Re: Proposal: (No?) email client for Ubuntu 17.10

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 1:08 PM, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos <
fitosch...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I hate Electron “apps”. What about Sylpheed?
>

Tossing apps out of contention because you don't like the platform isn't
really fair to users. For better or worse more and more applications are
built on electron and many of these upstream projects choose to do so
because it's much easier to get contributors when you work on every
operating system.

No one realistically can start a new "native GTK" application today and get
enough developer mass to make it succeed, but every day people discover new
electron apps that are meeting that need; they're cross-platform and
relatively easy to hack on. Selecting an application should involve more
than "I hate electron". I would look at other health metrics, such as
number of contributors to the project, quality of releases, CI/CD
development practices of the project, responsiveness to user requests and
bug reports, that sort of thing. Eyeballing the amount of work to be done I
would think that those metrics would be more important especially given the
work that the existing team needs to accomplish over the next year.

That being said, there are real performance/memory implications of electron
apps, and they should absolutely be discussed and debated but at the end of
the day I'd rather use a well maintained electron app than a poorly
maintained "native" one.
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Re: Add Mesa stable releases to graphics-drivers ppa

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi Edwin!

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 6:45 AM, Edwin Smith 
wrote:

> This has proved very useful to gamers since it was launched, however it
> only contains Nvidia proprietary drivers. We have been working with the
> Mesa community to help improve the Mesa drivers so more games can run on
> AMD and Intel hardware, and in the last year this has started to hit the
> tipping point and support has become more and more viable when using the
> very latest drivers.
>

I agree, it's been nice to get fresh drivers.


> The biggest issue we have is there is no way for a user to officially
> download and install the latest stable versions of Mesa.
>

This would be nice, the reason we named it "graphics-drivers" was to keep
it vendor agnostic. There's always been an open invite to whoever wants to
stick AMD drivers in there, but no one's really shown interest. Maybe now
since there's been so much improvement in the last year it might be worth
making another push?


> There are two commonly used PPAs that have the latest mesa drivers but
> these are built from git latest around twice a week so the quality varies
> depending on the status of git when it was built. Unfortunately we can't
> officially recommend them as they often contain serious bugs that are still
> being fixed.
>

So the way we did it for the Nvidia drivers is ask the people running the
community PPAs to consolidate into one PPA to share the work, has anyone
talked to these two of consolidating and releasing stable releases in a
common PPA? Then it'd just be a matter of getting them upload access and
applying for some hardware from the community fund.


> I look forward to seeing what the community thinks of this suggestion.
>

I think most people would agree that this is an excellent idea, it's a
matter of manpower and finding people to do the work.

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Help needed: Support for Steam Controllers in our steam package

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to ask for help in the following two bugs so that the
upcoming Steam controller works in Ubuntu and Debian. Valve has
provided us with the following things we'd need to fix:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/steam/+bug/1498655
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/steam/+bug/1498658

This seems like a good place for someone to contribute fixing both
distros in one fell swoop, any takers?

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Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Jorge O. Castro jo...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 ... or, how I wanted to kill Orcs all weekend, but instead I was
 wrestling with my operating system.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the overwhelming positive response. In true Ubuntu spirit
Rico, Michael, and Alberto busted this out today despite the timezone
difference:

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

There's no driver difference, so if you were using xorg-edgers or
michael's PPA, nothing really changes. The real fun begins when new
drivers are released.

- I've gone ahead an applied for the hardware for Rico and Michael
through the community process,
- We still need to sort where bugs will live and policies around bug
reporting and what not, but I'm sure we'll sort this over the next few
days.
- Some mails to the list seem to be stuck in moderation, can someone
on the desktop team check it out? In particular Michael Larabel sent a
mail with his thoughts.

From my initial testing swapping over to the new PPA has worked as
expected, orcs were slain, I'm not trying to brag, but let's just say
Goroth Graug-Slayer won't be bothering anyone again.

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Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Jorge O. Castro jo...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 After some googling I found two people who are doing amazing work:

Bah, as pointed out in IRC I totally missed Rico and Robert:

https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Sorry guys, it wasn't my intent to leave people out!

