Meetings/Community Meeting 2006-12-16/minutes

From openSUSE

Section1 existing community projects:

Translation:

Martin Schlander (cb400f) explained the importance of the translation efforts, and explained that it is not difficult for people to get involved using tools like kbabel.

The following resources were highlighted for those wanting to get involved in translation efforts:

• The translation portal: http://i18n.opensuse.org/

• Translation stats: http://i18n.opensuse.org/stats/

• Teams: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Localization_Teams

• Localization guide distro: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Localization_Guide

• Localization guide wiki: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Wiki_Translation_Guide

• Mailing list: opensuse-translation@opensuse.org

• Irc channel: #opensuse-translation@irc.freenode.org

• http://www.novellglossaries.com/ login/pass for read only access is guest/guest

Martin offered to help anyone interested to get involved.

Pascal Bleser (yaloki) asked whether the translation team works with upstream to merge translations. Martin explained that only openSUSE specific strings are translated by the openSUSE translation teams, upstream translations are not forked.

Marcio Ferreria (aka_druid) asked whether Novell accepted help translating tier1 languages. Martin explained that the tier1 languages (en, es, de, fr, br-pt, cz, it and more) are in fact always fully translated by professional translators paid by Novell, they don't accept help, but they do accept bug reports.

(metavoid) asked whether there was a public repository for the novell books at http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse102 for translators to participate. Benjamin Weber (benJIman) referred to the http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-doc/2006-10/msg00014.html message explaining why this was not possible.

James Tremblay (fxrsliberty) put forward an idea of having a web based translation service like the "rosetta translation service" that could improve collaboration on translations.

Packaging:

Pascal summarised the current packaging situation:

• We have factory, but we can't contribute to this yet.

• Community can contribute to repositories in the build service.

• Build service is limited in what can be packaged by legal issues.

• Community can also contribute to packman project.

Pascal summarised how the community can contribute in the packaging area:

• Making packages

• Testing packages on buildservice & third party repositories and reporting bugs.

The issue of missing bug reporting facilities for unofficial packages was raised.

• No bugzilla currently exists for packman.

• No one is sure whether Novell Bugzilla may be used for filing bugs against packages on the build service.

• Stephan Binner (Beineri) mentioned the possibility of adding a Build service component to bugzilla.

AI: Pascal to bring up the issue of the way bugzilla is to be used on the packaging mailing list, and announce the results. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229213

Francis Giannaros asked whether all packages without legal issues could be moved from third party repositories to the build service. Pascal explained that the build service is still missing important features for users and packagers, which means that for the present using their own infrastructure is best.

Build service client:

Jonathan Arsenault (bill-barriere) informed the meeting about his KDE frontend to the api.opensuse.org buildservice web service.

This aims to provide the same facilities as the web frontend to the build service.

The project page is http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/Rich_Client Subversion repository at https://forgesvn1.novell.com/viewsvn/opensuse/trunk/buildservice/src/richclient/ Releases are built at http://software.opensuse.org/download/openSUSE:/Tools/

Jonathan would welcome help both in development and testing. Those interested should contact him.

Pascal suggested Jonathan call for testing of the build service client on the mailing list.

The Education site and it's goals:

James Tremblay outlined his plans for the education project. (http://en.opensuse.org/Education)

He would like to revive the SUSE Linux School Server

Marcus Meissner drew our attention to the shool server project at http://extis.de/

The goal is a Commercial Off The Shelf approach to data- warehousing for education.

There are existing tools to combine the open source software from extis with a student information system, course management system, to provide data warehousing and interoperative login.

The project will entail:

• Packaging

• Add on cd and patterns to install.

• Adding hacks/patches for having LDAP backend support on some existing software

• Testing and feature requests

• Promotion

Pascal pointed out the importance of communicating with upstream providers of software when making required modifications.

Jose Cifuentes Riquelme (pitux) expressed an interest in providing advice for the project from a teacher's point of view.

Martin pointed out that the project needs to be announced more publically to attract the necessary resources.

AI: James to announce project to mailing lists and summarize he needs help with. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229216

Package search:

Benjamin Weber (benJIman) described his webpin (package search) project (http://benjiweber.co.uk:8080/webpin/)

The aim is to allow users to search the contents of all suse repositories to locate packages & files in packages they require.

This is very much an experimental project at present. And could also become partially redundant when the build service search facility is completed.

Nevertheless it is useful at present, and the build service search won't be able to index repositories such as packman/guru in any case.

