Ubuntu Dev Summit Lays Out Plans For Hardy Heron

Opurt writes "On the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston this week, a roundtable session focused on the vision for the upcoming Hardy Heron Ubuntu release. Unlike Gutsy Gibbon, which brought a handful of experimental features along with some new functionality, the focus with Heron will be on robustness as it will be supported on the desktop for 3 years. 'The Compiz window manager, which adds sophisticated visual effects to the Ubuntu user interface, will be a big target for usability improvements. Keyboard bindings and session management were noted as two areas where Compiz still needs some work.' PolicyKit and Tracker will also be significantly tweaked, while Heron is also likely to see a complete visual refresh."

more details

[sayfawa]

Here's a better summary [fsckin.com] of things to come in Hardy, linked from an OS News [osnews.com] posting.

Re:How about fixing things...

[JediTrainer]

Hear hear. I'd particularly like the regressions addressed - the latest upgrade broke my installation of Eclipse so I can't run Ant inside it [launchpad.net]

Yes, the workaround is to either download/install Eclipse manually or run Ant from the command-line, but it is annoying to see a basic feature still broken for weeks when it worked perfectly fine before.

Re:Looking at the release schedule

[baadger]

Recursive file permissions and ownership changes: Nautilus' interface for this clunky and doesn't work right.

Yeah, and their current permissions tab on the folder/file properties dialog which was introduced in 2.18 (I think), made the whole dialog a whole lot taller. It's pretty ugly.

Directory compare & synchronization: sync two folders by content. Yes, I know there are tools for this, but most of them are too difficult for the average user to setup and use.

This is a good idea, in fact I'd be happy if instead of saying

A file named "morgan.jpg" already exists. Do you want to replace it?

it said

A file named "morgan.jpg" already exists, but the files are the same

and then gave me some options.

Easy interface for massive file renames by pattern matching.

I think it'd be great if there was a way to sequentially number files using rename (Windows Explorer has this) or to mass change extensions, but anything more complex should resort to the command line. Perhaps with some easier to use command line renaming tools, like "chgext" or something.

An easy interface for installing QEMU and Windows like QEMU Launcher and QEMU Control polished and fully supported by Canonical.

Try VirtualBox, it'll blow you away :-)

Re:can we just use numbers, please.

[kazade84]

The numbering system in Ubuntu is based on year, month of release (e.g 7.10) Obviously in development no-one knows if they are going to meet the deadline or miss it like they did with 6.06. This is the reason that the code names are used.

To make it clearer, development has just started on Hardy Heron, or what is likely to be known as 8.04. To start development the Ubuntu devs create repositories named after the codename (e.g. Hardy). If they used 8.04 and the deadline was missed and the release was actually 8.06 they wouldn't easily be able to change the repositories and other stuff.

The names are just code names, after release the number is the identifier that is used by Ubuntu (see if you can see 'Gutsy' on the Ubuntu.com front page, it's not there) its just usually the the code-names stick it peoples' minds.

So to sum up, the code names are there for a perfectly logical reason, and the animal thing is just a consistent naming theme that was chosen.

Re:How about fixing things...

[haeger]

Yeah.
Gutsy broke my vmware. Not expected and from what I hear there's no vmware in gutsy still. We who have technical know-how can still fix it, but it does seem that the QA-dept slipped a bit on Gutsy.

.haeger

Kubuntu too?

[joeslugg]

In TFA and in another posted summary that had more details, the focus (expectedly) is on standard Ubuntu. I'm just wondering if anyone knows if and how much focus and time is put on improving Kubuntu as well? I read things about improvements to GUI tools and apps, and it's always Gnome/GTK related. Are the KDE/Qt counterparts getting attention as well?

(Please, no flame wars on Gnome v. KDE - it's just my preference and you have yours.)

Hmm, I should go try their forums too...

Re:Ubuntu To Do List

[EsbenMoseHansen]

* Application bundles - drag and drop install, removal. Ability to drag an .app to anywhere in the file system at any time. App resources all contained in the .app directory structure instead of scattered all over the file system

We have this. It's called "deb packages". Works like a charm.

* /Application directory - default place for App bundles to be copied to

You mean /application... no need to use capitals. Anyway, I don't see the advantage over the current system. I don't really care where packages are stored, that is my package manager's job. Oh

* /Preferences - standard place for apps to store their user specific settings instead of hidden . files in the main user home directory

You mean /preferences :p Anyway, that sounds like a horrible idea. Cleanup after users would get more messy and quotas too. But putting them under ~/.prefs/... might not be a bad idea. There is some merit there, but not an easy thing to change!

