I, PhillipSusi, apply for universe-contributor

Who I am

I am a 32 year old software developer from Orlando, Florida. I taught myself to program C and C++ in high school, and got a BA in CS from Rollins College in 2003. Since then I have been working at a small startup company making medical devices, and contributing to Ubuntu and other open source projects. For a little while after college I contributed some code to the ReactOS open source NT clone project, which mostly involved the kernel and low level libraries. I also got married last year.

My Ubuntu story

I discovered Ubuntu in 2005. I had previous experience with Slackware back in 1996 or so, Debian for a while in college, and RedHat for a very short while in college. I liked Ubuntu because most things just worked, right out of the box, and the things that didn't, I was able to fix.

My involvement

Outside of working on triaging and fixing bugs, I have been very active on the forums helping people, and written a few wiki entries, including FakeRaidHowto, and Lvm.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Blueprints

• Add support for full read/write access to cdrw media in packet mode

• Provide out of the box support for BIOS Software RAID/FakeRAID

Bugs

• [SRU] Nautilus: 'Remember this application for ..." option should be made inactive by default

• index.html is a dangling symlink

• Regression: Unable to add a partition to a disk that has another partition in use

• grub does not detect partitions properly on DMRAID

• [Intrepid] dmraid 5 error: "raid4-5" not in kernel

• Ubuntu 10.04 can't create partition on fakeraid

• lvm snapshot causes deadlock in 2.6.35

• [PATCH] Fix dmraid install regression

• [Natty] Gparted duplicates dmraid partition devices

• External SATA (eSATA) removable disk detected as system-internal

• GParted crashes with Assertion (head_size <= 63)

• Please drop obsolete package

• drop obsolete package

• resuming from S3 wrongly prompts for password

Boot speed initiative

• I have revived the old defrag defrag package and fixed it up to work with modern ext4 filesystems

• Made some improvements to ureadahead that have been getting some positive testing in my ppa

• Combining ureadahead with e2defrag to optimize the disk for faster reading of the boot time files

Areas of work

The first big problem I ran into with Ubuntu was the new system I had just built used a fakeraid. I eventually discovered the dmraid package and worked to integrate it into Ubuntu and fix bugs. I have also worked on grub, parted, gparted, lvm, and the kernel. I think it was back in 2008 I noticed that the ancient defrag package had been dropped by Debian and therefore, Ubuntu, as it had been unmaintained for years and suffered from bit rot. I rescued the source code and created a project on launchpad to revive it. I hope to get it put back into the universe as I become a motu. I have been working lately on some improvements to ureadahead and coordinating it with the defrag package to improve boot times on rotational hard disks.

Things I could do better

I still need to learn to perform an initial debianization of a package.

Plans for the future

I hope to continue fixing bugs as I find them, as well as get the defrag package back into the archive, and make improvements to boot times and pretty much whatever else I see needs improvement.

General

What I like least in Ubuntu

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it.

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 testify about Phillip's great work on dmraid over several years. He is the de facto maintainer, fixing bugs and, very importantly, contributing fixes upstream, and he follows up pretty much every dmraid bug report from start to end. One question about e2defrag, you mention getting it into Universe, but have you tried to revive it in Debian by taking (sponsored) maintainership of it? -- tormodvolden 2011-05-03 12:40:22

Endorsements

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

Scott James Remnant

<Keybuk> Phillip has worked on many of the core filesystem plumbing pieces, providing good quality feedback and patches. He is one of the trusted community voices in this area.

Colin Watson

I've reviewed or sponsored a number of Phillip's patches to foundational packages. Generally speaking they've been of good quality and well-tested, and have been improving over time - the last series of patches I reviewed (to dmraid and parted, fixing device naming) were complex and yet well-constructed and straightforward to review and apply. I'm happy to recommend Phillip for universe-contributors.

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 ===