2006-02-07-status-meeting-minutes

Şuraya atla: kullan, ara

This meeting is meant to discuss the latest developments in and around openSUSE.

It was hold at

Tuesday 2006/02/07 18:00 CET

Meeting minutes

Mirrors situation

-- bill-barriere

  • Several people expressed concerns about the current mirror model with separated repositories with the OSS/main repository at opensuse.org and the extra repository at suse.com. Adrian Schroeter stated that they could not be merged as the open source project must be strictly separated from the commercial services.
  • Mirrors outside of Europe are not in as good shape as the European/German mirrors (bottle necks, corruption, de-synced), specially the ones with installation sources (many mirrors have ISOs, few have installation-sources), which affects many people trying to perform network installations.
Action Item henne:
- Discuss this in opensuse@opensuse.org
- Involve ftpadmin@suse in the discussion
  • The factory repository doesn't have enough mirrors
  • Mathieu Chouinard(chouimat) suggested drpmsync should be able to let the client decide what to sync or not
  • Opensuse is looking for more mirrors, so if anyone knows of one interested in running it, step forward
  • drpmsync needs better documentation and marketing so people will be more inclined to use it, at present there is not much interest.
Action Item schiele:
- discuss how we can make the drpmsync service better
- help in the documentation process, extending http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_setup_a_drpmsync_server
  • It was suggested to put the torrent files of the downloads for the next release in the openSUSE wiki
Action Item notlocalhorst:
- upload final 10.1 torrents to the wiki

Foreign language mailing lists

-- skh

  • It was requested that any foreign language wiki gets its associated mailing list in that language.
  • There was a discussion about whether or not it is a good thing to have lots of new localized mailing lists, but no conclusion was reached. Some suggested creating the lists to see how they go, so henne took the job.
  • Also a discussion about the format the lists should have
Action Item henne:
- put mailinglists into the next meetings agenda
- setup opensuse-it mailinglist after naming convention is decided
- come up with a proposal for mailing list layout in the future (helping skh)
Action Item darix:
- ask the Italian guys if it hurts them badly to wait a week or two (delay due to the name problem)
Action Item skh:
- come up with a proposal on mailing list layout in the future (henne will help)

opensuse.org frontpage lift-up/redesign

-- Pflodo

  • Some people felt that the front page of opensuse.org is poorly designed, although some are happy with the way it is now.
  • People need to decide what is wrong and then what needs to be changed, and how it should be changed. There are 2 different issues: the layout/design and the way information is grouped/distributed in the front page and in the wiki. This needs to be discussed in the wiki mail list.
Action Item michl:
- discuss front page redesign on opensuse-wiki

Forum Discussions Result

-- Henne

  • Sonja Krause-Harder(skh) explained that some wish to have a forum at forum.opensuse.org. She also suggested the proposal that we now prepare to setup a forum, trying to involve the existing forum owners, but that would take some time to be done.
  • Viras (from an unofficial suse forum) expressed an opinion that an official forum is not needed. He questioned whether it would be a helpful step in the project. He thinks the forum would grow well but would not get the existing forum members involved.
Action Item Viras:
- take the discussion to the forum people in suselinuxsupport.de forum
Action item skh:
- talk to suse internal people to see about resources, etc if the forum idea goes ok
Action Item StormX:
- invite the other forum maintainers to the suselinuxsupport.de opensuse-forum category

subfs discussion

-- houghi

  • Several people expressed concern that the automounting feature would only be available for GNOME and KDE
  • SUSE people explained that subfs is gone for good, and keeping it is not up for discussion. Also that at present there is not a clear solution for that problem for non-KDE and non-GNOME users.
  • It was suggested that other users could run gnome-volume-manager even if they are using other environments, but this is not an ideal situation because it would use additional resources and some people simply don't have any parts of gnome installed installed.
  • Suggested alternatives: supermount, autofs, create a console daemon that will do the job of gnome-volume-manager. The problems are that autofs is poor documented, supermount status is unknown, and the console daemon would need to be implemented, it simply doesn't exist now.
Action Item henne:
- write SDB article about alternatives of subfs
- discuss the alternatives in opensuse-factory@opensuse.org

Linux Tag

-- Christian Boltz

  • openSUSE requested a community booth at the LinuxTag (http://www.linuxtag.org/2006/), SUSE people confirmed, but it needs to be discussed how openSUSE will be represented there.
  • It was said that there will be no commercial Novell booth, which disappointed several users.