* An app interface building tool that has OS X level UI element default spacing when laying out an interface to help with the jarringly hideous problems virtually every Linux app has with visual layo

Hmm..I think OSX apps looks terrible, while KDE apps are the cleanest. But all three are quite usable, so I don't see this as a priority. And technically, it isn't the interface building tool's job to layout widgets, that would be horrible! Just imagine what happens when the font changes, or the resolution.

Re:Ubuntu To Do List

[m2943]

Have you even considered the proposals on their own merits? Keeping a clean filesystem is a noble goal, and definitely worth considering.

OS X's file system is no "cleaner" than Ubuntu's. Furthermore, OS X fails to conform to standard UNIX file system conventions.

Oh, and that attitude of yours is what I consider to be the *PRIMARY* thing that's wrong with Linux. But I guess it will be hard to fix as well...

That attitude of yours is what I consider to be the *PRIMARY* thing that's wrong with OS X.

In fact, there are many aspects of OS X that positively suck. You named some of them. Linux may need to imitate some aspects of Windows that suck simply because of the predominance of Windows in the market, but OS X's market share is so insignificant that the only features of OS X that are worth adopting in Linux are the ones that demonstrably are better than what Linux already has. File system organization, installers, and GUI designers are not among those.

Re:Ubuntu To Do List

[Warui Kami]

This $appdir/ setup you mention was done in UNIX-style OSes once upon a time (and still is), and every one of these $appdirs was kept in one place: /opt.

I have a .profile I used on Solaris machines for something like ten years that had several for loops for setting up the $PATH, $MANPATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and so on, by looping through /opt/*/{bin,man,lib}. While the /opt setup has certain advantages of separation of applications from each other, it creates a messy operating environment. You have a list of applications (`ls /opt`) and can uninstall any of them (`rm -rf /opt/$app`) using standard file management tools. Package management provides these advantages of /opt, by giving you a list (in synaptic, dselect, `rpm -qa`, etc.) without the disadvantage of having a 5k $PATH. If you compile your own software and are too lazy to create a package, you install into an area meant for that (/usr/local) most of the time. Admittedly on systems with net-mounted /usr, /usr/local has another purpose, but we can safely ignore that in 99% of cases, as the two are not incompatible.

One of my housemates built a linux system that relied on loopback fs images, mounted and combined with unionfs. He had basic packages that would be loaded into the unionfs, and the file trees merged. Then, the only files on the only rw branch of the union were config files he had changed, and his home directory. It was an absolutely fascinating system, and there were scripts for hot-loading new packages, with some restrictions on unloading due to the nature of unionfs (which he had hacked the kernel to get this functionality). When he started talking about creating a package manager, the discussion really ended with us saying he had just changed where the abstraction level of standard package managers was and the only real advantage was that altered files were in a separate filesystem, and easily sorted through. All the other advantages of the system are the same as in, for example, debian. You don't need to touch any files, or know where they'll be, to install OO.o, you just install the package, and everything is interleaved into your filesystem for you.

Naively creating a /Applications directory and thinking it will make everything better and easier ignores the vibrant history of UNIX. I wish more people would learn how and why modern package management came about. It is incredibly powerful, and one of the things that Linux systems have over Windows, rather than vice versa. The 'Add and Remove Programs' control panel is a cheap imitation, and per-program installers a serious downside to the platform.

Re:How about fixing things...

[nhaines]

Ubuntu 7.10 didn't "break" your copy of VMware server. Every time you change your kernel, you need to recompile the kernel modules for VMware. VMware provided kernel modules for Ubuntu 7.04's updates. Currently they do not provide kernel modules for 7.10. They will probably begin providing these updates within a few weeks.

In the meantime, you just have to compile your own modules. It's very simple--it's a matter of running vmware-config.pl every time you upgrade the kernel, which will automatically take care of everything for you as long as you have build-essential installed.

As annoying as this is (and I find it mildly annoying, at least), it is the price of using a proprietary solution like VMware instead of similar Free solutions (like QEMU or VirtualBox).

Re:Maybe it's time Ubuntu got a icon

[ppc_digger]

We really owe a lot to "Deb" and "Ian" for their brilliant, visionary start.

If memory serves, Deb isn't one of the Debian founders, she is Ian Murdock's wife (then girlfriend).

Re:Ubuntu To Do List

[HiThere]

Apple has made some changes in their EULA recently (or, possibly, I've recently noticed some features) that make them no longer an acceptable choice. They've added that obnoxious(paraphrase) "we have the right to add, remove, copy, or delete any files from your system". That makes them an unacceptable choice.