[21:02] <james_w> hi everyone
[21:02] <james_w> who's here for my session?
[21:04] <james_w> anyone know if we can turn off +m in here?
[21:08] <mhall119> woops, I don't think that was right
[21:09] <james_w> thanks, that's better
[21:09] <james_w> everyone is free to talk in here, I think a Q&A doesn't need to be split over two channels
[21:09] <mhall119> no, I don't think it is
[21:10] <w1ngnut> better for me too
[21:10] <mhall119> oh, ok, maybe I did do it right
[21:11] <mhall119> just saw a bunch of messages I wasn't expecting
[21:12] <mhall119> anyway, carry on
[21:12] <james_w> thanks mhall119 
[21:13] <james_w> ok, let's try again
[21:13] <james_w> who's here for the session?
[21:13] <james_w> and tell me if you know anything about the topic at all, so that I know where to begin
[21:14] <w1ngnut> james_w: I'm here for the session. I know what I've read on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributedDevelopment
[21:15] <james_w> that's a good start
[21:15] <james_w> w1ngnut: is there anything in particular you would like to ask about?
[21:16] <w1ngnut> james_w: no, just do whatever you have in mind. I have experience with development tools and vcs but never applied any of these knowledge's using ubuntu tools.
[21:18] <james_w> ok
[21:18] <james_w> well, as you will have read, UDD is an effort to bring the power of version control and advanced development tools to Ubuntu development
[21:19] <james_w> the aim is to make Ubuntu development more efficient, easier to learn, and less frustrating
[21:19] <james_w> that's a large undertaking, and we can't do it all at once though
[21:20] <james_w> so the focus so far has been on making it possible to use version control to do packaging work, and abstract away a lot of the tools that you used to have to learn to do packaging on Debian/Ubuntu
[21:20] <james_w> this was mainly in the form of a tool called bzr-builddeb that is a bzr plugin that knows about packages, and provides several commands to do packaging in bzr
[21:21] <james_w> built on top of this is a service that imports all of Debian and Ubuntu's source packages in to bzr
[21:21] <james_w> this allows you to work on any package in Ubuntu using bzr, rather than exclusively the traditional tools, or whatever VCS someone decided to use for that package
[21:22] <james_w> so, if you want to patch a package, or work on a new upstream version, or just look at the code, you can start with "bzr branch lp:ubuntu/<source package>"
[21:22] <james_w> e.g. bzr branch lp:ubuntu/bzr-builddeb for the bzr-builddeb package itself
[21:23] <james_w> or you can do lp:debian/*
[21:23] <james_w> and other releases are available too, e.g. lp:ubuntu/lucid/* and lp:debian/lenny/*
[21:24] <james_w> (note that lp:debian/* won't actually branch the whole of Debian)
[21:24] <james_w> there is more documentation on how to do this at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributedDevelopment/Documentation
[21:25] <james_w> and we would love some help in improving what is there, and providing how-tos for specific tasks
[21:25] <james_w> now that we have all of that in place we are also starting to work on projects that build on top of it, such as recipes in Launchpad
[21:26] <james_w> a Launchpad recipe is a way of specifying how to merge some bzr branches together and building a package out of the result
[21:27] <james_w> this can be as simple as specifying lp:ubuntu/something to build the latest in Ubuntu, but where it gets really interesting is when you merge branches together
[21:27] <james_w> for instance you could merge the trunk branch of a project with the packaging in order to build the code that the developers of that project wrote today
[21:28] <james_w> and Launchpad allows you to schedule the builds to happen once a day, so that you can always have the latest code running on your machine
[21:29] <james_w> this is useful for developers, but also makes it much easier for people to get involved in testing and bug reporting
[21:29] <james_w> plus, it can be useful for triagers too, as they can point to one of these and ask people to test with that, so that they can know the bug still exists in the latest code
[21:30] <james_w> this feature is just starting to become available in Launchpad, and we don't know all of the useful things that could be done with it, so we're interested in ideas you have for what you would like to do with this
[21:30] <james_w> any questions?
[21:38] <james_w> this is supposed to be a Q&A :-)
[21:45] <james_w> ok, if no-one has any questions then I guess we'll wrap up
[21:45] <james_w> Feel free to ask me questions at other times though
[21:45] <james_w> I'm usually around on IRC during the week