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Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Sebastien Bacher seb...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 Thanks for the email. I read what you wrote but failed to understand the
 details of issue, could you give some details on what sort of issues you
 saw? Did we ship drivers buggy enough that you couldn't play with them?
 Was that fixes with the version you found in ppas?

From a Just Works for the Desktop, the drivers we ship in the
archive work just fine. However, with all that's going in upstream
OpenGL and (soon) Vulkan; coupled with AAA game releases; users are
wanting to get the absolute latest drivers.

For example, a new game comes out, and Liam runs some benchmarks:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/shadow-of-mordor-nvidia-benchmarks-on-linux.5769

If you check out the comments there are some times when a game
requires a new version for the best performance. This is just an
example, but it's usually a similar discussion any time a large
release is made.

 Having uptodate drivers in a documented location seems like a good idea,
 I would still like to understand how unusable our archive versions
 are, because if users can't use those to start games then I think that
 having an out of the archive solution isn't good enough.

I don't consider the drivers in the archive broken, I think for
desktop users they generally work fine. I don't think aggressively
updating those will be useful, since Nvidia has dropped support for
older hardware in the past, and I am wary of us sending out an SRU
with a new driver update and old hardware breaks. (This happened to
SteamOS in May).

It appears as though more and more games are requiring newer drivers
though. I was thinking of maybe pinging the guys over at Feral or
Aspyr (who port games to Linux) to see what they think.

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Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Jorge O. Castro]

... or, how I wanted to kill Orcs all weekend, but instead I was
wrestling with my operating system.

So, Shadow of Mordor was recently released on Linux so I happened to
have some spare parts, rebuilt a computer, and then ended up not
playing because our Nvidia driver story in Trusty isn't ideal. It's
not terrible, it worked, but I think we can do better. After some
googling I found two people who are doing amazing work:

The first is Michael Marley:
https://launchpad.net/~mamarley/+archive/ubuntu/nvidia
And the 2nd is Jason DeRose from system-76:
https://launchpad.net/~system76-dev/+archive/ubuntu/stable

So, I approached both Will Cooke and Alberto Milone on how we could do
a better job of getting all this goodness to users with the least
amount of breakage.

Will responded with Talk to the right people, get some +1's and tell
me how I can help. That's this email. :)
Alberto responded with We spend a bunch of time testing drivers,
which is why we look slow, as long as we don't break that...

I just got off the phone with Michael and Jason, and I'd like to start
this discussion. First off:

## Why?

- The amount of Linux games being released is ever increasing; the
demand for fresh drivers in a fast developing market is becoming hard
to ignore, users are going to want the latest upstream has to offer,
and historically that's why we're here; we should strive to deliver
the best experience.

- With Windows 10 Nvidia is now directly publishing their drivers into
Windows update. That means they can deliver a kickass experience with
almost no effort from the user. Until we can convince Nvidia to do the
same with Ubuntu we're going to have to pick up the slack.

## What I propose

Jason and Michael have done a ton of work to deliver these goodies in
PPAs, here's where I think we should go:

- Let's not break distro, SRUs and existing distro policies exist for
a reason; breaking my dad's computer isn't worth it, so 

- Let's do a blessed PPA with the latest drivers, so that people can
just get those drivers without resorting to xorg-edgers and bleeding.

- This PPA can have a give be the latest bling section, which is
basically automated builds of the latest drivers; and a stable
section that is basically a few days behind for people who want the
latest, but don't want to be beta testers.

- Lets work to ensure that there's a nice way to get back to the
stable drivers in distro and that for users opting in won't be stuck
in a weird broken state.

- Lets add a hook to the graphical driver installer for Pure upstream
nvidia driver, which would enable this PPA. (Actually the entire
wording of the drivers in that capplet is horrible, but let's save
that for another day).

- We should ensure that there is an understanding of support; we're
going to give you the latest driver from Nvidia, and if it breaks, you
get to keep both pieces. :) Last thing we want is people reporting
bugs on binary drivers that we can't fix.

- I would like to dip into the community fund to provide Michael and
Jason with hardware for development and testing. Carl Richell told me
that they have no problems sourcing hardware for testing for Jason,
but I'd like to ensure that Michael is sorted. I was thinking of a
first gen Maxwell card (750TI), and a 2nd gen Maxwell (970) to round
out his existing hardware.

