I, Didier Roche, apply for MOTU.

Who I am

I am a 25 year old French system administrator, living near Paris.

About my Linux profile, I started using Linux with Red Hat 6 in 1999. I then really become a regular Linux user since Mandrake 7.0 with a KDE based interface. I used Mandrake until 9.0 release of Mandrake, and then decided to try debian, and was truly satisfied with it, despite the long configuration time it took to have a working environment. I found the apt tools really cool compared to rpm one.

I was seeking for an easy-to-use and install Linux distribution. I found the "no-name-yet", known as Ubuntu today, and become to make some test with it. I have sticked with it and Ubuntu make me love the GNOME environment since this date.

I also went in Africa for 1 month with a non-governemental organisation, Africedu : (project 2006: Lome, capital city of Togo), shipping in a school 60 computers set up with Ubuntu 5.10 (and upgraded there to 6.06 from on old hard drive!). We made some training there.

As a programmer, I know C++, XHTML/CSS, PHP, XML/XSL/XPATH, shell scripting (Bash/Ksh) and java languages. I am currently learning python which seems to rock on! Oh ya, and I began a little more than ten years ago, with... visual basic :/ (nobody's perfect).

My Ubuntu story

I wrote a documentation I wrote to my dudes when going to Africa to teach them the very basics of Ubuntu. It turns out as a Simple Comme Ubuntu, free book (under CC:By-Sa licence), part of framabook collection, solded at more than 3 000 copies only by the Internet, and downloaded more than 300 000 times at the very moment.

It becames popular and so people from ubuntu-fr ask me to help in coordinating the ubuntu-fr wiki. Today, I am involved in French ubuntu-fr loco team as a member of the administration team and part of the chair (as the secretary) of ubuntu-fr French non governemental organisation. With this, I am participating to French Ubuntu Party as an organizer and differents French FOSS meetings in promoting ubuntu.

Then, for ubuntu development, at last RMLL, I spoke with huats about MOTUship and he presented me the mentorship program. I was excited about that and dive in it from last July, having to balance my spare time between ubuntu-fr and ubuntu development (a solution is to poke huats for every tasks you have to handle in parallel manner)

My involvement

So, from then, I worked to learn a lot of things reading a whole bunch of documentation (long time transportation to go to your paid work enables you to read a lot!), and working in my two prefered areas, at the time being: ubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-server teams.

I set up a wiki page to communicate with my mentor and to sort out things that can be useful. This one is located on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DidierRoche/MOTU/memorandum. I never hesitate to document seems that can not be seen as being obviously described, for instance the build process.

I worked also on updating the description of use of bzr in the desktop team for packaging (add and update a package) and some other pages are still in progress to have step-by-step usage of such workflow.

The whole work on packages can be seen there and here is the full story with sponsors (first examples were more detailed ;)).

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I will show examples in different areas:

• bug correction: The "easy" file sharing not notifying about logout/login was a great experience of working on a hilighted an "waited for" bug which had also the focus for an SRU (and so, experiencing SRU process). And well, this persuaded me that I can still read and write some lines code in C/C++ Seeing that it was listed in the 8.04.2 release note was a great reward.

• package updating: gnome-session..
• After having worked with jdstrand in ufw package integration, I was feeling that it was a pity that rules (which can have some horribles name) were case-sensitive. So I made a patch which has been merged (slightely differently) by jdstrand in trunk. It was a good way to begin to learn how python works)
• working in teams

Areas of work

I am working more on the desktop team at the moment, but try to dedicate more time time to the server one as well.

Things I could do better

learnt about dh_install --list-missing and to diff to see added depencies not leasted in NEWS (I was relying on that before)

I will try to be present in the desktop/server team meetings, but the schedule is not really great regarding with my paid-work. So, at this moment, I just read ML summary of those meetings.

* lib... I always ask when I am unsure * autotools... I didn't used them a lot * I want to learn more "pythonic way" of writing code, but I think this will come with time.

Plans for the future

General

gcc

What I like least in Ubuntu

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it.

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.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===