MotuApplication

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 * '''Generic bug fixes''': I've contributed since Hardy to some bugfix. They're messed u^W^W... listed in a [[Gaspa2/BugsList|wiki page]]. Here are all uploads summarized together:  * '''Generic bug fixes''': I've contributed since Hardy to some bugfix. They're messed u^W ^W... listed in a [[Gaspa2/BugsList|wiki page]]. Here are all uploads summarized together:

I, Andrea Gasparini, apply for MOTU.

Name

Andrea Gasparini

Launchpad Page

https://edge.launchpad.net/~gaspa

Wiki Page

Gaspa2

Debian QA Page

http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=gaspa@yattaweb.it

Who I am

I'm 29, from Bologna, Italy, I'm married, and have two little children.

I'm an electronical engineer in a academic perspective, although I work as an embedded developer for a videosurvaillance company: recently I work mostly with device driver and "low-level stuff" in some kind of ARM SoC, but I worked at almost all abstraction level, from webapps to initscripts.

Linux is my only OS for quite a long time. ( I don't remember the exact year, but the first distro I clearly recall on my PCs is Debian Potato, so probably it was near 2000). I'm using Ubuntu since the ealier releases, starting with only some "install tests", but ever with a growing attention, till the September of 2007, when I really started my contributions.

My knowlegde inside Linux involves mainly C and Python as programming language, although my job is a whole-round kind, so I touched from the kernel to web interfaces, being a programmer as than a sysadmin, probably without having a deep experience of all what I did, but a very good knowledge of the system in his whole. I wrote scripts, code and webpages also in Perl, C++, HTML, XSL(plus XPath&Co.), Javascript and probably some other stuff I didn't recall, and I'm studying Haskell and functional programming in this period (at a veeeery slow rate, my free time is currently very low) Wink ;)

Apart the time devolved to free software, I like spend time in mountains, free climbing and miniature painting...

My Ubuntu story

My first work for Ubuntu was on usplash, when I worked on it for my job, and subsequently sent some patches that was reworked and accepted ( see bugs #152933 #152952 #154234 ). This makes me discover a very dynamic and comfortable community of developers. Seeing my work accepted in few time, made me happy to begin to actively contribute at bugfixes, merges and syncs.

My involvement

  • Generic bug fixes: I've contributed since Hardy to some bugfix. They're messed uW W... listed in a wiki page. Here are all uploads summarized together:

    • Hardy dev. cycle: almost 22 uploads.
    • Intrepid dev.cycle: almost 18 uploads.
    • Jaunty dev. cycle: only 4 uploads.
    • Karmic dev. cycle: currently I've 22 uploads on my count.
    • Of course there's some work that do not appear in -changes mailing lists. In the last month, in fact, I took care to most of the ocaml packages that fails to build, for the transition between ocaml 3.10 and 3.11 (most of them only needed some build test in the right order).
  • Italian Loco Team: The great part of my "online" time is spent inside the Italian developers community (inside #ubuntu-it-dev IRC channel), where I learned so much, although I think I taught something to new devels. I want to underline particularly the talk I attended in the last devweek (the 19th of January), where I took one of the localized "Getting started" session.

  • QA: a lot of work I did concern QA processes. I initially took some time trying to understand NBS and transition process and did some bugfix about these. I did also a couple of page that aggregate bugs: the "reverse NBS" page, and the "Edos-buildcheck" (it still lacks of a decent index page, sorry Wink ;) ). This pages feeds harvest in clues and opportunities. Besides I'm nowadays working on FTFBS page: I'm studying the code, and I'm thinking some stuff to improve it.

  • Together with the Italian developers community, we maintained a build server, with Debomatic and QA tools. ATM the server is down, and we're searching for someone that will accept us and our band-eating. Wink ;)

  • Debian: I strongly trust that working for Ubuntu means also working for Debian, as the more code we share, the more code we could get better and better. Said so, I usually try to get new packages to Debian direcly, and bugs reported to both distros:

    • I currently maintain two packages in Debian, and one is awaiting for a sponsor in mentors.debian.net (note that for smile I'm working with the person that's uploading it to revu as well )
    • This is a list of some bugs reported in debian by me: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=gaspa@yattaweb.it ( often I try also to contact directly the maintainer in IRC or mail )

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

  • usplash: it was my first contribution, so perhaps it hasn't anymore a lot of sense in my application, besides I'm still proud of it. As said before, I started proposing some patches #152933 #152952 #154234. After that, I sometimes contributed again to usplash, with little patches, for example bug #224709 and bug #259761, I tried a bugfix still unsolved #219867, and triaged some other bugs: #210485, #197302, #280718, #281312.

  • vtk merge: this started as a merge ( bug #373305 ), but became a FTBFS fix. It was very hard, because it require a lot of rebuilds and each build took a couple of hour. I like to present this bug, cause this package has python binding that required a fix, and java as well. So I had to dig inside the CMake magic to understand all the build process. The package still has an ugly bug that makes python-vtk useless, and I'm still working on it.

  • Matita ftbfs and ikiwiki merge as an example of debian collaboration: the first is a problem I reported to the Debian Maintainers, and after an exchange of some mail, we resolved in quite a little time. The latter is a package that from a long time was merged, and definitely needed a boost to be synced: with the debian maintainer, indeed we found that the problem was on another package (w3c-dtd-xhtml, which has an ubuntu modification that need a review).

  • Another quite old work, but IMHO valuable, is a security fix for django of March 2008: bug #234631. I did some other work in django: a merge(#229954) this revision

Areas of work

Things I could do better

  • More international partecipation: that's not a technical problem, but I probably must be less shy and more confident in the answers in the -motu and -devel channels.
  • Be more precise: sometime I fall into the mistakes of having haste, and this distract me from some particular.
  • Be more effective and save time to do things I like more (python&3d applications are in my sight since too much time, but I never had the time to study and apply seriously in these kind of stuff).

  • Take more difficult bugs to fix: this is due more to the lack of time (trying to fix a hard bug without having the time to concentrate enough, could take much more time), but I should try to do more difficult bugs and perhaps apply for some blueprints.

Plans for the future

General

  • I feel that work on QA should continue to be my main interest.
  • Education of new MOTU in my opinion is a really important task, and so I'd really like to help the mentor project and help to shorten the universe sponsor queue.

  • Again I want to underline the importance of Debian collaboration, for a couple of reasons:
    • This is all OpenSource, and so It should be shared to be growing, more effective, and bugless. So is important coordinate efforts through upstreams, Debian, and even other Linux distributions.

    • The more work we'll merge with Debian, the more Debian will grow, and the more we'll have our work simplified.
  • (more a wish, than a plan) I'd like to study and package some graphics framework that involves OpenGL, cairo and similar.

What I like least in Ubuntu

  • The size of patches.ubuntu.com. (already explained why, I think) Wink ;)

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 ===


CategoryMOTUApplication

Gaspa2/MotuApplication (last edited 2009-06-23 09:06:21 by host134-118-static)