Saturday, 21 November 2009

I love LWN. It's the best value for money way of keeping abreast of what's going on out there.

I also love LVM. I'm thrilled to learn from a comment on this article about Btrfs, that LVM is soon to gain snapshot merging support.

This is going to be absolutely fantastic for rolling back upgrades that go bad. I can't wait.

I don't usually get around to blogging about UDS, but since I've got a couple of hours to kill and WiFi on the plane, I might as well write something while it's all fresh in my mind.

Unfortunately, I came down with a head cold on the way back from Australia, so I was not my usual perky self all week, so as a result I probably did less networking than usual, but I did start to feel more human by the end of the week.

Four of us from work went, and I think this worked out well, as our kernel engineer was able to cover the kernel track, and there were frequently three applicable sessions on in parallel, so this allowed for good coverage.

That said, there were frequently less than three things of interest as well, and I take this as a good sign: there aren't plans to really do too much weird or wonderfully different things in 10.04, which I think is the right approach for an LTS. Couple that with the fact that Lucid is based off Debian's testing distribution instead of unstable, and I've come away from UDS with a very good feeling that the third time is going to be the charm as far as Ubuntu LTS releases go.

This was also the first time that we submitted blueprints of our own. I think the upgrading running software one was well received. There was certainly a lot of discussion. I'm not sure if anything will be implemented for Lucid, but at least we got the problem onto the radar.

We also managed to score an impromptu demonstration of Landscape, and while I don't think it's quite at the point where we'd want to buy it, it definitely has potential and apparently all of the things that we found to be lacking have already been identified as features that need to be added, so I think that maybe by a 2.0 release, it'll be more compelling. I don't think the Dedicated Server Edition existed last time I'd looked at it, and this sounds like a much more sensible (and reasonably priced) option.

This was my fourth UDS. The first one being the one for the Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS release. The entire team went to that one, and we were all completely uncalibrated for UDS and didn't really know how or if that UDS differed from ones for non-LTS releases. Since then I've learned that every UDS is different anyway, and it's a fairly evolutionary process. Aside from the venue being multi-level, which I think hampered networking, I thought this UDS was the best facilitated one yet.