I, Martin Pool, apply for per-package upload rights for bzr*.

Who I am

I'm the technical lead of the Bazaar project, and I manage the Bazaar team at Canonical. I also wrote distcc and librsync and some other free software. I've been working on free software since about 1997 (starting with Apache jserv).

My Ubuntu story

I first switched to Ubuntu in the Warty release, moving from Debian and Gentoo. I thought it provided a very nice balance between freshness and stability, and between approachability and technical seriousness. In early 2005 I joined Canonical to work on version control tools.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

1. Bugs and patches in Ubuntu. When I see a problem, I like to fix it. Ones that come to mind recently:

• 477529 confusing failure in usb-creator, and some others

• feedparser bug 224 allow sending cache-control headers

• http://pad.lv/433970 allow using non-ssl connections to s3 for duplicity

• bug 587783 buggy signature generation in python-dkim

2. Bazaar itself, and alignment with Bazaar. I like what we've done there, and I want to improve two specific parts in relation to Ubuntu: first, for me to do more Ubuntu development work so I better understand what you need; and secondly to be better able to get our changes into Ubuntu.

At my initiative we've started making major releases every six months, synchronized with the Ubuntu release schedule, and then bugfix releases on that series. This has worked quite well at getting a good stable release into each Ubuntu release, but we have not yet done really well at getting the updates out, which is one thing I want to fix.

3. Launchpad: I've been doing some amount of work on Launchpad; I want to make it something that works very smoothly for Ubuntu and upstream developers. Recently:

• feature flags so we can deploy or roll back new features more gracefully (hopefully leading to less downtime)

• DKIM authenticated incoming mail

• bug 503222 adding a count and link to high and in-progress bugs: a small step, but I think a useful one

• pad.lv shorthand urls for Launchpad bugs

Areas of work

• bzr and related things
• python and libraries
• usb-creator, vm-builder and other "getting started" type tools

I'd specifically like PPU for bzr and "closely related things": there are a bunch of closely related plugins such as bzr-svn and bzrtools. Specifically at least

• bzr
• bzrtools
• loggerhead
• qbzr
• bzr-explorer

and if possible also

• bzr-hg
• bzr-svn
• bzr-git
• bzr-gtk
• bzr-pqm
• hitchhiker
• bzr-xmloutput
• bzr-webdav
• bzr-upload
• bzr-stats
• bzr-search
• bzr-rewrite
• bzr-pipeline
• bzr-loom
• bzr-grep
• bzr-fastimport
• bzr-email

I'm aware that doing SRUs can be a high risk operation so I will be extra careful.

Things I could do better

I have a moderate amount of Debian/Ubuntu experience. I will draw on mentors and learn more without exceeding my present limits.

In my general work? I could do lots of things better. The biggest is probably making good choices about what to work on, where I am trying to think about:

• what is most useful, not just most comfortable?
• what will make the project move much faster in the future, either through technically enabling people or drawing more people in
• what will feel good to do -- I'm trying to recapture the feeling of improving projects because it feels good, even if it's not on a roadmap

I've been relying a bit too much on James_w for the package importer, bzr-builder, bzr-builddeb and so on when I should have been helping with that. It's related to the previous point: it's easy to choose tasks already in my area and where I know more about how to fix them.

Plans for the future

General

• The first thing I want to do is to get SRUs for Bazaar flowing more smoothly into Ubuntu. We have a Micro Release Exception for Bazaar that acknowledges that our bugfix updates match Ubuntu's conditions for shipping updates. However, they're currently stalling for a long time waiting for SRU review. I realize as a PPU I won't be able to unilaterally make the SRU -- and I don't want to because extra care is very appropriate here -- but I will be able to get them further along.

• I want to walk a bit more in the shoes of Ubuntu developers to better understand what we can do in Launchpad and Bazaar to help them.
• Just fixing more bugs I run into.

What I like least in Ubuntu

• I think the profusion of stacked or alternative toolchains makes packaging very complicated, and hard to approach for upstream developers or people from other free software distributions.
• Trolls.

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 ===