PulseAudioUploaderApplication

I, David Henningsson, apply for upload rights for package PulseAudio.

Name

David Henningsson

Launchpad Page

http://launchpad.net/~diwic

Wiki Page

Diwic (not recently updated)

Who I am

I'm a software developer from southern part of Sweden. Born in 1980, and I've been programming since I was nine. My special interest is in music/audio software, and I've been working for Canonical with audio infrastructure and enabling hardware for more than a year now.

I also enjoy playing the piano.

My Ubuntu story

  • 2007: Switched to Linux/Ubuntu for real. Gutsy was the first release I tried, and I've stayed with Ubuntu since.
  • 2009: I became involved with the FluidSynth project (upstream), of which I now one of the lead developers (in my spare time)

  • 2009: I also started more and more to be involved with Launchpad work, triaging bugs and so on. I focused on audio bugs for two reasons; 1) out of interest and 2) because the area needed more manpower.
  • 2010 (July): I got employed by Canonical, to work with hardware enablement and audio infrastructure full time. With an interest in both software, Linux and audio, this feels really like the place to be!

With my work at Canonical, I'm able to travel to conferences and meet both Ubuntu people and upstream ALSA and PulseAudio people. For the PulseAudio upstream people, I'm usually the person they go to if they have a question about ALSA or Ubuntu. (And for the ALSA people, I'm one of those who know Ubuntu and PulseAudio...)

...and somewhere along the road I also became a Ubuntu Bug-Control member, Ubuntu member (i e contributing developer), and Ubuntu Audio Dev Team member. If that matters.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

The stuff I'm most proud of is probably all bugs I've tracked down and fixed. Especially the complex ones.

Also; I believe most people both in the Ubuntu community, upstream, and within Canonical, see me as both friendly and knowledgeable. Being able to cooperate with people of different personality types isn't always trivial either, but I believe I've been mostly successful in that area as well.

Areas of work

Well, feel free to have a look at the changelog, but in short:

  • Together with Luke Yelavich, we worked on packaging of the new PulseAudio version in Oneiric.

  • Over the past cycle or two I've been working a lot with Jack detection (see my blog for more info)

  • I also maintained daily builds for PulseAudio to help upstream to find Ubuntu testers of the new version

  • In addition, I'm maintaining some daily builds for ALSA modules, I recently updated some wiki pages, and just trying to spread knowledge about how the audio stack works by helping people out in a friendly way.

Things I could do better

  • Prioritizing tasks
  • There are so many bug reports I've had my hands on these days, it's easy to forget to follow them up.

Plans for the future

General

I want to make sure we have a tip-top release of PulseAudio and the rest of the audio stack in 12.04, which will be easier if I'm able to upload PulseAudio as well as just being able to commit to the branch, instead of bugging sponsors to do it for me.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Ouch, this is difficult. And controversial. But I think we need to shift the balance between Canonical and the community a bit; so that the community gets more power and Canonical gets less power. As Canonical has employed more people, but the number of community people doing similar stuff has not grown in the same pace, the balance has shifted a little too much. To solve bug #1, we can't do what Windows or MacOS does - we need to do something far better. And I think the best chance we have of being far better, is to make better use the power the community has. I would like the resources and time spent by volunteers on Ubuntu to far outweigh the resources and time spent by Canonical, and I would like the influence on decisions making to reflect that (im)balance. I can't say I have figured out a master plan of how to actually accomplish this, but there were some good signs in the community track at last UDS, of how to improve the relationship between Canonical and the community, so I'm hopeful.

Btw. If we could toss the "crossing the chasm" expression in the trash, that'll be good. While I understand that the best decision for the average developer is not necessarily the best for the average user, it also tends to make us think of developers and users as we and them. And that is harmful: we shouldn't pretend there are any chasms to cross to *become* a blogger, bug triager, documentation writer, developer, spreading-the-word:er, designer etc. There is no we and them, there's just us.


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.

Martin Pitt

I only sponsored a package or two for David, so I cannot vouch for his packaging skills. However, I have followed David's work for several months now, and he is a very active and skilled developer in the sound area, and I had good discussions with him about patches and other sound related issues. He certainly left a rather large footprint in the pulseaudio package already. I would welcome him to become able to upload it directly. Thanks for your great work!

-- pitti 2012-01-06 12:02:33

Daniel T Chen

David has been making significant contributions to Linux audio infrastructure for several years. His ability to navigate both upstream and downstream issues has resulted in marked improvements across the major Linux desktop and mobile device spaces. The ability for him to directly upload packages related to audio in Ubuntu would further improve users' experiences in an invariably thorny problem space.

I've worked with (and uploaded work by) David across nearly all the seeded audio source packages in the Ubuntu desktop and mobile seeds. He is a meticulous and thoughtful developer who has rightly earned the respect of upstream and downstream developers.

-- crimsun 2012-01-10 13:19:00

Luke Yelavich

David has been making some major contributions to both Ubuntu's audio development, and upstream in ALSA and PulseAudio. He regularly posts fixes to the pulseaudio development mailing list for bugs he or other users discover, and is regularly involved with discussions about future PulseAudio development. He is also instrumental in getting audio hardware working as well as he possibly can without access to the hardware proper, and gets the fixes into ALSA driver development as soon as the user has verified the patch works, which usually involves David going out of his way to build a test kernel or a test alsa driver package for the user to use.

In the several audio package uploads I have sponsored for David in the last several months, not once have I had to correct any errors in his work. He understands the distributed nature of our development environment, and makes sure he leaves branches in a suitable state for someone to either upload, or continue work on other things. I would be more than happy for David to be able to upload audio packages, as it is less work for me, and allows for much more agile development.

It has been a pleasure working with David, and I look forward to future opportunities to continue working together.

-- themuso 2012-03-28 00:53:00


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 ===


Diwic/PulseAudioUploaderApplication (last edited 2012-03-28 00:56:31 by CPE-60-225-131-246)