I, Charlie Smotherman, apply for upload rights for packages Quickplay, Upnp-Inspector and Pylirc.

Who I am

I am 48 years old and I live in the United States. I have been married to my sweetheart for the last 17 years and I have 4 children, and 9 grandchildren with one on the way. I served a 10 year stint in the U.S Army, after the Army I went back to college and obtained a degree in Nursing and soon after passed the Texas Registered Nurse Certification Exam. At which time I was issued my Registered Nurses Licence, and have since had 10+ years in the Intensive Care Unit taking care of open heart surgery patients until the stress almost killed me (literally). I now work part time at a local nursing home, which gives me some free time to play with grandchildren and work on Ubuntu. I am the current Maintainer for Ampach, Ampache-Themes, Quickplay, and Upnp-Inspector in Debian. I am also listed as the Co-Maintainer for Coherence and Pylirc.

My Ubuntu story

I came to know Ubuntu when Dapper was released. After becoming frustrated trying to install one of my favourite pieces of software, Ampache, on that OS from Redmond, I decided to give Ubuntu a try. I was so impressed with the easy of installation and that it was a piece of cake to install Ampache, I never looked back. I have since converted my wife from windows to Ubuntu (no an easy task in itself), along with several of my friends.

I am by no means an IT professional, nor do I work in the IT industry, I am just an avid Debian/Ubuntu user that has the desire to give back to a community that has given me so much.

I am a very active member in the Ampache and Coherence upstream projects, on IRC and in the user forums helping to answer Debian/Ubuntu related questions and staying abreast of changes.

My involvement

I have been involved with Ubuntu since Hardy when I requested the first sync of Ampache from Debian to Ubuntu. As time goes along I have been more and more active in Ubuntu as shown by the number of packages that I have touched durnig the karmic cycle. Yes most of these are sync requests, however they corrected packages that FTBFS in karmic. I would have done more but I had to make some last minute changes to Coherence, Rhythmbox, Totem and Ampache. Due to a change in Python-coherence the Rhythmbox Coherence plugin and Totum Coherence Plugins needed to be updated. Ampache required an update due to a possible sql injection vulnerability. I am waiting on new releases from upstream which will eliminate the debian/ubuntu delta created by these uploads. I am an active member in PAPT and PMPT, where DktrKranz and POX has done most of my uploads in debian.

If things go well during the lucid cycle I may apply for MOTU, unless this council thinks I should now.

Things I could do better

There is always room for improvement. I am continually reading documentation and learning as much about Debian/Ubuntu as I can. Becoming more proficient at bash scripting is something I am always trying to improve on, along with learning a programing language such as python or php (other than the basics) is on the top of my todo list.

Plans for the future

I have been tossing around the idea of possibly applying for MOTU, however I decided to apply for upload rights for Quickplay, Upnp-Inspector and Pylirc instead. These are all packages that I either maintain or co-maintain in debian, so any changes to these packages will make their way into Debian.

Since UDS will be held in Dallas Texas this year I will have the opportunity to go. I hope to get my key signed by one of the good DD's that helps with Ubuntu. This will enable me to apply for Debian Maintainer for the above mentioned packages, thus allowing me to keep my packages up to date in Debian. Sometimes getting you package sponsored through m.d.n. can take a very long, long time.

I have plans of attempting more merges during the lucid cycle, I feel this is one of my weak points that I need to work on, before applying for MOTU.

What I like least in Ubuntu

About the only things that I dislike about Ubuntu is developers who do not submit their patches upstream to Debian.

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

Luca Falavigna

General feedback

I sponsored some of the packages listed above in Debian, and I always found Charlie very eager to apply my suggestions in order to improve his packages. His work will be reflected in Ubuntu as well, so I believe he can be granted upload permissions for the packages mentioned above.

Specific Experiences of working together

We worked on coherence adjusting package name to match Python policy, also switching from python-central to python-support, Charlie now knows some in-depth Python packaging tricks which will help him a lot maintaining Python packages.

Nick Ellery

I've sponsored several packages for Charlie and have been happy for all of them. His quality is strong, and he is improving quickly. I support his application for the mentioned packages, and trust him fully.

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.''

CategoryPerPackageUploaderApplication