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General Report

Some figures about Mageia communication

Blog

  • 2013 135,378
  • 2014 77,304

- 42 %

Twitter

  • 2013 2 844
  • 2014 3 059

+ 7,5 %

Facebook

  • 2013 5 480
  • 2014 6 485

+ 186 %

Google+

  • 2013 2 623
  • 2014 1 098

- 58 %

The main facts for 2014

Mageia 4 release

Mageia 4 was released on 2014/02/01.

Mageia 3 EOL

Mageia 2 officially became end of life on 2014/11/26. An announcement was made across all channels of communication including IRC, mailing lists, forums and blog.

Teams report

As main teams were represented during the general assembly, we were able to make a review together of these teams.

Atelier

web subteam

  • created documentation pages (http://www.mageia.org/doc/),
  • transition from lang files to gettext translation system for web pages,
  • new download page (http://www.mageia.org/5/),
  • merging common navigation (mognase) to www.mageia.org,
  • l10n progress report was improved,
  • new report about differences in our git from l10n platform Transifex.com,

For 2015 we would like to improve visual experience on our website.

Artwork subteam

  • the artwork for mga4 being well received was a nice moment
  • Fixing bug #763 mageia-theme-Default defaulting background to wrong resolution was pretty nice too, it was one of the last big outstanding artwork bugs going back to mdv days
  • For 2015 switching KDE splash screens to qml will give nice animation options
  • Rewriting the plymouth boot theme also to give better animation and to fix some scaling issues

QA TEAM

Getting Mageia 4 released, and all of the security updates out quickly for things like heartbleed and shellshock. Those updates only took a few hours to get released, and were released before the bugs were common knowledge. Undoubtly it was the release of Mageia 4 and that in time for the FOSDEM show 1 Feb 2014. A huge effort for everyone involved. A super release from a super team.

What are you most looking forward to in 2015? Well the obvious is Mageia 5, again for FOSDEM. But really beyond that looking at the Mageia 6 and some of the new technologies that will be integrated into that. QA is a continual learning process, so more learning really. Obviously nobody can be expected to be familiar with all packages and all protocols yet that is more or less what we are expected to do. It is always interesting to learn more and to come into contact with software and technology which may otherwise pass you by. To anybody wanting to 'learn more about linux', contributing as a member of the QA team is fast paced and wide ranging. You will learn alot about alot of different things and see all aspects of the operating system, from low level system services and libraries to things like web services and desktop applications.

  • What are the biggest challenges that face GNU/Linux and FOSS in the upcoming year?

I think that challenge has been there for a long time. Just getting the message out as to what Linux et al is. Ask the average person in the street what is Linux and most of the time you get confusion, no idea or isn't that the hackers thing. Ask the average person in the street what's the most shipped operating system and most of the time you hear Windows. There's the biggest challenge. Linux became the most shipped OS years ago and few people link that Smartphone to Linux. It's a message thing. From a QA perspective it is probably keeping active people. QA can be daunting when people first join the team, both the pace and the complexity. It can be a challenge, but that is what makes it so rewarding. We often find people begin to contribute and slowly decline, which is sad but something we've come to expect. The pace can easily be lessened by having more active people. The complexity is lessened by breaking everything down into more simple procedures. We generally now have testing procedures for package updates as we've updated them in the past and can look back at how they were tested before. We have processes to follow which explain how we work when testing too.

In general though I think one of the biggest challenges to the foss world in these days of closed and locked down devices with closed and locked down apps being 'the norm', rather than proper computers with open access to what is running on it, is not just getting the message across but getting people to realise that free software doesn't just happen. It takes an army of energetic PEOPLE to create free software and to put a distribution together, not just programmers but people of all specialities and even those without. As we've seen recently with the heartbleed vulnerability and openssl, there is a growing realisation from big companies that their use of free software has been largely one way, with little actual contribution to the software they depend upon. Things are beginning to go full circle in this respect, but it is one damaging aspect stemming from the wide adoption of proprietary software.

It sounds a bit hyperbolic and grand maybe but society as a whole, perhaps, has an unfelt responsibility to ensure there will be no skills shortage which could at some future point stunt technological development. In my school days computer studies classes meant learning about the guts of computers, learning about the various languages available (which were far fewer then), learning some basic programming techniques, bubble sort etc and then actually writing a program in 32k of memory. Today it is more along the lines of learning what a mouse is, how to use MS Office and how to send an email. The European Computer Driving License (ECDL) is basically the same, starting with a childrens game to teach people what a mouse is and graduating on to MS Office with email being one of the more advanced topics.

In short, participation. If not you, then who?

Packagers

Biggest highlight for 2014

2015

  • renew the way we organize this team so that we can keep everybody in touch about development and maintainance - have people interested in including all the last inovation but also people for maintenance
  • really focus on mentoring to get more packagers and developpers in the team
  • work harder on historical tools of the distribution: installer and drakxtools. It's the heart of Mageia environment but it's getting old in term of functionnalities and design. We have a first big work done through adminpanel. We have now to go further

docteam

  • Biggest highlight of 2014: creating our official documentation in EPUB and PDF format, too, instead of in HTML only.

For 2015, looking forward to :

  • Seeing those EPUB and PDF publications become available for all users.
  • Having a better internationalized wiki.

i18

  • new l10n platform Transifex.com brought a lot of new translators as needed technical level of knowledge is lower,
  • new gettext translation system for web pages unified our work,
  • some new and improved reports for l10n,