Ibex design: user switching, presence and session termination (Here Be Dragons)

First, talking to me is absolutely pointless. But if you insist on it, show up at my curling club, and I'll buy you a pitcher after I teach you how to curl. I'll make sure to record the whole discussion and post it somewhere. It will be the first installment of a series of discussion collectively known as "The blowhard chronicles: The re-education of Jef"

Speaking of recordings... you wouldn't happen to know if the audio recording of the teleconference Shuttleworth had about Ibex this past week is available? I'd really hate relying on second hand Shuttleworth quotes from places like the Register, or for any laypress articles for that matter. Relying on cherry picked quotes never gives a full picture. I'd much prefer to see the selected quotes in the original context of the full teleconference. Can you get that full teleconference audio posted somewhere for public consumption?

But, I think there are a few things to be taken from this. One, we screwed up, we were working on the wrong schedule. If we want to be 'upstream' to the distribution we need to be working on an upstream schedule instead of the distribution schedule. The other thing to take away from this is a big thanks to the folks on the Ubuntu platform team who gave us a huge helping hand when we needed it. Lastly, we've learned our lessons.

You say you learned your lessons.. its easy to say that. Don't fall into the trap Shuttleworth falls into by opening his mouth and speaking from the pulpit well before you actually have a plan in place... cough open source launchpad..cough. How about you get on a Ubuntu forum thread or a Ubuntu mailinglist thread and hold an open discussion with your community about exactly what you are planning on doing to address the mistakes Canonical has made in attempting to push things into the distribution without thinking through integration issues. You must build a process where your community can act as a check on Canonical's tendency to jump the gun without thinking through the integration issues. I never actually jump into the middle of discussion in Ubuntu specific communication channels, so you don't have to worry about my trying to sideline that discussion with my own agenda.

Have that discussion, openly, with your entire community. Going out of your way to see me, or any external critic down over a beer that you learned your lesson doesn't really do anything. Discussions with me are not constructive, since I'm not one of the people who pays the price when Canonical screws up. Canonical must have a discussion with its own community and put a set of specific corrective actions forward. Put a publicly communicated process together and talk to your community of contributors so they can hold you accountable for sticking with that process.

If you have already had that discussion, just provide a reference to the forum or mailinglist thread.

First, I want to say that I think that's very unfair.

I am never fair, nor am I balanced. I would never fit in on the staff of Fox News.

We've worked hard to ensure that everything we do has the possibility to go upstream. In this case, we didn't see a path that would allow the code to go upstream (see my previous comment). That's unfortunate. We hope that in general, all of our code will be accepted by upstream. I'm sure 100% will never happen, but we'll try.

Here's the problem you want to think of this situation as exceptional... perhaps you are wrong about that. Perhaps the way that Canonical approaches "integration" makes these unfortunate situation more common than not. It's really nice to say things like you are hopeful that your contributions are upstream friendly...but if you aren't really looking internally at your own contribution statistics..and how much of of your downstream work is actually merged upstream..and how long it takes for that work to merge upstream..then its just wishful thinking. Just ask your own translation community if they are happy with the process Canonical uses and whether they are happy with the rate at which their translations are being merged with upstream projects. They've only been complaining about the same problem for years.

In any event, I look forward to seeing your name show up in upstream Gnome commit logs. Just for the record which accountname should I be looking for? -jef