I, Wookey, apply for core-dev rights.

Who I am

I'm a long-time Debian developer, having joined up in 2001 (https://nm.debian.org/nmstatus.php?email=wookey%40aleph1.co.uk), working professionally on Arm Linux since 2000ish, at Aleph One Ltd, Toby Chruchill Ltd, and now Linaro (as an ARM secondee). I've been a free software developer since 1990 when I started writing Survex with Olly Betts (http://survex.com/). I've been involved with open hardware projects since 2002: LART, Balloonboard.org and iEndian (for whom I worked from 2007-2010).

My Ubuntu story

I largely ignored Ubuntu (apart from installing and maintaining it for inexperienced users I was responsible for, such as my mother and my boss at Aleph One) until I joined Linaro, where (almost) all the work so far has been done using Ubuntu process and in the distro, so I had to find out how it worked, and how things were done. I was actually quite surprised how different the processes are from Debian despite the similarities in the software itself.

I have been working on cross-building and multiarch fixes generally initially with xdeb and now with multiarch and thus work with a huge range of packages.

My involvement

I'm working on core stuff to do with cross-building, which has led me to an interest in multiarch as it helps enormously in this area, and indeed is now (March 2012) my main focus. So my work tends to cover all packages (or at least the core couple of thousand packages people sensibly want to use in smaller systems). The ability to upload cross-bulding and multiarch fixes across the board in Ubuntu as well as Debian will help get this stuff actually implemented in finite time.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

The Psion netbook project was a particularly fine effort back in 2004/5, showing what can be done with a really good team and good technology (we did a linux image for the original strongarm 'netbook' based on OE, which was way ahead of its time).

YAFFS (nand flash filesystem) is one of the other major things I've been involved with of note. A couple of the articles I wrote on arm kernel porting back in 2002ish are still the top google hits(!) http://www.glomationinc.com/PortingLinuxKernel.pdf

I take an interest in the legal and licencing side of things: I put a lot of time and effort into the software patent debate and CII directive in the EU in 2005 as part of FFII-UK, and on behalf of Aleph One and Toby Churchill. Preventing that from becoming a much worse situation was a huge achievement. I am now a member of the Freedom Task Force group of Free Software lawyers/legal experts, primarily due to my Open Hardware expertise, but also representing Debian.

I have been responsible for the Embedded Debian project since 2004, even though others have done the bulk of the actual work.

Within Ubuntu I've worked on xdeb a fair amount, put pdebuild-cross and multistrap into the archive, improved pkg-config for cross-work, and helped Vorlon with multiarch fallout. Over the precise period I've filed quite a lot of patches for cross-building and multiarch cross-dependency support.

I've done quit a lot of work on analysis, documentation and specifications for fixing of the cyclic-dependency and cross-building issues, and have also built a simple cross-autobuilder so that uptodate results of the current cross-buildability of the archive is available online: http://people.linaro.org/~wookey/buildd This is a long-term effort. Having that info available to all means that we can report on it, packagers can check their status, bugs can be reported semi-automatically and so on.

I have done a lot of packaging and build-system work over the years, including for proprietary stuff run on top of Debian (at TCL)

I am pleased that Ubuntu has given some priority to cross-building so that cross-building FTBFS bugs can be filed as more than just 'wishlist'.

Areas of work

These are my Debian packages, which are essentially cave-surveying and emdebian/cross-building packages. http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=wookey@debian.org I work closely with the various upstreams, all of whom I know well, and retain good relations with.

I also have an interest in domotics and building-design packages and have done packaging work on those but not generally uploaded them due to recognising that my time is limited and there is no point uploading things I won't have time to maintain to a reasonable standard.

Within Ubuntu I have worked largely with Steve Langasek, Loic Minier and Colin Watson.

Things I could do better

I made a bit of a pigs ear of updating xdeb in Debian and Ubuntu in parallel, due to not using bzr branches and merging the way the rest of the team expected and putting a version into Debian with the same version number as in Ubuntu but slightly different functionality. This was due to not properly appreciating the relationship between the distros when 'upstream' is effectively Ubuntu bzr. That still isn't quite properly sorted, but will be soon.

Plans for the future

General

I expect to be driving the 'cross-building and bootstrapping Ubuntu and Debian' effort over the next few months, which touches a lot of packages. Not having to bug someone else about uploads all the time would be a good thing. Emmet suggested I apply here for core-dev-ness, and I guess that is sensible, (if you all think I'm not going to screw things up too badly

What I like least in Ubuntu

Having to develop software (xdeb) via bzr and team code-review has been a bit of a culture shock. I've always previously worked where I was ultimate arbiter on uploads and what was done in the Debian (and thus Ubuntu) versions of software. Still, I think I've got the hang of it now, and it does catch errors and improve code quality, in exchange for being rather cumbersome. This isn't a dislike as such - just something different to get used to.

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.

Colin Watson

General feedback

Wookey's summary above of what we've done has been pretty accurate; I've worked with him on various changes to xdeb (graphing, loop detection and resolution, build-dependency satisfaction, etc.) and on trying to organise cross-build improvements to Ubuntu. This is definitely the sort of thing that requires core-dev privileges to do usefully; a broad-but-shallow set of changes need to be made, and the interesting ones are pretty much all in the core system. I'm happy that he knows what he's doing (due to a long history in Debian and substantial concentration on cross-build work recently) and has good taste in terms of how things should be fixed.

Specific Experiences of working together

As Wookey says, his revision control practices left something to be desired at first, but I think that's sorted out now. Generally my main whinge is that he's taken a while to get cross-build patches merged into Ubuntu, which is exactly the kind of thing that a grant of upload rights tends to correct!

Wookey's graphing work in xdeb (presented at DebConf this year) has been excellent; it's exactly the sort of organisational/visualisation thing that I never bother to do but that's very useful when trying to attack a large problem, and especially when trying to distribute it across multiple people. I think a good next step will be automating this and making it something that we can see progress on in mainline Ubuntu, in continuous-integration style.

Areas of Improvement

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 ===