Benjamin explained some of the technical challenges it presented, and asked that anyone with implementation or usability ideas let him know.

Christian Boltz (cboltz) mentioned Martin Lasarsch's package search at http://hitme.resetbutton.de/pin/ , and suggested the possibility of collaborating on this.

Several people expressed an interest in viewing & possibly working on the source code.

AI: Benjamin to clean up source code to releasable state, and set up public SVN. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229218

Section 2: Brainstorming session:

Quality documentation & answers to frequently asked questions.

Pascal kicked off the brainstorming session by bringing up the issue of having quality documented answers to frequently asked questions from new users.

This would take the form of screenshot decorated short guides, on the wiki.

Benjamin pointed out that many of the most frequently asked questionsare related to issues we can't give the answers to on the wiki for legal reasons.

There was general concensus that we need a wiki not hosted by Novell for such guides.

It was pointed out that there already exist several unofficial wikis, with documentation spread out in many places. This is confusing for users. The following existing wikis were mentioned:

• http://susewiki.apanela.com

• http://susewiki.org

• http://wiki.suselinuxsupport.de

• http://suseroot.com

The options of rallying around one of these existing wikis, or creating a new wiki for this purpose and encouraging existing contributors to use it were discussed.

The discussion outcome was to set up a new wiki at http://opensuse-community.org for this purpose.

Some concern was raised about potential issues with using the opensuse trademark. It was decided that the best policy was to ignore this unless we are told that it will be a problem.

It was decided to run this wiki as a meritocracy, rather than allowing anybody to create/edit articles, in order to maintain quality. Benjamin noted the importance of getting existing contributors on board at the start.

AI: Jake Rogers (sPiN) to provide hosting (completed)

AI: Francis Giannaros (apokryphos) to register domain name (completed)

AI: Jake to start discussion on list and contact the owners of existing wikis. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229219

Installing from windows

Jordi Massaguer Pla (instalux) sought discussion on a project for installing openSUSE from within windows.

Jordi is the maintainer of an existing project capable of doing this using a openSUSE media.

It might be nice to have this install capability on the openSUSE media.

It was suggested Jordi try making custom install media using the http://en.opensuse.org/Making_a_SUSE_based_distribution method.

AI: Jordi to make custom install media including instalux and report back to the mailing list.

YaST Modules

Vince Negri (vincenegri) raised the topic of improving existing, and creating more YaST modules.

Some ideas for modules were suggested, including webcam module, a module to import windows settings. Martin pointed out the yast wishlist at http://en.opensuse.org/Feature_Wishlist/YAST_related.

Pascal pointed out the YaST module tutorial from fosdem http://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDEM/FOSDEM2006-openSUSE-10-Writing_YaST_Modules-2006-02-26-video_full.ogg

It was suggested a special meeting be set up to discuss community development of new and existing YaST modules.

AI: Vince to set up this meeting. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229221

Feature tracking and collaboration

Benjamin mentioned the potential problem of effort duplication with SUSE employees and community members due to the latter not knowing what the former are working on, and vice versa.

Some way of tracking features people are currently working on is required.

A bugzilla could be suitable. Novell bugzilla's current setup has limitations in its suitability for this purpose.

It was suggested this be brought up as a concern at the next status meeting.

Other project ideas

Martin suggested some potential projects:

A gnome updater applet using libzypp directly, so that gnome users would no longer require ZMD.

A desktop agnostic, or KDE version of gnome-xgl-switch, and applet for controlling compiz.

AI: Marting to add these ideas to the feature wishlist.

Testing

Alberto Passalacqua (Albertop) raised the subject of improving release testing effectiveness.

This could be improved using test-plans to ensure that all areas of the system get tested.

Organising those testing, assigning specific areas to specific testers.

It was decided to return to this topic at a later date.

Organisation:

Date of next meeting:

It was decided to aim to have another community meeting in late January, with the specialized YaST development meeting at some point before then.

Anyone interested in organising the next meeting should contact Benjamin.

Interest was expressed in hearing from Houghi about makesusedvd at the next meeting.

Feedback

AI: Martin to feed back results of meeting, and concern raised about feature tracking & collaboration to the next Status meeting.

Minutes and transcript

AI: Benjamin to write & publish minutes and meeting transcript.

AoB:

Benjamin reported that Henne requested that future meetings be held in #opensuse-project, and appropriate practicalities can be arranged for us to use that channel in the future.