- I've asked David Planella if we can get a bit of support
communicating this to places where gamers are, like Liam @
gamingonlinux and Michael @ phoronix. This would help us getting data
early on how well this works with plenty of time for the LTS. Once we
have a semi-official place it will also allow other people to
contribute if they'd like to.

- The intent here is very much like umake; we recognize that people
want the latest bling, and no matter what they're going to do it, so
we might as well put a framework around it so people can get what they
want without breaking their computer.

On a semi-related note, Marc Deslauriers has been maintaining a PPA
with the latest SteamOS stuff, the dedicated session, xpad controller
fixes, and the compositor, once we get the baseline set with the
drivers I would love to see someone grab these bits and get them into
the distro proper. The xpad stuff has already been submitted to the
upstream kernel, but if someone wants to help get the other parts into
the distro, that would be amazing.

Let's hunt some orc: https://youtu.be/XD-PfIdGIBE?t=1m25s

Thoughts?

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Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Shane Fagan
shanepatrickfa...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 Some things to note, so this is an Nvidia only thing going by what you are
 saying, could we have a split for AMD users too?

If you want to gather people up to do the AMD side of the house I
think that would be swell.

 Also what about tweaks like setting the CPU usage to performance mode, it
 has a slight bump at least for my machine in frame rates. (cpupower
 frequency-set performance)

So for things like this I was thinking let's sort the driver situation
first, get that solid, then investigate other things down the road.

 The biggest question I have is the future of the effort given the move away
 from apt to Snappy eventually.

Without defaulting to snappy will solve all our problems, I'm more
concerned about sorting the issues out over the next cycle for the LTS
since we know that we'll still be on Unity7/Traditional Xorg.

  Can someone elaborate on what the idea for
 the future of PPAs after Snappy comes to the desktop, I'm presuming it will
 be the default eventually.

It is my understanding that with snappy upstreams can publish directly
to their users and that the idea of PPA won't really matter anymore
for snappy systems, but I'll let someone from that team explain that
bit.

 One last thing but aside from the topic slightly, the Steam package in
 Ubuntu is semi-broken for certain systems because the installer doesn't have
 the newest Steam runtime so it just straight up breaks on 15.04.

I have found that in general when there's a new HWE release that Steam
is uninstallable for a certain period of time, but have not had a
chance to investigate this other than when I see people complaining
about it on reddit or whatever. Maybe it might be a good idea to put
steam on the list of things that get tested as part of the HWE
process? It might be useful if people gathered a list of bug reports
around this if anyone out there is reading this and knows more about
it.

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Improving the out of the box game controller experience

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone,

With Steam bringing in the game devs I've been working on a dedicated
game machine. Since there's some new attention in this area I thought
I'd bring the experience to the list. I was thinking that we could
probably do a better job supporting game controllers out of the box:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/165210/how-do-i-get-an-xbox-360-controller-working
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sixaxis

The Xbox controller was relatively straightforward (I can't comment on
the PS3 as I don't have the hardware), but it's still not usable to
normal people. I was wondering if someone would be interested in
working on software-properties-gtk to make it so when someone plugs in
either controller the user is prompted to install the right software
and it all just works.

As it happens I have a spare Xbox controller and cable that I can mail
to someone. There are some other minor issues as well, like
blacklisting xpad and xboxdrv needs an upstart job, but it doesn't
seem overly complex.

I'm sure we can drum up some support for getting a developer a PS3
controller if they're interested in fixing those controllers too.

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Fixing 'unity --reset'

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone,

Some changes to unity this cycle means that unity --reset doesn't
work. Didrocks sort of explained what needed to happen to make it work
and J Phani Mahesh stepped up to the plate taking a stab at it.

- 
https://bitbucket.org/jpmahesh/unity-reset/src/00e73b345dae/reset-gio.py?at=master

Some things here:

- It needs to be tested more widely.
- Someone needs to integrate it into Unity at some point once we know
it works so people can do unity --reset.

Thanks J Phani for this contribution!

