I, Dave Jones, apply for Core-Dev (someone pick schopin up off the floor, please).

I am applying to simplify wide-ranging changes to the archive ... which I unwittingly keep getting dragged into. And because the architectures team in Foundations is apparently the only team in Foundations with no Core-Devs. For shame!

Who I am

I'm the author of a few open source packages, and contributor to some others. Most have some connection to the Raspberry Pi (rpi-lgpio, pemmican, GPIO Zero, picamera, piwheels, pisense, the Sense HAT emulator), others have only a tenuous link (structa, cbor2, nobodd). Since 2019, I've been a software engineer on the Canonical Foundations team where I'm primarily responsible for (surprise!) the Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi images -- including the boot chain, configuration, firmware packages, new hardware enablement, and so on.

If you've been to the engineering sprints or the Ubuntu summit, I'm the one wandering around with the suspicious looking toolkit full of Pi.

My Ubuntu story

Previously on "Dave's Ubuntu Story"

And now, on Dave's Ubuntu Story...

Having been on the Foundations team for slightly more than 5 years now, I have somehow retained my sanity, though the same cannot be said for my ever thinning hair. My complex love/hate relationship with Debian packaging continues, though now aided by ever more tooling to prevent me from forgetting certain minutiae (thank you, dput-ng!).

I've managed several complex merges of relatively significant packages, including u-boot, flash-kernel, initramfs-tools, sbuild, and dbus (though recent merges of initramfs-tools and sbuild were kindly handled by BenjaminDrung). I've also handled MIRs, SRUs, and several other TLAs that we like throwing around to confuse people.

I've occasionally dabbled in wide-ranging changes to our packaging (more on these horrors below), seed changes, and meta-release changes (mostly fiddling with imager JSON). All of which I should probably never have been let near without some sort of license.

More recently I've also been involved in the patch pilot program, sponsoring (particularly community) contributions as a MOTU.

My involvement

Examples of my work

Available from udd for sponsorships and as sponsoree, but here's a selection of some of the more interesting bits I can recall:

• I commonly handle things for the Ubuntu Pi releases including trivial JSON updates for serving our images via rpi-imager (which I also maintain the snap for). Being lazy like a coder, I naturally wrote a script to do all the hard work for me.

• A recent u-boot merge. These aren't that complex these days, thanks to the (big) delta being split out on previous merges, but I also did the initial split on this, years ago.

• The python3-defaults SRU bug involving localized diversion messages and py3clean. BenjaminDrung deserves the credit for much of the analysis on this bug. I suggested some adjustments to the fix, uploaded a ton of universe packages as a result, spent several days moronically looking at the wrong excuses page, but then managed to patch enough stuff (and hit retry enough times) to convince it to migrate. Many thanks to mfo for the SRU reviews!

• Yes, I've done some MIRs too.

• And some syncs.

• I even mess around with seeds on occasion.

• Many moons ago, I did some rather hairy work on debhelper, fixing a problem causing it to restart services even when explicitly told not to. This in turn led to a subtle but complex change in dpkg-reconfigure. Perhaps as a result of this, people seem to be under the impression that I know what I'm doing with complex packaging issues. They're wrong, but that hasn't stopped them sponsoring for my fixes for it.

Things I could do better

• Packaging. Always packaging. Anyone who claims total knowledge of Debian packaging is lying. There is always more to learn here.

• SRUs. Sometimes I'm too lax with other's SRU uploads, particularly when it's insert-yet-another-pi-clone wanting to upload their custom-firmware/bootloader/config/delete-as-appropriate.

Plans for the future

General

• Mentor my new partner-in-Pi, Pragyansh, on all the Pi related stuff in Ubuntu

• Maybe, between us, start keeping up with changes streaming from RaspiOS

• No, I haven't thought any further than this -- I'm too swamped!

What I like least in Ubuntu

• The quality of certain snaps. To be fair, this has improved in some areas, e.g. the Firefox snap finally gained hardware acceleration on the Pi, but this was almost 9 months after it would've had it as a deb. And we're still lacking piles of snaps for ARM (again, improved, but not enough).

• The missing / broken bits of our infrastructure. Debian has code-search, which I relied upon for identifying affected packages in complex cases like the debhelper fixes above. But when it came to Ubuntu, "ask someone who has a mirror of the archive".

• And I still want a preview button on Launchpad. Though again, I still love Launchpad's rendering speed on my Pi, and it really is the most elegant mechanism for tracking bugs in Debian packages.

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.

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 ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication