UbuntuCinnamonPPUApplication

I, Joshua Peisach, (also known as "ItzSwirlz") apply for upload rights for (source) packages:

  • cinnamon
  • cinnamon-control-center
  • cinnamon-desktop
  • cinnamon-menus
  • cinnamon-screensaver
  • cinnamon-session
  • cinnamon-settings-daemon
  • cjs
  • muffin
  • ubuntucinnamon-artwork
  • ubuntucinnamon-environment
  • ubuntucinnamon-meta
  • ubuntucinnamon-wallpapers

Which are all locatable within the universe repository.

I am applying because:

  • I'd like to eliminate delays in getting my work sponsored.
  • I'd like to be more recognized in the Ubuntu community.
  • I'd like to be able to have more management in transitioning/moving my and the Cinnamon DE packages into Ubuntu Repositories.
  • I'd like to be able to have more benefits to the project and my future life.
  • I’d like to be able to have more and better connections to highly skilled developers to increase my knowledge.
  • I’d like to help assist people in their work.
  • I'd like to try and make myself a better person (especially online)

Who I am

I’m Joshua Peisach, or commonly known on my internet alias as “ItzSwirlz”. I first began playing with Windows 7, and through virtual machines, thanks to my Dad who works at a university, I discovered the world of Linux, and in 2014 (I estimate, I can’t remember an exact date) for the first time I launched Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in a Virtual Machine running Unity DE. Later on I came back to the Ubuntu Community and began developing by:

  • Creating an “Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix (UCR)”, in hopes to make an official Ubuntu Cinnamon flavor.
  • Helping with bug squashing and patching.
  • Helping with ISO and QA test assurance.
  • Helping on Improving Features

My Ubuntu story

I wanted to use Linux for programming-but the Rutger’s had an old Dell Latitude E6500 that I used-4 GB RAM running Windows 7. I didn’t have the disk space (only 100 GB) to dual boot anything.

October 2018 I got a better Dell Inspiron 15-3567 that I began distro hopping from Fedora Cinnamon, and went all over the place until I settled back home, to Ubuntu. Later on I’d come to the Ubuntu Discourse Community, suggest an Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix idea, and make one with the initial release on December 4 2019 (19.10 Eoan Ermine)

Today I continue to maintain Ubuntu Cinnamon along with maintain other relevant packages, or any that interest me.

I have also been accepted into the Bergen County Academy of Technology and Computer Science. In September 2022 I will begin attending CS classes.

My main knowledge of computer programming came from, please forgive me, Minecraft. I joined the game when Minecraft Java Edition 1.6.3 came out (2013). It was such an amazing game, but more could’ve been extended to the actual game. Due to the Forge Mod Loader, you can add mods which can add items, or literally anything to Minecraft if you just refer to it as a new (Minecraft reference) item in a new mod.. Using tutorials I learned how to open eclipse and I began programming the Obsidian Diamond Ores Mod. Yet it still stands on Planet Minecraft, a Minecraft Community Forum today. (Beware of cringe and horrible textures) My goal is to take all the knowledge of programming and CS I have and will learn and incorporate it into my FOSS packages.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I've been working hard on getting sponsors. See:

Sponsorship miner link

My involvement has mostly been through Cinnamon, other DE’s and other main Desktop-side features.

I haven’t had many sponsors since I don’t requestsync much or have any patches, but Rik Mills has sponsored some of my requestsyncs in the past.

Mostly, you could say my main work for this Ubuntu Application would be the packaging I’ve done and helped for in Ubuntu and Upstream Cinnamon or the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix. Otherwise it would be patching things and bug reporting. I’ll link all of my work here.

Debian Cinnamon

I am a member of the Debian Cinnamon Team, and along with Fabio Fantoni (He cannot be thanked enough, he does way more than he needs to when school plagues me).

Here, we continue Cinnamon maintenance; and we will need to check-in it again when new versions of Cinnamon arrive.

Debian Packaging

I have packaged a lot. The simplest way to put this by keeping up to date is to look at my DDPO/Dev dashboard.

qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=itzswirlz2020@outlook.com

Aside from helping out with cinnamon, there are some packages I have initially created and fully packaged myself:

  • cppimport, a python module to import C++ code
  • kotlin-mode, an emacs major mode for Kotlin
  • python-patch-ng, a patch utility for python
  • pyupgrade, a tool to help upgrade code to newer versions of python
  • sc-im, spreadsheet calculator improvised, continuation of sc

For a lot of the ITPs open, a few of which I don't care about, these are all nemo extensions which I also packaged myself. In Debian I've had trouble getting sponsors, and because school kicked in I haven't had time to update it continuously and fix the packages.

For other stuff I've done outside those, see my Salsa activity:

https://salsa.debian.org/users/ItzSwirlz-guest/activity https://salsa.debian.org/users/ItzSwirlz-guest/contributed

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix

I used to host the repos and commit on a separate GitHub account/root account for UCR but later made it an organization-you can see my organization which I pretty much to do everything there here:

https://github.com/Ubuntu-Cinnamon-Remix

Here is our launchpad team. We have four repos-stable (all), unstable, backports, and an archive repository. Feel welcome to swoop around.

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntucinnamonremix https://launchpad.net/~ubuntucinnamon-dev

To view any other commits-they may not all be Ubuntu-related or what not, but if you want to see my development, checkout my GitHub.

https://github.com/ItzSwirlz/

My Contributions to Ubuntu and it's flavors

I've filed about ten launchpad bugs-you can breeze through them: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?search=Search&field.bug_reporter=itzswirlz

Ubuntu MATE

I periodically talk with Martin (flexiondotorg) and show up at his live streams. I like to see what he does but on the track of Ubuntu MATE, I found out about their Color Selection tool and wanted to add wallpaper support for it. I was not really at Python and shell work but I learned a lot. Thanks to Luke Horwell, we managed to scrape it just in time for 20.04. Always good to see that MATE colourized wallpaper on the Linux News Articles!

https://github.com/lah7/ubuntu-mate-colours/pull/20

Other

In general, I keep in touch with all flavor leads and work with all of them.

ISO and QA Testing

Have I done a lot with ISO and QA testing! I've done well in my opinion, and placed in decent spots on the testcase leaderboard. Here's the scoop.

Version

Type

Testcases

Bionic

Daily

2

Disco

Final

1

Eoan

Daily

17

Focal

Beta

7

Focal

Final

16

Focal

Daily

77

Groovy

Daily

8

Groovy

Beta

2

Jammy

Daily

15

Total

145

Yes I know that this is not a competition.

Bionic isn't much due to me actually using Ubuntu when Cosmic was out. Focal Daily results were mainly before release and Groovy is so far, when I originally wrote the draft.

That sums it up here!

Areas of work

I’ve worked mainly through the Ubuntu Community, to summarize it up briefly.

More in-depth, I work mainly around the cinnamon packages, the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, Debian’s Deepin Packaging Team/Cinnamon Package Maintainers, and anything Ubuntu-related for flavours, remixes, and my friends.

But with a gaming heart in mind, I also will work on areas of my choice including Discord Bots and much more. But for now, gaming, desktop, and community is my expertise and where I like to stay.

Things I could do better

It is especially my fault that I don’t exactly stick with programming goals often. Sometimes when I have trouble with things, I sort of just leave it to the side and never come back. When I learn a programming language too, I also likely end up not knowing how to do actually good things that could benefit me in development. I could personally learn programming and better scripting more as it would help me stabilize my code and have a better understanding of everything.

Socially-not much to say, but I want to try to continue diversely helping everyone regardless of what the problem is so I can try to become a better maintainer for packages. I feel great helping people and I’m sure I’d like to help even more as time goes on.

My Mistakes

I am all about making mistakes. For example, instead of syncing from Debian latest or going to Ubuntu unstable for building the latest version of Cinnamon, I’d just rebuild everything for no reason.

I did read the Debian Policy Manual, but I didn’t take an actual deep-through look of it until May 2020.