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Re: It's time to jettison CCSM

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Jeremy Bicha jbi...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 Yes, there are lots of ideas but until someone actually has a working
 patch to make CCSM better, the complaints posted on this thread are
 still valid. And one of the most important points as Didier posted is
 that CCSM has had very little work done on it in along time despite
 known problems. I hate to be off-putting but what CCSM needs is not
 power users on mailing lists, forums, twitter, etc. but developers.

One person stepped up to the plate to try to (start) solving the problem:

 [Alan Bell]
 * debian/patches/01_remove_redundant_sliders.patch:
   - remove sliders which are redundant and potentially dangerous
 combination when using the mousewheel to scroll the page

This is in precise now. Thanks Alan!

More to Petko's point; we do have Compiz bugs and outreach as part of
the general Unity developer growth. In my experience however it's very
difficult to get new volunteers to be able to just dive into Compiz
because it's complicated.

And as far as I can tell no one cared about it's state in Ubuntu
before and so far out of all the recommendations and flames on the
internet for how to fix it only one person has even tried since then.

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It's time to jettison CCSM

[Jorge O. Castro]

With tools like MyUnity now in universe, and didrocks putting basic
configuration in the control panel I'd like to propose the removal of
compizconfig-settingsmanager.

I don't mean stop telling people to use it or add a warning, I
mean total removal from the archive until the tool is either better
tested or doesn't break people's configuration. Here are some of the
problems with the tool.

- It's possible to accidentally uncheck the Unity plugin, breaking the
user's desktop.
- It has a load of checkboxes for plugins that we don't support,
allowing infinite combinations of untested options, which result in
either a broken desktop or a misconfigured one.
- People report these bugs, and instead of fixing real bugs we have to
deal with corner case bugs for things we never plan on supporting.
- Since it's settings are separate from Unity a unity --reset
doesn't fix it, you have to blow away .compiz or some other dotfile
directories to get a desktop back.
- Alex Chiang has documented some of the issues he's run into here:
http://askubuntu.com/a/80590/235
- I'm sure at UDS you've seen didrocks show you one of the ways it
breaks even when using parts of it that shouldn't break.

MyUnity is a better user-facing tool anyway for those that want to
play, it would be a shame to have the ccsm tool ship in an LTS. If
anyone cares about it they can plop it in a PPA.

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Re: It's time to jettison CCSM

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 12:24 PM, Micah Gersten mic...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 Because novices are using a power user tool does not mean we should
 remove a power user tool.  I think attention just needs to be called to
 the problems that can be caused and what better tools exist for novice
 users. Places like askubuntu.com and the Ubuntu forums would be good
 places to evangelize this as well as omgbuntu and maybe webupd8.

We have a power user tool, MyUnity. If it doesn't do exactly what
people want then people will file bugs and then people will either
write the config option or not.

Then we'll have a power user tool that will work. And we do try to
warn people about the dangers of CCSM, but this is one of those cases
where we need to say Sorry, you can't switch to the cube instead of
well you can switch to the cube, but if you fail the saving throw
your desktop turns into a wallpaper with no panels, no launcher, and
no file manager and removing these dot directories, but hey, linux is
about choice!





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Re: It's time to jettison CCSM

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Chow Loong Jin hyper...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 I definitely will miss it, and I'm sure I won't be the only one. If CCSM was
 removed from Ubuntu, it'll most probably make it into a PPA. Then the 
 situation
 won't change much, apart from more bad blood between Ubuntu and the said power
 users, and maybe a less well-maintained CCSM package.

I think power users would appreciate a maintained tool that let them
configure unity (either myunity or ubuntu-tweak, whatever) than a tool
we know carries risk.

If anything this is a great improvement for power users that want to
configure unity but don't want to risk using an unsupported tool.

