I, Scott Howard, apply for MOTU upload rights.

Who I am

Professor of Electrical Engineering work bio. Expertise in optical biomedical sensing/diagnostics/imaging. General hacker-ish approach to everything.

My Ubuntu story

My involvement

I've been involved in Ubuntu development for 8 years. In fact, this was my gateway to the open source world. I started off joining the bug squad, doing a bunch of bug squashing days, then joined bug-control (and over the first year or two reviewed many bug-control applications). I "adopted" gnome-power-manager for bug-triage and ended up fixing enough upstream bugs that I eventually got GNOME upload rights. At the same time I started working on maintaining universe packages. I joined MOTU science, and put a lot of effort in keeping Debian and Ubuntu in sync by pushing bug fixes to Debian and doing merges/syncs back to Ubuntu. Through this work with Debian, I adopted some Debian packages and got involved with debian-java and debian-science.

As I worked with Debian packages, I became a DD and have been a DD now for 5 years or so. You can see my Debian work here; I am the original packager and primary maintainer of nearly all of those packages.

I've also been an active Debian sponsor, and have helped applications that wanted to get in to Ubuntu get in to Ubuntu via Debian. Specifically, OpenMW, LibreCAD, and TripleA are all packages I worked with upstream to get in to Ubuntu via Debian when the authors lacked expertise. As a sponsor, I enjoy mentoring new contributors and have worked with and then advocated for several current DMs and DDs.

I've worked significantly with many upstream projects helping them with licensing issues (ensuring DFSG) and packaging.

I maintain automated daily build PPAs for a few projects.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScottHoward/ContributingDeveloperApplication

• Several SRUs (including one I stumbled across myself, triaged, wrote the patch, got it sponsored)
• Bringing arduino to Debian and Ubuntu (www.arduino.cc). Coordinates with upstream and depending libraries upstream (rxtx) to keep releases up to date.
• Bringing librecad to Debian and Ubuntu. Right not it's only in Ubuntu as Edubuntu would like to replace QCAD (qt3) with LibreCAD (qt4) in Natty. I worked with Jonathan Carter to get that done.

• Lots of fixes, merges and syncs. My list at https://launchpad.net/~showard314/+related-software does not include the team packages I maintain and help with in Debian.

• Involved with > 600 bugs, 200+ of them are fix released/committed (some of them are duplicate upstream trackers and the bug itself, this is just a rough interest)

Areas of work

gnome-power-manager (and desktop team, pitti did a bunch of my first sponsors, fabrice as well, communicated much with Richard Hughes from upstream. coordinated the string changes to gpm with Ayatana and got feed back from the sabdfl), MOTU-science, debian-science (Andreas Tille, Steffen Moeller), debian-java (Torsten Werner), Edubuntu (Jonathan Carter).

Things I could do better

I could be on IRC more, I mostly work over email. I worked a bit on trying to resurrect the MOTU-mentoring program (under the new name "developer mentoring"). However, the patch pilot and packaging sessions, I think, were much more useful at identifying quality new developers as well as in getting students involved in high quality work immediately. They also appear to be good uses of our limited resources (developer time).

Plans for the future

General

Coordination of Debian and Ubuntu (many DDs don't know how to work in Ubuntu, and vice-versa). Keep bringing the best and newest scientific software in Debian and Ubuntu, sponsoring MOTU-science packages (and other Universe packages).

What I like least in Ubuntu

To talk about what I like least, I need to explain about what I like most - as what I like least detracts from what I like most!

1. It just works. My mother-in-law used it xubuntu on an ancient laptop as her primary OS for a few years, and didn't even notice a difference 2. It just works really really well. I use this as my primary OS at home and at work, my productivity is extremely high due to how nicely everything works together and the available and powerful packages taht are available 3. Built within a larger OSS ecosystem. Ubuntu is built on Debian, which is the distro I agree with both the most philosophically and technically. Since Ubuntu strengthens Debian, and vice versa - this is great. Same with desktop (GNOME, KDE, etc) and individual packages. 4. Dependency system is sane. This is inherited from Debian, but library support and multi-lib support is phenomenal.

Ok, so what I don't like: 1. 2. 3. 4. Alternative packaging systems now exist for higher level languages. For example, Maven, npm, and pip/PyPi also offer package distribution and support, but (at least in Maven's case, in my opinion) can be done haphazardly or sloppily and without regard to potential technical or licensing conflicts. All the work Ubuntu and Debian (and all the distros do, really) to make sure software is kept modern and bug free is skipped over which can lead to bitrot and packages depending on buggy, unsupported, or even insecure libraries. That is my slight fear for the "docker-ization" of everything, where everything is now in a virtual environment or chroot, or you "freeze" your python distribution/java libraries, node modules at an exact version of libraries is that it makes hunting down bugs harder, and any bugs fixed may only help a small subset of packages. Sure, you get perfect alignment of libraries and binaries, disk space is cheap so redundancy isn't an issue, but the amount of maintenance to keep all these packages (and dependencies) secure and up-to-date. I acknowledge that it is a move towards cross-platform package distribution, but even that isn't guaranteed yet. What does this have to do with Ubuntu? It is also frustrating trying to unify all these distribution systems in order to create a viable Ubuntu package. For example, I was looking into what it would take to create a node-js package for a very common node build tool Lineman Task list. Even though there exists easy tools (npm2deb) to help us, that is a scary hill to climb. There seems to be a duplication of effort now spreading in the OSS world. I think Ubuntu/Debian has the best overall system, but the future looks like we'll need to change if everything moves to scripting language "apps" instead of native programs. Will Snappy help? I don't have an opinion yet, haven't worked with it enough. I love that Ubuntu does push the envelope and does positively change projects (e.g., all the UI work sdbdft and the ayatana team did, lots of infrastructure improvements like multilib in Debian), but there are other cases where Ubuntu pushed their in house technology rather than get behind contribute/collaborate another which leads to duplication of effort and division of attention (bzr over git, upstart over systemd, ubuntu software centre vs gnome). It seems Ubuntu has a better history forking and improving existing projects than investing their resources in in-house ones. Of course, it's easy to look back and say something should or should not have been done, but I think there is still something to learn from looking what was good in common with a group of things that worked well or not.

Comments

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Endorsements

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

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 ===

CategoryMOTUApplication