I, Gunnar Hjalmarsson, apply for upload rights for packages language-selector and accountsservice.

Who I am

I was born in 1958, and live in Gothenburg, Sweden. I hold a Bachelor's degree of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Gothenburg, and has worked with the audit and business consulting firm PwC for about 25 years, of which about 15 years as a partner. I have worked as an authorized auditor and financial reporting advisor.

I have no formal computing or IT education. The computing skill I still had before I started to contribute to Ubuntu was gained from learning some web programming and developing a couple of web site scripts. The programming language I'm most comfortable with is Perl. By participating in e.g. the comp.lang.perl.misc Usenet group for several years I got valuable knowledge of good programming practice - at first hand Perl related, of course, but also generally applicable. I'm the author of a couple of simple CPAN modules.

My Ubuntu story

My involvement

I converted from Windows to Ubuntu in July 2010. I like to share my ideas for improvements of free software that I benefit from, so I started to explore the world of Ubuntu almost instantly.

I'm an Ubuntu member and a member of ubuntu-bugcontrol.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Compared to when I started to use Ubuntu, the UIs for setting languages/locales in e.g. Language Support and lightdm-gtk-greeter have been improved, and the number of unattended bugs in that area is lower.

Areas of work

Most of my work so far has been i18n related matters together with members of the desktop team. During the Natty development cycle I helped to make the Ubuntu model for dealing with languages and locales more distinct (see GdmLanguageSelectorDissonance for an early problem description). My first merge proposals were mainly about changes to the language-selector and gdm packages. The language/locale related architechture in Ubuntu is continuously changing, and as a consequence I have come to work with more packages, e.g. accountsservice, lightdm, and gnome-control-center.

I have also done some input method related work. For instance, in the Raring development cycle I have worked with changing the input method configuration system from im-switch to im-config.

In the form of a tutorial I help other users customize the guest session feature. Through a few changes to the gdm-guest-session source code (now inherited by LightDM), the customization ideas in the tutorial can be applied without any hassle at upgrading.

Martin Pitt is the developer that has sponsored most of my uploads. Lately my proposals have been sponsored by several different patch pilots.

language-selector has not had a formal maintainer for several cycles. I have helped with the maintenance by fixing bugs, and under Martin's supervision.

My primary interest in accountsservice is a few patches that I wrote and that extend the functionality for handling languages and locales to fit the needs of Ubuntu.

Things I could do better

Everything. For instance: I'm not (yet) able to design GUI components. (It's the backend stuff I have been working with.) My skill in important programming languages such as C and Python is limited.

Plans for the future

General

I plan to keep fixing i18n related bugs.

The Language Support UI for setting languages/locales will be replaced in standard Ubuntu with the Region & Language capplet in gnome-control-center. My intention is to help accomplishing that switch within the scope of my ability.

With the upload rights I apply for, my contributions would be more effective. I wouldn't stop asking for reviews/sponsorship - I'm aware of my limitations. But I think I'm ready for doing some of the uploads myself.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Bugs. There are too many of them IMO. I think that Canonical should spend more resources on fixing bugs (and slow down the development of new fancy stuff a little bit).

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.

Iain Lane

I've sponsored a few uploads for Gunnar. They've been of good quality. But what I believe is more important is that he has, to me, the right attitude to be trusted with upload rights. He proactively seeks opportunities to discuss his implementations and is responsive to suggestions for changes/improvements. A good example is that we recently, with Aron Xu, had a fairly in depth discussion about conffile modification with respect to the im-switch to im-config migration that Gunnar mentions earlier in his application. im-config was behaving slightly badly in policy terms and I made some suggestions as to how this could be improved. Gunnar took the suggestions on board, clearly understood the issues and came to a sensible conclusion.

He's one of our main maintainers of the locale selection UI language-selector and parts of the input method stack, as well as taking care of (at least parts of) accountsservice. I've caught him sneakily doing changes to fonts too. I'm really very glad that the desktop team has him around and hope that he continues to contribute for a long time.

MartinPitt

I have mentored Gunnar and sponsored his work on language-selector and the corresponding bits in accountsservice for several years now. He has shown a high dedication and attention to details wrt. i18n handling, and has practically been the sole maintainer of language-selector for several cycles. He knows how all that stuff works, how patches etc. are applied and changed, and I fully trust him to ask when he runs into something unknown. I welcome him to be able to upload these two packages by himself. Thanks Gunnar for your excellent work!

-- pitti 2013-04-09 13:37:26

Sebastien Bacher

I've sponsored work from Gunnar on language-selector, accountsservice and gnome-control-center region's panel for a while. I'm glad we have him around, he usually takes the time to understand the problems (often in languages/domains where we don't have a lot of knowledge around to be able to easily figure what to do) and to come with tested solutions. He has been doing solid work on language-selector, and acting as the main maintainer for it over the recent cycles, so it's only logical that he gets upload right for it. The work he has been doing includes changes to some scripts included in accountsservices, I trust his work on those as well and I'm confident he will ask before changing other parts of the code if required.

Daniel Holbach

This is easy. Gunnar has done fantastic work over many cycles, he's very diligent, happy to work with upstreams, goes the extra mile and gets things done. Big +1.

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 ===

CategoryPerPackageUploaderApplication