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Re: It's time to jettison CCSM

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Alan Bell alanb...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 I tell a lie, it *is* keyboard navigable, you can tab off the controls on
 the first page and get focus on all the hidden controls on the other pages
 (that you can't see because you are still looking at the first page) and you
 end up turning off your font anti-aliasing and hinting and messing up
 settings all over the place whilst trying to get keyboard focus on the next
 page widget :-/

Right, these sorts of issues with this tool (and ubuntu-tweak) are
what power user developers should be working on improving. Maybe
myunity or ubuntu-tweak is not the way to go, but what we do have
/today/ is a known-broken tool

As long as your list of criticisms is, there's nothing in the myunity
that can cause the havoc of ccsm, and I'd feel much better if instead
if we concentrated on fixing the actual problems (like the
aforementioned lack of a11y adjustment in the existing tools) than
shipping ccsm.

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Re: It's time to jettison CCSM

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Oli Warner o...@ubuntu.com wrote:
 By that logic we should probably remove:

 rm
 mv
 sudo
 nano
 ...

 They're all installed by default. CCSM isn't and you can do a lot more
 damage with any of those than CCSM alone.

Those are well documented stable tools that do exactly what they are
told. If I told you that every sudo rm -fR /var there was a one in X
chance that /usr/bin would get blown away then that would raise an
eyebrow.

 CCSM is very obviously a power tool. Power tools very obviously allow
 you to screw things up. It's how we deal with those breakages that
 defines how usable Ubuntu is.

It's not a power tool, it's a stopgap tool that ended up being used
because no one has started to make anything better. All my power tools
have safeties on them. :)

 CCSM's problems:

You list a bunch of things broken with ccsm that haven't been taken
care of since Feisty; so I am hesistant for anyone that says we
should just fix CCSM but no one ever does.

It's been nearly _6 years_ that we've shipped this tool and it's been
nothing but problems, clearly no one cares enough to fix it, so why
carry the risk?

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Re: Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 10:47 PM, Martin Owens docto...@gmail.com wrote:
 But what is available isn't classic ubuntu gnome... at least not in
 testing so far:

Seb128 has fixed this, the Classic GNOME in Natty as of yesterdayish
is now what you'd think Classic should be.

For people who prefer classic they'll get almost the same desktop they
had in 10.10; traditional 3 entry GNOME menu and no appmenu.

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Re: OpenShot instead of PiTiVi

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Jonathan Thomas
jonathan.oo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Any update on whether the Featured Applications list will be dynamic for
 11.04?

From chatting with mvo and the USC folks over the week this feature
won't be in 11.04 unfortunately, but we should have something for
11.10. I'll follow up at UDS.

I think when it is dynamically generated we should just drop the
strict requirements of the Featured Apps and just have it generated by
the rating data we collect from users; there's no sense in restricting
a great app if people love it just because it duplicates functionality
of something we ship by default.

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Re: [Oneiric-Topic] Reducing number of patches in our packages

[Jorge O. Castro]

 Also, some Ubuntu-specific patches, like the appindicators ones are
 duplicated in lots of packages, so it would be good if we could find a
 better way to make upstream apps use them, like, for instance, patching
 gtk_status_icon_* in GTK itself to use the indicators when available,
 instead of having to patch dozens of apps (and keep those patches
 up-to-date and working for every major version upgrade).

How would this affect application authors, would they need to go update again?

 Another candidate for that could be the launchpad integration patches,
 which are present in many more packages than the appindicators ones. I'm
 sure we can find a way to have that in GTK itself, so that whenever a
 Help menu is created, and given we have the name of the app, it could
 just create the LPI entries.

This would be great, do you think GTK upstream would be keen on this?

 +100 for this topic.  The amount of patches we carry is a huge but
 mostly silent overhead.  I'd like to make a website like versions [1]
 that shows our diff against vanilla GNOME to make this more visible.

I would like to also +100 even though I'm not on the desktop team. :p

The 3.x transition this is the time to get this out of the way before
we find ourselves in LTS-crunch with too large a delta. When we're
ready I'd like to see us approach d-d-l as soon as possible and start
talking to module maintainers and start working on this. Even if we
don't get them all if we could at least do a frontloaded approach for
O and catch the remainder in P that would be great.

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Re: Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 9:38 PM, Rick Spencer rick.spen...@canonical.com wrote:
 1. There are key feature regressions, for example, there is no systray
 support for many important applications.