I am certainly a Prometheus; I often do things before I think about it, especially when it comes to chatting on the internet (IRC, email, discord, whatever. It has happened). This is a big weakness for me - I want to work on my online maturity and overall be a better person, and this is a great place to start.

Plans for the future

General

Continue packaging what is best for me, other people, and the rest of society and become a better programmer.

What I like least in Ubuntu

I wish the ubuntu-mentors program would come back as it would allow for community developers to get access more easily.

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@.

ItzSwirlz has been leading and managing Ubuntu Cinnamon really well, with regular releases and following the Ubuntu release schedule. Kudos to him! I'm sure he'll be an excellent Ubuntu Contributing Developer. -- rs2009 2020-09-29 17:02:07

ItzSwirlz has taken on the challenging task of not only building a community but a remix. Spinning up, developing and driving a project like this can be very challenging. I see passion like this as something we in the Ubuntu community can always do with more of. While that endeavour can be a full-time job, seeing the attempt to give back to the broader community shows a "one for all" vs an "all for one" attitude. We need this, as well as new people entering the larger community. A welcome addition. -- bashfulrobot 2021-01-15 19:20:16

I'm not just commenting because ItzSwirlz' work enabled me to have a beautiful teal Ubuntu MATE experience! He has been a dynamic developer and remix lead, who has stayed remarkably hard-working and consistant, even with his responsibilities outside of the community. Someone with this sort of "can do" attitude who embraces a broad community spirit, in my opinion, is exactly the kind of developer we should be supporting. He has my earnest and enthusiastic support. -- -- madhens 2021-03-03 21:33:35

Endorsements

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

Erich Eickmeyer

General feedback

I have sponsored four packages for Joshua, and was quite surprised as to the quality of packages I encountered upon review. There were just a few issues, such as executable bits where they didn't belong and a missing copyright field, but for the most part the packages were completely spotless. Upon upload, the packages were accepted without question from the Ubuntu Archive Administrators, although we did find out that the priority was wrong and needed to be fixed later, which was a minor oversight.

Honestly, I think Joshua is ready to maintain these packages on his own with full PPU rights, and has done a great job in upstream Debian on the packages he has worked on there.

Specific Experiences of working together

I have sponsored all of the ubuntucinnamon-* packages for Joshua. As said above, the packages were of a quality that I would expect from a more seasoned packager.

https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?render=html&sponsor=Erich+Eickmeyer*&sponsor_search=name&sponsoree=Joshua+Peisach&sponsoree_search=name

Areas of Improvement

Like most packagers, Joshua just needs to pay attention to d/copyright, and make sure he has priority correct in d/control. Other than that, I think he's ready for PPU upload privileges, and in a few months, perhaps even MOTU. Smile :)

Jeremy Bicha

Joshua's work on packaging Cinnamon is interesting because although he has done a lot of work on Cinnamon packaging with the intent of improving Ubuntu, his upload count to Ubuntu is low. This is because he has a strong upstream-first philosophy. I don't believe this is a negative point. I encourage him to submit changes directly to Ubuntu where it makes sense because of, for instance, where we are in Ubuntu's release calendar.

Most of my interaction with Joshua and the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix has been in helping sync packages from Debian. The team-maintained packages have been high quality.

Joshua has been team maintaining the Cinnamon packages for years which meets the threshold of sustained significant work on these packages. I believe that it would be better for Ubuntu and users of the Cinnamon desktop in Ubuntu if Joshua were given direct upload rights to Ubuntu for these packages.

I am confident in his packaging skills and I endorse his application for PPU rights not just for the 4 packages specific to Ubuntu Cinnamon but for all the Debian Cinnamon packages except libtimezonemap (used by ubiquity). I do note that Ubuntu Budgie also ships these packages: nemo, nemo-fileroller, python-xapp, and xapp. I believe that the Debian Cinnamon set are core packages for the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix and there ought to be a Ubuntu maintainer for these packages with upload rights. I encourage the DMB to grant upload permission for these additional packages today to avoid needing to vote again for them at a future meeting (probably soon).

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 ===

itzswirlz/Applications/UbuntuCinnamonPPUApplication (last edited 2024-01-02 01:24:47 by itzswirlz)