I, Olivier Tilloy, apply for upload rights for package chromium-browser.

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 10 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.

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 did a few package merges and hope to be doing more.

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

I also maintain and actively develop snap packages for chromium and libreoffice.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• Initial implementation of the history view for Ubuntu Software Center

• General work and initial packaging for Unity 2D

• Implemented autofill in oxide (unfortunately oxide was discontinued before this was merged)

• 0AD snap

• Brand new chromium autopkgtests

• A couple of chromium crashers: LP: #1697496 and LP: #1702407

• LP: #1718446 in gdm3 (Ensure wayland -> xorg fallback to the corresponding session)

• chromium snap

• libreoffice snap

Areas of work

Since I have taken over maintenance of chromium-browser in April 2017, I have created and kept up-to-date 3 PPAs that track the three upstream channels (stable, beta and dev) for all supported series (trusty, xenial, yakkety until its EOL, zesty, artful and now bionic). I use those PPAs and I do a fair amount of testing to catch issues as early as possible.

All the packaging is kept in bzr branches owned by ~chromium-team.

When a new stable release is out and I have successfully tested it for all supported series, I upload it to a staging PPA and hand it over to the security team. They do their own validation and publish the packages to the -security and -updates pockets.

I triage incoming bugs, and as an idle task I'm cleaning up the bugs database which has numerous outdated/incomplete/invalid bug reports.

I proactively follow upstream development, and I submit patches when they aren't distro-specific.

One important task which I carried out shortly after joining the desktop team was to remove the outdated autopkgtests that were not being run any longer, and add modern and meaningful new tests that make use of the recent headless capability of chromium.

Things I could do better

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

Plans for the future

General

• Work with upstream to enable accessibility and the OSK in chromium (LP: #1697641)

• Follow closely upstream work on enabling hardware-accelerated video decoding

• Follow closely Igalia's work on making chromium run natively on Wayland

• Help with firefox packaging, and eventually take over
• Make the chromium and libreoffice snaps first-class citizens that can fully replace the debs
• Contribute in every aspect to making the Bionic Beaver an awesome release

What I like least in Ubuntu

Regressions. It's not an Ubuntu-specific plague, but I think we could do better at preventing them. 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.

Ken VanDine

General feedback

I've never sponsored a package for Olivier in the traditonal sense, but I handled most of the packaging reviews for the System Apps team which were landed with bileto. Over the past several years I've reviewed packaging changes for Olivier many times. One thing I've learned working with Olivier, he pays great attention to detail and thoroughly tests changes before looking for reviews. Most of the packaging changes were to handle changes needed from upstream (which was often himself).

I would trust Olivier with upload rights.

Specific Experiences of working together

Of the packages I've reviewed for Olivier, webbrowser-app and oxide-qt stand out. I've reviewed these many times for Olivier without really experiencing significant issues. Both of the packages were in main through zesty and I'd say very well maintained by Olivier. Olivier has always been a pleasure to work with.

Didier Roche

General feedback

Olivier is a very reliable person, taking responsability on what he is working on, conscientious, and a great and positive person to work with in general. I have no doubt that he continue doing excellent work with his PPU rights and will fix timely whatever needs to be fixed.

Specific Experiences of working together

I didn't work with Olivier on sponsoring many uploads recently. However, I have seen and reviewed a lot of his packaging changes in the Unity 2D time, and on his ubuntu touch core apps he was reponsible for. When he had any doubts, he was asking before pushing anything up for review, and always wanted to deeply understand what impacts any changes he was making had.

Chris Coulson

General feedback

I've been working with Olivier for the last few years, and always found him to be hard-working, thorough and a pleasure to work with. He's familiar with Chromium, and I trust him with upload rights.

Specific Experiences of working together

Most of my experience with Olivier was spent working on Oxide together, but I've been sponsoring Chromium updates for him for the last few months. These have all been timely and with no issues.

Sebastien Bacher

Olivier is doing great work on chromium. He's keeping an eye on the different channels, staying on top of the build issues on all Ubuntu series and showing he has a good understanding of the project and that he cares about the quality.

I've been working with him on other desktop issues and sponsoring some of his changes (not on chromium though), the work he's doing he great and I trust him for uploads.

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 ===

CategoryPerPackageUploaderApplication