I, Sebastian Heinlein, apply for upload rights for the following packages.

• aptdaemon
• python-defer
• sessioninstaller
• packagekit

Who I am

In my daily life I work as a Palliative Care nurse in a consultant service of the Catholic Church. I am based in the beautiful Bavaria - in the south of Munich to be exactly.

My Ubuntu story

I am involved in Free and Open Source Software development for one third of my so far 34 year long life. Starting as a translator for the Synaptic package manager I soon got interested in documentation and user interface design. The main developer of Synaptic and long standing Debian and Ubuntu developer Michael Vogt became a kind of mentor to me and introduced me to the Ubuntu community. Once again time to say thank you very much, Michael.

My first UDS was in Paris, 2006. I was mainly working on user interfaces and implementing them using Python. But over the time I dived down the package management stack. So after the PackageKit project was started I wrote a Python based APT backend. Unfortunately the technical design policies of PackageKit did not allow to support essential features of APT and the upcoming software-center. This was the time when I created the aptdaemon project which is used as the default package management service in Ubuntu's desktop.

As a "side task" I worked on translating Ubuntu, but I decided to step back from the lead position of the German translator time because of too limited time resources some years ago.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I am most proud of the PackageKit compatibility layer in aptdaemon which allowed to integrate PackageKit clients (e.g. GNOME applications or LibreOffice) on the one hand and on the other still provides enhanced features and a lot of customisations for the Ubuntu stack.

Areas of work

Let us know what you worked on, with which development teams / developers with whom you cooperated and how it worked out.

Generally I work with the teams involved in package management: desktop, foundations, design. Always with more or less intensity over the years due to the fact that I am a volunteer.

Since I am the main author of aptdaemon it seems that I am responsible for most of the bugs IMHO aptdaemon has reached a good quality level - also expressed in the latest 1.0 release.

Things I could do better

Plans for the future

General

Test even more!

Communicate better when there's a period of lesser development activity.

Since Michael sponsored most of my work I would like to try to fill a small part of the gap that he left by taking over more responsibility for the software that I work on.

What I like least in Ubuntu

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

The need of the business to advance that puts your software's future in a kind of vague and uncertain state. You never know for sure if your work is part of the next design/technical/strategic/business decision. I try to not think in the category of "my work's product" but instead of a process. The raison d'être of software is to provide a solution for one or more issues. If those go away also the software has achieved its goal and it's time to move on with the learned knowledge of the last project.

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

According to the Sponsorship Miner, I just sponsored one of Sebastian's uploads, but I interacted with him much more in the last years. I was constantly amazed by his diligence and attention to detail. Sebastian has done some fantastic work and is the absolutely right person to maintain the packages mentioned above. -- dholbach 2013-01-25 10:57:18

Michael Vogt

General feedback

I know Sebastian since 2006 when we started collaborating on Synaptic. We are in contact ever since and its amazing to me to see how much good work Sebastian takes on. In particular his work on aptdaemon and python-defer are essential for the success of software-center. I trust him and his judgement and recommend that we give me upload rights to the packages mentioned above.

Specific Experiences of working together

We worked on aptdaemon, python-defer and sessioninstaller together since the very early days of software-center (~2009) with great success.

Areas of Improvement

If anything maybe packaging, but Sebatian is pretty good at this as well so I'm just mentioning it because I feel like I should mention something here

Martin Pitt

I followed Sebastian's work on aptdaemon/PackageKit/sessioninstaller related issues for many years now, with discussions, contributing the odd patch, and mostly reviewing/sponsoring his work. I'm surprised that he cannot upload these packages himself yet, as he is pretty much the sole maintainer these days and knows every nook and cranny of them. He knows Ubuntu's development and release processes, and enough packaging so that I trust him to do unsupervised uploads of these packages. So +1 from me, and a big thank you to Sebastian for his work! -- pitti 2013-03-05 09:53:47

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 ===