Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

Name: Jon Bernard
Occupation: Software Engineer
Location: Blacksburg, VA, US
GPG: BF95C7A1
IRC: jbernard
Launchpad: jbernard

I got involved with free software around the year 2000. I've been a strong supporter and contributor to the Debian Project ever since. About a year ago I began to get involved in Ubuntu development and was immediately impressed with the sense of community and supportive nature of the developers working on the project. I've never worked with such friendly developers who are all ultra-motivated to collaborate and produce the highest quality GNU/Linux distribution possible. It's been a pleasure to be involved with such an awesome project.

Packaging

My packaging page contains a list of my package contributions. Recently I've been working on:

• lua-iconv - I found the needs-packaging bug for this package and thought it would be a good opportunity to contribute. Debian was also missing this package so I was able to file an ITP bug and maintain this package in both projects. Huge thanks to James Westby and Iulian Udrea for reviewing my package on REVU.

• libcgroup - I found the needs-packaging bug for this package in Dustin Kirkland's list, so I stole it from him and packaged it up. I've been collaborating with upstream to improve certain aspects of the package for the last few months and have established a productive relationship. There is also an ITP for this in Debian, but someone beat me to it. The Debian maintainer for this package should be able to take my packaging work and upload it directly to Debian without modification, so we all win on this one. A BIG Thanks to DustinKirkland, SteveLangasek, MathiasGug, and JamesWestby for feedback and suggestions to improve the packaging and to Dustin for sponsoring the upload.

Community Tools

I worked on adding inotify support to the update-motd package using the launchpad blueprint.

I had it all working but then Steve Langasek had a better solution to provide the same functionality in the pam_motd package, so the work never got merged. I did, however, enjoy the work and gain some valuable experience.

Looking Forward

I would like to get more involved in the ubuntu-server team and help make the server distribution as excellent as possible. I'd also like to become an MOTU so I can put my development and packaging skills to good use. Overall I'd like to see Ubuntu become a truly revolutionary movement in free software collaboration and development. I think we're well on our way.

Endorsement

• I've worked with Jon on a couple of packages and bugs, most significantly in update-motd and libcgroups. Jon has been extremely enthusiastic, responsive, and knowledgeable. He is quickly becoming an active Ubuntu Server Team member, and I expect him to be an excellent MOTU one day! -- DustinKirkland