MOTUApplication

Revision 5 as of 2009-01-26 13:15:01

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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. I quickly relied on ubuntu-fr website (just a forum at the beginning).

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 previous 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) Smile :)

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++ Wink ;) Seeing that it was listed in the 8.04.2 release note was a great reward. Intrepid debdiff, hardy debdiff.

  • I managed quite complex updates like gnome-games one and push them in bzr to prepare futur development workflow. (see "things I could do better" for the whole story ;))

  • Enhancement: 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): diff available there

  • Team work: Removing "multiuser" from some daemons were quite challenging, not because of the technical changes it had (it is a straightfoward changes), but to find people willing to sponsors the reverse depencies (nvidia-kernel-common, nis, lm-sensors, keepalived, dictd, acpid) was harder. I had to find one person who point me to another one, and so on... Smile :) This was a good experience to meet a whole bunch of people and also to forward those patch to debian and convince some DD for the benefit of it.

Areas of work

I am working currently more on the desktop team, but try to dedicate more time 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 them until I have a response I can fully understand Smile :)

Things I could do better

  • During the update of gnome-games of gnome-games, there were some files that weren't installed. seb128 show me the marvellous of "dh_install --list-missing" which I immediatly adding as a pbuilder hook. In the meantime, he shows me that you have to diff old and new configure.in to see which new depencies may be added. This was not the case this time, but I must confess that I didn't it and just relied on NEWS file. Frustrated for this mistake, I took some time to figure out bugs in gnome-games and saw that it misses LPI integration for two python games (in addition to one to convert from libgnomeui to GtkBuilder). Seeing no documentation on that (for python) and only Gajim, as a reverse dependency on python-launchpad-integration, used it (but this is no more the case, maybe we can remove the dependency. Will have a look at that.), I added this features for gnome-sudoku and for glchess (one using glade, and the other GtkBuilder).

  • I didn't handle update on librairies and that's a weak point. I alerted seb128 on that and he promess to give me the next library update (thanks seb \o/). As usual, when I am unsure of something, I ask question Smile :)

  • I planned to give/help on a session about autotools. This will force me to find some time to give a deeper look at them... I didn't used them a lot apart from autoreconf Wink ;)

  • 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.

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 setupping 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 norrawdays 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 (that I didn't succeed, unfortunatly), where I give some presentation of my projet (gchildcare)


Comments

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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 ===