BryceHarrington

Contact Info

About Me

I am Bryce Harrington, I've been involved in Open Source since 1994, Ubuntu specifically for about a year, and Mandrake and Gentoo in years prior. I am currently focusing on maintaining Xorg, through packaging, bug triaging/fixing, and spec work as Canonical's Xorg maintainer. Thus I am eating and breathing all things X lately. Outside Ubuntu, I am one of Inkscape's founders and I enjoy woodworking. Professionally, I worked for the Open Source Development Labs building automated test harnesses, web app development, and NFSv4 testing from 2001-2007. Before that I designed spacecraft propulsion systems.

My efforts revolve principally around keeping Xorg and Inkscape packages up to date, and triaging/fixing bugs in the same. I also am a big believer in the role of process documentation and statistics tools to help make software communities more effective, and so have created/maintained several web docs and tools:

Ubuntu Gutsy Contributions

During the Gutsy development cycle, I cut my teeth deeply on packaging, from small X apps to large, complicated things like xorg, xserver, mesa, and linux-restricted-modules. I also invested a lot of time into trying to get caught up with the huge backlog of untriaged Xorg bugs, and to help build up an Xorg packaging and testing community.

For two of the Gutsy specifications, I implemented Bulletproof-X, and helped glatzor integrate his displayconfig-gtk GUI tool for xorg configuration.

When I started with Canonical, magazine reviews of Feisty invariably reported that in their tests Ubuntu failed to select the correct monitor resolution. Since this seemed to be an extremely high profile (and embarrassingly bad) X issue for Ubuntu, I took this as my primary objective. After much experimentation, I fixed all the issues in xresprobe, with the result that when Gutsy was released hardly anyone reported monitor resolution detection issues. (There are still issues, they're just far more obscure things now.)

Ubuntu Hardy Contributions

My objectives for Hardy are to a) triage the New bugs to 0 for all major Xorg components, b) reduce the number of open bugs for -intel to under 100, and c) reimplement our xorg GUI config tool in C for inclusion in gnome-control-center.

As of January 25 objective (a) has been met, as the number of New bugs in xorg, xorg-server, -intel, -ati, and -nv were reduced to 0. I plan to turn my triaging focus to reviewing Incomplete bugs, and pushing appropriate bug reports upstream.

Getting the -intel bug total from over 160 to below 100 has proven a deeper challenge, but I've made good progress, bringing it down to 130 as of Feb 8. However, I've set up a bi-weekly call with Intel to review bugs, have been pushing bugs upstream, and am even coding up some patches myself.

While displayconfig-gtk was well received in the Gutsy release, unfortunately in parallel to that development Xorg has been making the xorg.conf file optional. Since displayconfig-gtk draws its configurational information from that file, with elements in that file becoming optional and disappearing due to Xrandr, displayconfig-gtk has grown increasingly more broken. Thus I've taken it as a goal to solve this by implementing Xrandr 1.2 multi-head support in gnome-control-center. Whether by implementing something myself, or contributing to work done by others, my hope is that we can gain a solid, supportable solution for us all.

I also participate in the ubuntu-mobile team maintaining their Xorg components, including their git-head copy of libdrm, the Poulsbo video driver, and various patches to xserver that they need.

BryceHarrington (last edited 2009-04-19 11:05:22 by 92)