I, Olivier Tilloy, apply for upload rights for the mozilla packageset.

Who I am

French software engineer in my thirties. I studied CS near Paris and spent a year in the UK doing a MSc in research. I have been living in Spain for the past 12 years.

My Ubuntu story

I first installed Ubuntu with a CD of 5.10 (the Breezy Badger). I got hooked. I initially did mostly advocacy and contributed to translations, then registered my pet projects on Launchpad to share them and package them for Ubuntu, and gradually started contributing more seriously by way of bug reports, patches, and feature branches for the Ubuntu Software Center. In 2010 I joined Canonical in the OEM division. I worked on a number of projects including Unity 2D, Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu Touch. In April 2017 I joined the desktop team and I took over the maintenance of chromium-browser and libreoffice. These days I still maintain chromium-browser, and in September 2018 I took over the maintenance of firefox and thunderbird.

My involvement

I have particular interest in applications, user experience and quality.

I contribute to translations, I file and I triage bugs, and whenever possible I investigate and fix them. I do package merges, and I contribute GNOME package updates in Debian.

These days, as a member of the desktop team, my interest revolves around desktop packages, GNOME, browsers, libreoffice and snaps.

I also maintain and actively develop a snap package for chromium.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• Everything listed in my 2017 PPU application for chromium-browser still stands

• Taking over the maintenance of firefox and thunderbird from their previous maintainer, Chris Coulson, and keeping up with upstream updates has been challenging but a great learning experience and an opportunity to make a visible difference for Ubuntu users on all supported releases

• In 19.10 I transitioned chromium-browser from the existing deb packages to the snap, which generated a lot of feedback and resulted in multiple improvements to the snap and to the transition process itself

• I am currently working on upstreaming the snap packaging for chromium

Areas of work

Since I took over maintenance of firefox and thunderbird, I have been working on building, testing and uploading updates for every new release of both products, with the invaluable help of Rico and Michael on the foundations team who prepares rustc and cargo updates.

Firefox and thunderbird, being a browser and a browser-based product, are very sensitive to security issues, and as such every new version is backported to all supported Ubuntu releases (currently xenial, bionic and eoan) as security updates. I am tasked with preparing and validating the updates, which I then hand over to the security team for publication.

My belonging to the Ubuntu Desktop team gives me upload rights for firefox and thunderbird, but it doesn't for closely related packages such as enigmail and jsunit. This is bothering me because the only existing automated tests for thunderbird are currently the autopkgtests for jsunit and enigmail, and so I cannot request test runs when I build new versions of thunderbird in a PPA. Being able to upload these packages would also be useful when a new major version of thunderbird requires a new version of those (which it did when thunderbird 68.0 was released).

That's the reason why I'm applying for membership to ~ubuntu-mozilla-uploaders (as an aside I would like to request/suggest that jsunit be added to the mozilla packageset, it's currently not in it).

Things I could do better

I could be more efficient at bug triaging. It's a tedious task that I take seriously, and as a consequence I tend to spend way more time than I'd like on reproducing/confirming issues.

Plans for the future

General

• Keep up with new firefox releases (the release cycle was shortened to 4 weeks earlier this year, which increased my workload)

• Keep up with aggressive build dependency updates (not only rustc and cargo, but also libstdc++ and other build dependencies)

• Convert firefox and thunderbird packaging branches from bzr to git (proof of concept done, needs a thorough verification)
• Modernize and streamline the packaging scripts

What I like least in Ubuntu

Regressions. It's not an Ubuntu-specific plague, but I think we could do better at preventing them by testing more upfront. At least, I think we're not doing too bad of a job at addressing them timely once they are surfaced.

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.

Sebastien Bacher (seb128)

Olivier has been maintaining firefox and thunderbird for some years now. He understands the projects pretty well and is doing an excellent work getting new versions out in time with great quality (for the current Ubuntu serie but also SRUs for all the stable ones).

Olivier is also a trusted Ubuntu contributor who already has upload rights for the Desktop set, he knows how to work with other contributors and upstream.

I strongly recommend giving him upload rights for the Mozilla set!

Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)

Olivier has been doing an excellent job looking after firefox and thunderbird for some time. Part of this work involves delivering new versions regularly to all supported Ubuntu releases (not just the devel release), and I've been sponsoring Olivier's updates to the security pockets since he's been doing this role. His updates are always high quality, he's familiar with the projects and interacts well with them.

I've also been sponsoring Olivier's chromium-browser updates without any issues, and I've had a great experience working with him on other projects in the past as well.

Olivier should definitely have upload rights for the Mozilla set.

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.''
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
## http://ubuntu-dev.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?
=== Areas of Improvement ===