I, Michael Casadevall, am applying for core-dev rights.

Who I am

My name is Michael Casadevall, and I'm a member of the Ubuntu and Debian developers community, who works with strong Debian/Ubuntu integration, and working towards improving the state of FLOSS and making it available to the general public. I am strongly apposed to DRM, and am wary of closed-source programs, especially from companies that have known track records of pushing propriety standards or anti-consumer products. Improving and pushing Ubuntu is the best way to help correct this.

My Ubuntu story

I've been involved with Ubuntu for roughly two and a half years, having started actively contributing in July 2008, and have worked through the second part of the intrepid cycle, the full jaunty cycle, and karmic. I am an active member of the Ubuntu ARM porter team, and maintain membership with the Kubuntu packaging team, doing heavy work on keeping KDE functional on ARM. In addition, I work with other teams on an ad-hoc basis on image creation and porting work, helping build links between the ARM porting team, and the rest of Ubuntu.

My involvement

• Kubuntu - Active since late intrepid/early jaunty. Work on packaging KDE 4.2, and working to port the stack to ARM, ia64, and lpia. I've been involved upstream to work at keeping ARM a release target and to make it more heavily supported.
• Ubuntu ARM Team - active member since January 2009 (then called Ubuntu Mobile team), and working to improve Ubuntu on ARM devices.
• Ubuntu CD Image team - active member, actively involved in helping do image spins during release times. Responsible for creating preinstalled image backend used by OMAP images and devices that only have a single boot source such as an SD card.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• Ported KDE 4.1-4.5 alpha to the ARM architecture and working with upstream to integrate ARM build hardware into their test build system
• Merged ARM changes from Kubuntu to pkg-kde to reduce our deltas, and reduce our workload at packaging further KDE releases

• Worked with TheMuso on bringing the linux-ports tree up to date in the jaunty cycle, and continuing to do so throughout the karmic cycle, as well as actively improving the ia64 and sparc kernel configurations

• Returned ia64 CDs to a buildable state
• Creation of lpia-wrapper to allow testing of the archive built with -Os on the lpia architecture. This wrapper works transparency and exists in the build chroot of all lpia buildds for karmic.

• Work on resolving subtle bugs with upstreams such as https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/349504

• Working to upstream bugs; https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+source/gnome-keyring/+bug/328167 is a good example of a bug that has been upstreamed while a workaround was applied in Ubuntu itself

• Helped port Ubuntu to several new ARM subarchitectures with assistance of the kernel team by devising and modifying board boot mechanisms, extending debian-cd to create new types of image, and improve per-image hooks, modifying livecd-rootfs for new flavours, and per subarchitecture tweaks, and creating proper flash-kernel hooks for new boards.

Areas of work

I do work on solving most ARM related issues, with some dabbling in the general nuances of CD image building work. I am also involved with Kubuntu development, mostly in respect to keeping it working on ARM, as well as helping the liaison between Debian and Ubuntu packaging teams.

Things I could do better

• Spend more time in the sponsorship queues, as well as providing better feedback on why I'm rejecting something
• Stronger working with Debian; I'm sometimes a bit lax at pushing patches into Debian

Plans for the future

General

• Continue work on easing support and helped to make porting Ubuntu to new ARM SoCs be a more straightforward process

• Resolve FTBFS issues on ARM

What I like least in Ubuntu

• Non-existant Launchpad support for Qt translations
• Virtually no community involvement or development into Ubuntu backend infrastructure

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@.

I can't say that I've interacted with Michael all that often, but I do remember the evening when he was the second ever Ubuntu patch pilot. More, I think, than anybody else I've seen piloting, I felt like he did a great job of getting other people on IRC involved in the piloting process. I felt like we were all working on bringing down the queue length collaboratively, and it was a lot of fun. I'd support Michael for core-dev just on the basis that I think he would be able to be an even more effective pilot. -broder

Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

JonathanRiddell

General feedback

Michael is a first rate developer who can fix the bugs other developers can't reach. He has been especially useful at getting Qt and the KDE stack to compile on ARM. He works well over a range of Ubuntu teams.

ScottKitterman

General feedback/Experiences

I sponsored quite a number of Michael's armel portability fixes in KDE (I didn't count). They were generally very complex patches and while they weren't all perfect on the first try (what is), whenever there was a problem, he came back and took care of it. There's no way KDE would have built on armel in Jaunty without Michael's help. He's a definite asset to Ubuntu.

OliverGrawert

Michael made enormous progress over the last years, packages i have sponsored for him generally have a good quality nowadays, bugs he works on for the Ubuntu ARM team generally get good info and often a proper solution.

Compared to his last application for core-dev upload rights Michael improved a lot, is a lot more focused and usually bites his teeth into problems others hesitate to work on (Openoffice build failure researches or working on several bugs in the Mono stack come to mind here).

He knows when he has to ask for help from other experts instead of jumping onto an easy but hackish solution, his habit of working got a lot more focused and he learned to think twice before going the path of least resistance. All in all the shown progress as well as the quality of packages i have sponsored for Michael have increased so much that he has my full support for core-dev application.

Due to his work on packages across the board having upload rights for the whole set of supported packages is very important, a package set would not suffice here since the Ubuntu ARM team of which Michael is a member often needs to touch packages in a widespread manner, does package transitions that go beyond a single package set as well as working down the FTBFS list.

Please grant Michael general upload rights for the whole archive.

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 ===