According to the AppIndicator Design document the notification area
will be phased out:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CustomStatusMenuDesignGuidelines

We've been transitioning since 10.04 now so I don't think this should
be attributed to Unity entirely, we could have easily run into this by
not shipping the notification area in classic mode.

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Re: OpenShot instead of PiTiVi

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 1:24 AM, Robert Ancell
robert.anc...@canonical.com wrote:
 Except one of the requirements of the featured applications at the
 time was they couldn't be a duplicate of application already
 installed. (Perhaps this is worth changing?).  My personal feel is now
 we have ratings and reviews the best video editor will naturally float
 to the top with a 4/5 star rating.

I can't find the spec right now but I believe the idea was once we had
Ratings and Reviews to just let Featured Applications be built
dynamically from that data instead of us having to pick applications
by hand.

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Update on the Featured Applications for Maverick

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone,

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Maverick/FeaturedApps

So last week before the freeze mvo asked me if we were set to go on
the Featured Apps. At the time the list was PDFMod, Armagetron
Advanced, and Calibre. Having used all three of these extensively I
felt this was a great choice of apps. There was a discussion about
whether we should be switching apps around, etc. and I think that
would be a better discussion for UDS, as both ideas have their merits
and disadvantages and there didn't seem to be a clear consensus. So I
told mvo to go with those three for Maverick.

Today I found some new applications listed: mypaint, phatch, gramps,
and tuxpaint.

So the first thing we need to fix in this process:
 * Make a deadline obvious to everyone so that we have a clear idea of
when they can submit apps.

So for Natty I am thinking this is the best way to go:

 * Alpha 2 - Open up the wiki page for submissions
 * Alpha 3 - Add the applications we've agreed on as Featured Applications
 * Beta - Final List (removing ones we've decided aren't appropriate
or perhaps adding one last minute if it's awesome)

Even though the list of apps are data and a low-risk fix I think
having them ready by Beta is the best thing to do instead of late in
the cycle.

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Canonical Ltd.
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Re: Featured Apps for Maverick

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Benjamin Humphrey humphre...@gmail.com wrote:
 If you need help choosing good apps for end users I'd offer myself and
 Joey's assistance. We run omgubuntu.co.uk and are familiar with pretty much
 every Ubuntu app around.
 Just an offer, take it or leave it :)

It's a wiki, just add them to the proposed list.

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Canonical Ltd.
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Re: [Proposal] rbpitch: Rhythmbox Plugin

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Sean McNamara smc...@gmail.com wrote:
 I have been working on a new plugin for Rhythmbox in my spare time for
 several months. The plugin allows the user to change the pitch, tempo,
 and speed of the music currently playing (each of these elements can
 be changed independently of each other).

Hi Sean, thanks for working on this and for asking about how to get
this software in Ubuntu!

 I have never built a new package for Ubuntu before, but my main
 confusion is that I don't know what the political / organizational
 process is for seeing this through. I can technically figure out how
 to create the Debian package scripts; but once I have that, what's the
 next step to get it included in Ubuntu+1?

I've been working on documentation just for people like you here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Upstream

The short answer to your questions is: depends or not you can find
someone to do the work. In an ideal world we'd have a pool of waiting
developers ready to take your software, maintain it's packaging for
you etc. so you could concentrate on your upstream project. In reality
it can be challenging to find someone with enough free time to give
you a hand. You've done a great job blogging your progress, engaging
with users on the forums, and marketing your plug in, so I encourage
you to continue doing that. Half the battle is getting the word out.

It can be a bummer to spend so much work on your project and not be
able to get that our to users in an easy manner. We're working on a
post release apps process to start to help app developers get software
out to users: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PostReleaseApps/Process

In the meantime please keep chipping away at it, I'm sure we'll need
feedback from people like you to help make this process easier. They
don't let me experiment with cloning Ubuntu developers so that's why
we're always looking to grow the developer community. Since you've got
a fresh pair of eyes I'd love feedback on how those Upstream pages
work for you, feel free to email me directly so we can fix them for
the next person.

Also, developerweek is coming up on IRC, might be a good place to
start to finding help: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek

-- 
Jorge Castro
jorge (at) ubuntu.com
External Project Developer Relations
Canonical Ltd.

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