// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Ubuntu Phone engineer reunion over a decade-old bug closure
A decades-old bug on Ubuntu’s Launchpad marked as invalid at the weekend led to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonical’s former engineers.
Bug #1589796 was filed in 2016 by a user who’d spent £700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation to tell him how to use them.
Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug unresolved.
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, on the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked the bug invalid this weekend, closing it with a comment to explain (nearly a decade late) that phone “efforts were spun off to Ubports eons ago”.
But in commenting on the closure, anyone subscribed to the bug (or who opted in to bugs about specific parts of Ubuntu), as former engineers had been at the time, was duly emailed to tell them about the status change.
“What is this, an ex warthogs reunion?”, replied Chris Wayne, who worked in the Phone Delivery Team and was tech lead for Ubuntu Phone’s ‘scopes’, after receiving the update.
Marcus Tomlinson had helped build the Scopes framework but, in stepping aboard the reunion shuttle, made an unexpected confession: “I still don’t really know what a ‘Scope’ is… and I wrote it” – you and the rest of the world, eh Marcus?
For those unfamiliar, Ubuntu Phone’s Home Screen was made up of ‘scopes’ which, ostensibly, replaced the need for apps: rather than open Instagram or eBay, you access their content in a Scope1.
Zoltan B. chipped in (with what I’m choosing to read as a trace memory of this blog) to say: “Ohh my god :) I left Canonical when they sacked the whole Ubuntu Phone team :D I have really good memories about that project.”
Matt Fischer, who worked at Canonical from the early 2010s, described the impromptu reunion as “amazing nostalgia”, noting the phone/tablet was the last one he worked on while at the company. “Every so often someone closes an old bug I filed”, he added.