No action items :(

SDB migration to wiki

-- (not)localhorst

  • Migration of SDB is complete
  • Discussing is ongoing about how to migrate the howtos, especially regarding style-guides on how to do a how-to (whats a how-to, whats a sdb article, etc). According to localhorst: howtos are more complex things than SDB articles.
  • Old SDB in {portal,sdb}.suse.com will be replaced by redirects to the opensuse wiki
Action Item notlocalhorst:
- write HOWTO style-guide
- communicate that we want to keep SDB clean of HOWTO like writings

SUSE Linux 10.1 Status / Roadmap

-- AJ

AJaeger brought us the latest major changes from the development front

  • Kernel Changes km_ packages / non-GPL kernel modules

- The km_* packages are being replaced by the KMP, so packages can be built more easily independently from the kernel package build. Some information about kmp packages can be found in http://www.suse.de/~agruen/KMPM/

- Most developers of the kernel community consider non-GPL kernel modules to be infringing on their licensing/copyright. Novell does respect this position and refrains from distributing non-GPL kernel modules for future products. Novell works with vendors to supply alternative ways to provide the functionality that was previously only available with non-GPL kernel modules. So, the kernel-*nongpl package has been dropped and will not be provided anymore.

Action Item notlocalhorst:
- write documentation about the end user part of the KMP switch
Action Item garloff:
- provide notlocalhorst with details
  • Major bug in Beta3: Fontconfig

- This bug in fontconfig can cause your X apps to crash. So that means the beta testers should take careful look at those bugs and report when something interesting is found.

Action Item ajaeger:
- announce fontconfig changes on opensuse-factory
- announce fontconfig location on opensuse-factory
  • Package manager major changes

- Lots of changes in this area, headed by the inclusion of new libzypp (cool name). This will cause a delay of beta4, the inclusion of a new beta5 test cycle, and reduced functionality of the package manager in beta4, so that the integration goes smoothly.

- New Zen tools to make updates will be included, replacing SUSEplugger. The zmd daemon will handle YUM and ZENworks installation sources, which means a complete switch to YUM. YaST sources may not be supported anymore (but 10.0 sources have YUM metadata so don't panic). Hopefully there is still lots of development in this area, which means that yast sources might be supported and the (awful) current Zen updater interface can be replaced by a more sane design, as its very raw in the current betas. Also there will be a web user interface for the updater.

- Frontend wise the YaST software manager will be the same, as the change is in the back-end of the package manager as stated by AJaeger.

Action Item AJ:
- Document the change to libzypp so it's more understandable.

CDB/HCL - hardware database efforts

--the_dude

didnt happen because the_dude had some other meeting

Q&A Section

Please add your questions or remarks about topics from the agenda here if you cant participate. We will try to answer them in the meeting.

Your Name Question
Pflodo Due to my time zone (UTC+10), real-time attendance is unfortunately unlikely, so here is my input...
Website frontpage redesign - Either by competition, wishlist requests or talented SUSE staff, as it is not the best use of page that has over 3 million page hits. This could also include the site CSS stylesheet. Risk: No good designs are submitted in a competition, and it is a waste of time.
If a language is deemed to be worth a wiki, I think it should also have a mailing list, no questions asked, it should just be automatic. eg: opensuse-de@opensuse.org or de-opensuse@opensuse.org. For succesfull languages there is the possibilities of more mailing lists like for english opensuse-wiki-de@opensuse.org or de-opensuse-wiki@opensuse.org etc.
AvengerMoJo Who should I submit the chinese pages to enable the zh_cn/zh_tw.opensuse.org?

Please ask on the opensuse-wiki mailinglist. Christian Boltz

Transcript

2006/02/07 openSUSE Status Meeting transcript