Debian Edu IRC Meeting 06.02.2006

This is a summary about the second DebianEdu IRC meeting.

The following people gave input to the meeting:

The meeting was limited to 60 minutes.

At first we started to make a short summary about the current state of debian-edu .

State of development:

Steffen Joeris (white) announced that there are 3 release critical bugs left where 2 of them are fixed and need some tests and 1 is still open. In addition to that Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) said that he will test if the fixed bugs can completely closed.

RC issue:

Patrick Winnertz (pwinnertz) remarked that there is an other bug with cfengine. The bug only exists if no main server (tjener) is available. Then Klaus-Ade Johnstad (klausade), Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) and Steffen Joeris (white) discussed if this is a release blocker or not. Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) and Klaus-Ade Johnstad (klausade) only want to release if this is also running, because Debian-Edu is famous for various features and one is the ?ThinClientServer which is also needed without main server (tjener). Steffen Joeris (white) disagreed with that and did not see the RC severity. Anyway Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) said that it is fixed and the agreement was that this issue should be fixed for the next release.

LDM theme and Firefox printing:

The LDM theme for thin clients and the firefox printing didn't work in the last daily-builds. These are the two bugs which should be closed now but someone need to verify the changes. (Skolelinux Bugs #1035 and #1042)

Missing Kmail configuration:

Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) announced that the current preconfiguration of Kmail is not working. The problem is that the current state broke the configuration of the users after every upgrade of the debian-edu-config package. Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) reproduced it several times. The problem seemed to be Kmail itself. Although Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) and Steffen Joeris (white) agreed that it is a bad solution to provide configuration for Kmail under /etc/skel for every user Steffen Joeris (white) voted for doing it because the other way is that we have a non-upgradable system. Morten Werner Olsen (Werner_) and Steffen Joeris (white) also supposed to drop the mail client preconfiguration. Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) wants to stay with a mail system solution which is working out of the box (not only server also client side). Then Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) suggested to use an other mail client instead. He prefered to have Thunderbird. Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) wanted to have only one mail client on the CD so we should decide which one we want to preconfigure. Knut Yrvin (knuty) remarked that Kmail is in use by many schools. During the next days a few of us will work on this issue, because it is the last main RC Bug which is stopping the release and then we will come up with a decision of what to do. If you want to contribute just come on #debian-edu on freenode and ask for the state. For more information please look at Skolelinux Bug #550 (http://bugs.skolelinux.no/show_bug.cgi?id=550)

LTSP:

Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) worked on new LTSP packages for Debian-Edu which are now included in the daily build. He remarked that it will take some time until his changes will be included into the upstream release.

Dash:

Klaus-Ade Johnstad (klausade) tells us that the old link for ash is no longer working. We use it to make it easier to resize lv_usr for /usr. Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) explained that the new shell is called dash instead of ash. So we have to change the symlink by following the Debian advices (/usr/share/doc/bash/README.Debian.gz). Patrick Winnertz (pwinnertz) will work on this issue.

Translations:

Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) asked after the state of the translation for the debian-edu-install package. Steffen Joeris (white) and Morten Werner Olsen (Werner_) said that the translations mismatched because of the new strings for the Barebone profile. Morten Werner Olsen (Werner_) agreed in sending the new translations to the translators and work on including the right translations during the next days.

Release Codename:

Steffen Joeris (white) asked after the codename and version number for the next release. Petter Reinholdtsen (pere) decided to give the decision to the release manager, so Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) will surprise us later.

User Configuration (LDAP):

Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) suggested to allow members of the admin group to change other ldap entries (not only user passwords). He named shadowLastChange, sambaPwdLastSet amd sambaPwdCanChange. As Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) and Klaus-Ade Johnstad (klausade) explained shadowLastChanged is used to tell kdm that the user must change password and sambaPwdlastSet and ?CanChange is updated when the samba password is updated. Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) wants both fields writeable for the members of the admin group. Because of lack of time this discussion was stopped and so maybe Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne) will write a mail and explains this issue or we will discuss it during the next meeting.

Next meeting:

The next Debian-Edu IRC meeting is scheduled for monday the 20.02.2006 19.GMT .

Personal Comments:

During the last IRC meeting, two weeks ago, we talked about 16 release critical bugs and we were far away from our release. Now we are talking about 1 release critical bug and I think we are very close to our release right now. Thanks to all contributers, you can call yourself a release team and it was fun to work with you on these RC bugs and fix them. Let's keep our good work and fix this last RC bug and make Debian-Edu/Skolelinux ready for the release so that we can proudly announce Debian-Edu/Skolelinux (version number and codename still unknown until the day of the release :) ).

Moderator: Petter Reinholdtsen (pere)

Logs: Finn-Arne Johansen (finnarne)

Protocol: Steffen Joeris (white)