I, Rodney Dawes, apply for universe-contributor

Who I am

I am a GNOME Developer on the Online Services team at Canonical, developing Ubuntu One. I've been a heavy GNOME user and contributor since before 1.0. I have done lots of packaging on several distributions, and even written an experimental package manager in PERL. I've been an Ubuntu user for a few years now, and have maintained a simple apt repo on my own domain, and now use Launchpad PPAs to provide some packages. I've been maintaining a few Ubuntu One packages, which are in main, as well as have provided fixes for other packages which Ubuntu One depends on. I also maintain several projects upstream which have been packaged in Debian and/or Ubuntu by others.

My Ubuntu story

I started using Ubuntu in 2007 after leaving Novell, and needing a well maintained distribution with updated packages, for developing upstream projects, that wasn't SuSE. Knowing already that Ubuntu had a great community, and matched release schedules with GNOME, I went straight to it. Since then, I've provided some updated packages that I maintain, or that I had patched, in an apt repo on my personal web site. After joining Canonical, and using Launchpad, I've been using the PPA system, and not a simple apt repo. Now that I've gotten several packages in Ubuntu myself, I'd like to turn that into more involvement in Ubuntu directly, and help others on the Online Services team become Ubuntu Developers, MOTUs, and Core Devs, to maintain our own pacakges.

My involvement

I've packaged icontool, ubuntuone-storage-protocol, and ubuntuone-client for inclusion in main, and have been maintaining these packages since they were approved in REVU. I've also provided several bug fixes to python-oauth (which have been sent upstream), and updated the package in Karmic as well. I've also contributed upstream to python-distutils-extra, and other projects, as well as have started writing some tools using the Launchpad API to help make managing projects on Launchpad easier, which I hope to expand, and productize a bit during the Lucid cycle.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

http://launchpad.net/~dobey/+related-software

This is but a short list. While at Ximian, I maintained a majority of the Ximian Desktop 2 packages across several distributions. I've contributed to most of the GNOME projects, and plenty of non-GNOME projects. I wrote the Icon Naming Specification, and am a founding member of the Tango Desktop Project.

Areas of work

Maintaining the packages for Ubuntu One file sharing, I've worked with the platform team to get uploads into Karmic, meet deadlines, triage bugs, and get fixes for critical issues in Ubuntu One packages fixed and uploaded as quickly as possible, while trying to meet the schedule.

Things I could do better

There have been a couple of points where a new ubuntuone-client release upload just barely missed the deadline, for uploads, due to my misunderstanding of some deadlines, due to the way milestones have been set up in Launchpad. After understanding the deadlines better, this hasn't been a problem, though I would like to help improve the process so that others do not have the same confusions when managing their projects.

I haven't done a lot of Ubuntu packaging compared to packaging for other distributions, but intend to work with more packages during the Lucid cycle, and I think my knowledge and experience are valuable for working on Ubuntu packages. I'm not entirely familiar with the full suite of processes involved in Ubuntu packaging, and look forward to understanding more of the pieces I don't, as I work on more packages, and encounter new situations with current packages I've already been maintaining.

Plans for the future

General

During Lucid, I will be getting my hands dirtier, packaging new libraries and applications, and continuing to maintain the packages I've already worked with, as well as contribute to other existing packages. I look forward to engaging more in the packaging processes, and gaining new understanding of the different pieces I've not yet had to deal with personally.

What I like least in Ubuntu

While developing in the Karmic cycle, I have personally had some confusion about deadlines, based on the milestones set for Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu One upstream projects. I will be writing up my experiences, and discussing with the appropriate people wasy to improve the situation, and make it easier for other projects on Launchpad to integrate their development cycles with the Ubuntu cycles.

There are various tools written by other developers, either in the community, or at Canonical, which make doing certain things on Launchpad much easier, and not require using a hefty web interface to do some of the simpler tasks. I'd like to work with the developers of these tools to get them all released under a common license in a common project on Launchpad, and productized and integrated with the desktop where possible, to make development easier for everyone.

Comments

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Endorsements

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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 ===