

What we have done:
On the theme side nothing happened because robert is offline. On the technical side we investigated solutions to incorporate. The investigation phase is done now.

What we want to do:
Document the results of the investigations and then start to implement.

What is blocking us:
Nothing at the moment

Thats it for now. Expect to hear from us again as FOSDEM gets nearer, and when the public Retrospectiva instance is ready. Until then, we’ll be hard at work making openSUSE a better place to contribute your Free Software time.  And remember, if you want to join the Boosters, or just hang out with us, come to #opensuse-boosters on FreeNode!

Because everything changes, we thought it might be a good time to try something different for the booth. Usually we ran the LinuxTag booth as pure info booth. So you put out a GNOME and a KDE installation on display and wait for people to come look at it. If you are lucky they ask questions and you are drawn into a conversation. We of course think that conversation is what an exhibition is all about. But this was getting harder and harder every year. The reason for this is very positive one: Everybody knows Linux. There are nearly no people anymore on exhibitions that do not use it already. So instead of trying to inform people in general about the openSUSE distribution we will focus on communication and adapting openSUSE to your own needs this year.

To foster communication we will try to make hanging out at the booth as pleasantly as possible. For that we reserved space for some beanbags, a table, a whiteboard and other fun stuff. So an area where you can hang out and talk. We hope this will set a tone for the booth and makes everyone hang a bit loose!

To help people adapting the openSUSE distribution we have a suse studio counter and a openSUSE buildservice counter and a table with some Laptops to try out the image or package people have build. Of course we also bring some Moblin/Goblin netbooks,  can show you Linux in general and openSUSE Linux in particular, tell you all about the openSUSE project, answer all your support questions and so on and so on and so on….