I, Arif Ali, apply for upload rights for package sosreport.

I am applying because:

• I'd like to eliminate delays in getting my work sponsored.
• I'd like to reduce the burden on my sponsors.

Who I am

I am Arif Ali, a Staff Support Engineer at Canonical's supporting a specific customer, I work on sosreport at work as well as my spare time. I have a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics as well as a MSC in Advanced topics in Computer Science.

Before joining Canonical in 2019, I worked in the HPC industry deploying, architect, designing and supporting systems across many industries including Motorsport, Aerospace, Automotive and Research.

I have been using Linux since 1999 with various distributions, with the earliest being Mandrake Linux, with Fedora Core 1 being the first official distro for work Laptop in 2003. Which you can imagine had several issues to actually get working. Over the years I delved into Debian, CentOS, Red Hat and Ubuntu, interchanging based on experiences and requirements.

My Ubuntu story

I started using the first Ubuntu releases, and interchangeably used many of the distributions and versions. Since working with Linux, I have always found that ubuntu is one of the distros that works more easily with many more items integrated to ensure it works from the initial install.

Since joining Canonical, my primary OS has been Ubuntu, and also converted all my Servers, VMs and containers from whole range of Linux OSs to Ubuntu, and all my environments are now solely Ubuntu based.

At the same time, I'm a total open-source advocate, so like to promote Ubuntu/Linux to my family and friends; so much so that my parents use 12.04 on their desktop.

One thing I can improve on, is help promote Ubuntu more on social media and help people to understand the whole ethos of Ubuntu LTS and see how we can close the gap of understanding the support structure that is in place for Ubuntu supported platforms.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Below you can see the sponsorships for the work I have done since May 2024

• Ubuntu Sponorships

• Debian Sponsorships

The things I am proud of with sosreport project:

• I have been contributing to upstream sosreport since I joined Canonical
• Got much more involved since April 2023 and made significant improvements

• In December 2023 I was added as one of the maintainers of the project Discussion #3466

• Due to significant issues with 4.7.0 SRU LP #2054395, I helped revamping the CI for sosreport, and we now do more CI for ubuntu than RedHat.

• Added various functional testing based on issues we have faced in Ubuntu.

• Added non-voting testing for latest dev releases to that we catch issues before any SRU takes place. PR #3587

• Took over as maintainer of sosreport in Debian in July 2024 which is now being auto-synced to Ubuntu Bug #1076347 & Bug #1076253

Areas of work

I work in the Support Engineering at Canonical, and we use sosreport as a regular tool for our support organisation, so haven't worked with a development team or developer directly per-se. Between myself and David Negreira we both contribute to upstream sosreport as well all the verification work that is required for sosreport SRUs.

For the SRU work, I have worked very closely with Dariusz Gadomski and Mauricio Oliveira who have guided me in the ways of ubuntu packaging and SRU process.

I have worked on many sosreport bugs, whether they have been internally within my team, through GitHub issues or Launchpad bugs.

• Obfuscation issues faced in SRU for 4.7.2 LP #2085607

• msr module being loaded in focal and jammy LP #2089713

• sosreport upgrade from xenial to bionic LP #2038648

• Fix obfuscation issue from the state.json from snap plugin collection LP #1891296

• Password obfuscation issue of wireless password in netplan 2037872

Previously, I have also helped with verification of new release SRUs for sosreport since 2020

Things I could do better

We can always do better, better testing and such.

I would like to improve the testing of the packages, and having PPU rights would help me to run autopkgtests to ensure any infra related issues are resolved before doing SRUs.

Also, I would like to improve and we are working towards is getting more people involved with SRU verifications especially when we have new releases.

Plans for the future

General

• Keep improving and maintaining the sosreport packages for Ubuntu.
• I am also applying for DM in Debian for sosreport, and will continue to maintain the Debian package into unstable, testing and moving forward the backports.

What I like least in Ubuntu

On the key items is getting people to understand the concepts of snaps. I would like assist in helping to bridge that gap, so that people understand them better so that we can improve the overall.

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.

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:
##  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryPerPackageUploaderApplication