I, Simon Chopin, apply for MOTU status within the Ubuntu community.

I am applying because:

* I have taken an active role within the development community that requires to be able to communicate on all dev channels, including the ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com ML, which is moderated for non-dev members.

* I'll be involved in multiple uploads throughout the archive as part of my Foundations work, dealing with transitions and toolchains updates, and would like to decrease the pressure on the sponsorship queue.

* Being a MOTU means I can help clear the sponsorship queue, selfishly meaning Core devs have more time to look at my work

Who I am

I am a software engineer hailing from Brittany, France, currently employed by Canonical within the Foundations team. When I'm not working on the internals of Ubuntu as part of my dayjob, you'll usually find me playing either music or videogames, both of which usually involve fiddling with my computer setup ;-).

My Ubuntu story

My Ubuntu story is, for a big part, a Debian story.

Ubuntu was my first successful attempt at Linux back in 2006 on an old laptop, thanks to the free CD shipping program that was running back then. I kept running a dual-boot until 2009, when I had a new laptop which couldn't run the latest Ubuntu but could run the latest Debian. I pragmatically switched to the mother distro, and over the years ended up involved in Python packaging (DPMT and PAPT teams), indirectly working for Ubuntu ;-).

Ironically, my FLOSS contributions died down when I used Ubuntu again, both due to my first job after college. It was only server-side, but its extra-long version strings felt very familiar indeed! I became the resident expert on deploying our applications on our servers, putting my packaging knowledge to good use. After a few years, I switched jobs, and ended up maintaining a whole internal distribution based on Debian, as well as spearheading a grassroot movement to have technical roles in the company use Linux laptops instead of OSX, insisting on Ubuntu LTS on those.

This led me to my current job at Canonical, where I'm happily greasing the internal wheels of Ubuntu so that other, more user-facing teams can deliver a good experience to all of our users, including myself and many around me who've switched to Ubuntu.

My involvement

As part of the Foundations team, my area of impact includes language toolchains, bootloaders, installer, and other core components of the system. I've touched a rather wide range of packages, mostly C libraries and utilities, but my main involvements are netplan development and OpenSSL packaging, for which I'm currently driving the transition to version 3.0.

Outside of my day job, I don't have a big impact at the moment, but my long-term aspirations are to work on reducing the gap between Ubuntu and Debian, and work upstream with the Debian QA team for the good of both their and our archive.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Overall:

* https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?render=html&sponsor=&sponsor_search=name&sponsoree=*chopin*&sponsoree_search=name

OpenSSL 3:

* https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2021-August/041589.html

* https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2021-October/041639.html

My Debian Maintainer application, even though I since let it lapsed:

* https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2013/04/msg00005.html

Areas of work

As mentioned above, my work leads me to work on OpenSSL- and netplan-related matters. I also have personal interest in the Rust ecosystem and might get involved in its packaging (once we sort it out properly).

Things I could do better

Actively seek out interactions outside of the Foundations Team! Also, my uploads could be perfectible, as there is usually a detail (such as a bug number) missing.

Plans for the future

General

I of course intend to become Core dev myself, both for my coworkers' sake and mine.

What I like least in Ubuntu

There is no clear-cut way to contribute to an existing package. Some are maintained in Launchpad in a git repository somewhere, which isn't obvious to find, some are directly using the archive as "VCS", and expect a debdiff directly on the launchpad bug, but you'll find a git repository for some of those packages still, via the git-ubuntu package, making things that much harder to grasp.

I could contrast this with many other distros, but even Debian seems clearer to me, as all "landing pages" for a given package are interlinked and most of them have a link to whatever VCS is used to maintain the package.

Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.

Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

Lukas 'slyon' Märdian

General feedback

I have been mentoring Simon after he joined the Ubuntu Foundations team in early July 2021. Due to his prior Debian experience Simon didn't need a lot of mentoring wrt. distro work, but was able to cooperate with the developer community on #ubuntu-devel in a very transparent and engaged way from the very start! He showed a great learning ability too as he got into the netplan codebase in no time, cranking out high quality pull requests, touching core parts of the application while keeping backwards compatibility, testing and code style in good shape. Besides netplan.io SRUs and a lksctp-tools sync, I sponsored the s390-tools[-signed] package for Simon in "main", which has some special bits to it (wrt. to package signing on Launchpad) that he was easily able to grasp. I also synced git-remote-hg (to pull in Debian's autopkgtest fix that Simon spotted) and racket into "universe" for Simon to support him during his first "+1 Maintenance" session and reviewed his haveged merge that I was able to upload without any nitpicking. He is always attentive and curious about new things that he reads about in some git commits and does not hesitate to ask any questions to the relevant people if anything is unclear.

Simon has collected lots of experience preparing the OpenSSL 3 transition and could put his MOTU powers to good use in helping to clean up the universe outfall after this transition lands. In all of his work he has always focused on delivering high quality results. I trust in his skills and decision making in the best interest of the Ubuntu community. The MOTU membership should only be a first step on Simon path in becoming a Core-Dev and joining additional teams in the future, as he absolutely has the potential to do so.

I fully endorse his MOTU application.

Specific Experiences of working together

Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.

Besides supporting Simon's daily distro work (as described above) I've primarily worked with him as part of the upstream netplan project. Since joining Canonical he pushed 13 PRs to Github (https://github.com/canonical/netplan/pulls?q=author%3Aschopin-pro) all of which have been of very high quality and great form (i.e. git commit structure & description). He always reacted quickly and open minded to any comments made during review and resolved any issues to everybody's satisfaction. He also jumped in to do upstream netplan reviews for other community members and for myself and has been an excellent sparring partner for me doing so.

Areas of Improvement

There are always new things to learn in Ubuntu. Simon could be creating MIR bugs, do more SRU work (also some special cases, like netplan backports), creating NEW packages and getting packages removed from the archive where needed. In continuing his "+1 Maintenance" engagement he will inevitably come across such cases and grow his abilities while working through them.

Stefano Rivera

General feedback

I sponsored 37 uploads for Simon in Debian in 2011-2014. We co-maintained beets and he packaged some of the supporting python libraries. There was, of course, a learning process, but by the end of that time I would have felt happy to endorse Simon for uploading rights in Debian. Hopefully we'll see him back there again I enjoyed working with him, and think he'll make a great MOTU & core-dev.

Specific Experiences of working together

Areas of Improvement

As this was many years ago, it's hard to recall. Nothing comes to mind.

TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
##  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryMOTUApplication