Dear members of the Technical Board, I would like to request a clarification about the status/process of Lubuntu becoming an official flavour in the 'Ubuntu' family. After more than two years of development we would like to progress to the next level in the community and enable the development team and community to use the same tools as other flavours. The acknowledgement and support of the board for Lubuntu becoming an official flavour and achieving our goals would be greatly appreciated.
Before going into details, let me do a quick introduction: Lubuntu is a distribution based on Ubuntu, and the LXDE desktop environnement. The main goal is to provide a very lightweight distribution, but with all the advantages of Ubuntu world (repositories, support ...). [1] The project began 2 years ago when Mark Shuttleworth and Mario Behling (the founder of Lubuntu project) discussed it in Berlin. Later, work began in Ubuntu community, improving the support of LXDE, and the others applications part of the Lubuntu seed. During this 2 years, we achieved some goals : - Lubuntu packages are 100% hosted in Ubuntu official repository (we use PPA for testing and bringing extra functionalities, not for building the ISO) - Lubuntu provides the "standard" functionalities that you expect for an OS, by using LXDE environnement, well-known (Chromium, Pidgin ...) and adapted applications (Sylpheed for mail, Xpad for notes ...), and a original artwork (including a slideshow). - Lubuntu was acknowledged by several teams in Ubuntu (Artwork Team, Beginners and Youth Team, Documentation, IRC, Forum) - We provide an "official" i386 ISO, using a system similar to Ubuntu infrastructure, and a non-official alternative ISO. - We follow the same release cycle that Ubuntu (including Freezes). We plan to release Lubuntu 11.04, the 3rd version of Lubuntu, the same day that Ubuntu 11.04. We also have usually positive feedbacks from users, even if Lubuntu is still not perfect. As an non-official flavor, we can't use some ressources available : - Building ISO - Using ISO bug tracker - Booking sessions at UDS Even with an official status, I know that this couldn't be done in the short term. However, we don't spend time to maintain our tools to generate ISO, because we think an official adoption will make them obsolete. If we can't gain the status of official flavor, we will spend more time for them, but the non-decision make us quite uncomfortable. I know Emmet is writing an official process for adopting flavors, with all the technicals details to achieve it. The goal of this email is not to bypass the process, but to know if the Ubuntu governance officially acknowledge our existence to the Ubuntu family. The Lubuntu community has already widely adopted working and community models in the Ubuntu sphere, but the non-official status make the situation quite unstable for us. Our goal is to be included as an official release (included in the release notes). IMO, it's another topic, that should be deal by the Release Team when (if ?) the same ressources are available for Lubuntu, as any other flavors. To conclude, I would like to have an answer: When will we be officially part of the family? It's important for all people who work on Lubuntu, helping users on IRC, forums, IRL, but also people doing bug reports, artworks... Your support for the Lubuntu project will ensure a continuously strong motivation of contributors and a growth of the community and ecosystem. If you have any questions, please let me know. I'll be glad to answer them. Looking forward to your response, Best regards, Julien Lavergne [1] : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
