Contents

Contents

  1. Who I am
  2. My Ubuntu story
    1. My involvement
    2. Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of
    3. Areas of work
    4. Things I could do better
  3. Plans for the future
    1. General
    2. What I like least in Ubuntu
  4. Comments
  5. Endorsements
    1. Andrea Colangelo (warp10)
      1. General feedback
      2. Specific Experiences of working together
    2. Daniel Holbach (dholbach)
      1. General feedback
      2. Specific Experiences of working together
      3. Areas of Improvement
    3. Martin Pitt
      1. General feedback
      2. Specific Experiences of working together
    4. Sebastien Bacher
      1. General feedback
      2. Specific Experiences of working together
      3. Areas of Improvement
    5. TEMPLATE

I, Didier Roche, apply for MOTU.

Name

Didier Roche (didrocks)

Launchpad Page

https://launchpad.net/~didrocks

Wiki Page

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DidierRoche

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 take some test with it and immediatly loved it) I have sticked with it and Ubuntu makes me love the GNOME environment since this date.

I also went in Africa for one 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

So, I began very early in the Ubuntu world, but just as an user as the beginning. I quickly relied on ubuntu-fr website (just a forum at this time).

Founding that there were no real "begins here" and sorted list of basics learning in Ubuntu, and being sure that a wiki can't handle such a thing for most of people, I wrote a documentation to my dudes when going to Africa to teach them the very basics of Ubuntu. It turns out as Simple Comme Ubuntu, a 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 team asked 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, keeping also some relations with the press. Thanks to that, I get my Ubuntu membership.

Then, for ubuntu development, at previous RMLL, I spoke with huats (the "4K man", ubuntu-fr president!) 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) Smile :)

My involvement

So, from then, I worked to learn a lot of things about packaging reading a whole bunch of documentations (long time transportation to go to your paid work enables you to read a lot!), and working in my two prefered areas: 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 this page. I never hesitate to document stuff that can not be seen as being obviously described, for instance the build process.

I worked also on updating the description of bzr usage 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 workflows.

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:

Areas of work

I am working currently more on the desktop team, but try to dedicate more time to the server one as well. I think I am quite a generalist person and have a wide breath of interests. So, anything that can make me learn new things and make ubuntu better is really welcome.

As my sponsors may know, I like to really understand things and not just apply them, so, I keep asking until I have a response I can fully understand Smile :)

Things I could do better

Plans for the future

General

First, being present in team meeting, just have to find a way to recouncile work and free time Smile :-)

I plan to sponsor other people's work (as I had the chance to be sponsored many times, it's normal to give same chances to new contributors).

For the same reason, I want also to take part of mentorship program as I really liked this kind of relationship with my mentor (warp10, you ROCK ;)). Furthemore, I really think that the mentorship is a good way for new contributors to not be launched into the wild, and have a person that can help her/him to point to the right direction. But I greatly appreciate that mentors do not things/suggests for you, and let you come when you need him, not the contrary. As Andrea told me "The mentor-mentee relationship is a two-way road, where both learns from the other in different manners".

Finally, I have a great interest in programming a user friendly control parental GUI. See next section.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Not control parental GUI is a great loss for Ubuntu and stop/block some parents to use Ubuntu, for their children. Especially nowadays as in France, for instance, we have a lot a advertisements financed by the government on TV that say basically "turn on parental control in your computer": http://www.youtube.com/v/cE6fQwWggVM. I think this has to be fixed.

I planned to create one and I am currently working on it. See this page that was dedicated for UDS sponsorship (in what I didn't succeed, unfortunatly), where I give some presentation of my projet: gchildcare.

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

Andrea Colangelo (warp10)

General feedback

I have been Didier's mentor for the whole of his contribution period in Ubuntu, and I have to say that Didier has been an outstanding mentee. His technical skills are top level, as proven from the many packages he worked on (that would scare even experienced MOTUs). Apart from that, Didier's orderliness and both personal and team skills are remarkable. The way he used his own wiki pages should be recommended to every Ubuntu contributor. He is always eager to learn and asked me a lot of questions about packaging. Didier is now an experienced developer, showed improvements in all areas of work, and I am confident he fully understands our freeze policies. I definitely trust him, and warmly encourage to accept Didier in the MOTU rank.

Specific Experiences of working together

Being Didier's mentor, I worked very closely with him on about everything, so I can't list very specific experiences, since our relationship was pretty wide. Didier made some interesting patches for server-related packages and core packages too, often uploaded without the need of any correction. Further, his recent packaging experience with loggedfs has been excellent, and he was capable of packaging the software on his own (just a couple reccomendations from me).

Daniel Holbach (dholbach)

General feedback

Didier is a great contributor. I'm very happy with his contributions. I sponsored 10+ of his packages and I was always happy with his quick reponses and the overall quality. With every comment I made his contributions became better and better.

I trust him to be a good MOTU.

Specific Experiences of working together

Areas of Improvement

The small mistakes Didier made never really had an impact on the quality of the upload and I'm sure that over time he'll be less likely to make even those small mistakes.

Martin Pitt

General feedback

I uploaded a bunch of merges and bug fixes from Didier, overall perhaps 10. The patches I sponsored were generally good, and just needed minor corrections.

I have too little "live" experience with him to be truly able to say I'd trust him to upload everything on his own; but so far I have no reason to say the opposite.

So a general +0.5 from me, due to my relative inexperience with him.

Specific Experiences of working together

My most recent experience with him was with his nautilus-share fix, which he did very well.

Sebastien Bacher

General feedback

I did sponsor several desktop updates Didier worked on. He usually does a good job, takes the time to do thing correctly and understand what he's doing and asks when there is something he doesn't understand. He did good job on non trivial updates, learnt the required tools and documented his work on the wiki for other contributors. There is things he didn't work on yet (he's working on his first library split for an update) so he still has to learn but he seems ready to contribute to universe since he does good job on things he knows and ask questions when required

Specific Experiences of working together

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/324982 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/155269 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/286634 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/286597 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/286540 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/273598

Areas of Improvement

There is things he didn't work on yet and that he has to learn but he seems to be learning quickly so that should not be an issue

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 ===

CategoryMOTUApplication

DidierRoche/MOTUApplication (last edited 2009-02-25 10:32:22 by i59F72ABA)