I, Frank Heimes (fheimes), apply for MOTU (and Ubuntu Contributing Developers).

I am applying because:

• While doing packaging work, I need to bug fellow colleagues for sponsoring and reviews quite often.
• Universe package bugs are usually lower priority, so want to support in that area.
• I want to be able to upload fixes to certain packages directly reducing the need for sponsoring.

Who I am

I'm a German electronics and computer guy that grew up in the Rhine/Ruhr area close to Neuss/Düsseldorf and later moved to Böblingen - for business reasons.
I'm still living in Böblingen (in SW/Germany) with my wife Steffi and Lilo our cat.
I still like spending some time at the computer, even in my spare time, like to travel - cuddling Lilo and spending some time in the garden are other hobbies, as well as watching SciFi and my rattly classic car.

My Ubuntu story

After my time at Siemens, I joined the IBM R&D lab in Böblingen/Germany, where I enjoyed working for almost the entire time in the area of Linux (SW and HW) - but mostly with SLES and RHEL.
At some point in time a volunteer workstation OS project started at big-blue (called Open Client Debian Community, OCDC) and I became involved and maintained a dozen of packages (since the other Linux distro that could be used on the workstation sucked, imho).
Even if it was called Open Client Debian Community, most people in that community used 'Ubuntu'.
So I strove Dapper Drake / 6.06 LTS and really started to fell in love with Hardy Heron / 8.04 LTS (on private and business machines).
A couple of years later, a company called 'Canonical' was looking for someone to help-out with getting Ubuntu (Server) on 'big-iron' and since I worked at IBM on 'big-irons' at that time and had some Ubuntu experiences due to the volunteer project, I thought that this is a nice combination and the next thing I really want to do and work on - which ended in me joining Canonical in early 2016. Since then I'm a member of Canonical's Server Commercial Engineering (SCE) team (former Hardware Enablement, HWE), mainly working on IBM Z (s390x) and Power (ppc64el).

My involvement

Things I'm proud of

I coordinate and collaborate with other team on the technical work that is needed for the SCE projects. Bug management work is on me too, and with that I am in contact with larger parts of Canonical.

• One of my favorite packages - it took quite a while, due to intense partner discussions, but the solution is nice (s390-tools): LP#1892367
  (Well, there is more on s390-tools: LP#1942908, LP#1938947, LP#1908371, LP#1903984, LP#1898935, ...)

• The first library that I've packaged (libzpc): LP#1932522 (yet to be accepted from the queue, so far PPA).

• A common universe bug, the Debian maintainer noticed it, jumped in, applied the patch on Debian and sponsored my Ubuntu SRU, too, since he's also an Ubuntu (Contributing) Developer (qtwebkit): LP#1951470

• Patch and little rules-file change (pcre2): LP#1931857

• NVMe disk support for Ubuntu on s390x: LP#1902179

• Well, I'm not sure if I should be proud of that [FFe], but it was at least quite some work: LP#1866866

In 2016 I started the 'Ubuntu on Big-Iron' blog (https://ubuntu-on-big-iron.blogspot.com), like to work on documentation, contributed to the Ubuntu Server Guide (mainly the installation chapter), the Ubuntu Release Notes (s390x section), did some BrightTalk webcasts and more (see my Wiki page).

Examples of my work (mostly 2021)

Here some more general package work:

• A typical but simple universe package fix (scapy): LP#1908280

• That was a pretty complicated bug (opencryptoki): LP#1915517

• Again a simple universe package fix (tigervnc): LP#1929790

• A little endianness bug (elfutils): LP#1908756

• Expanding hardware support (valgrind): LP#1825343

I'm also doing quite a lot kernel SRU/PATCH submissions, largely due to the above projects (e.g. Dec, Nov, Oct, Sept, Aug).

For more details see my Related Packages, Uploaded Packages and the Ubuntu Sponsorship Miner.

Areas of work

Due to the ubuntu-z-systems (and ubuntu-power-systems) projects I'm involved in, I looked at several endianness bugs (s390x, see above ), organize and triage bugs in these projects, own the Launchpad ubuntu-z-systems project and touch lot's of areas of the (server) distro (from installer, test and even OpenStack and kubernetes).

I enjoy working with my team mates and other teams like Server, Foundations, Kernel, OpenStack and Field Engineering, Kubernetes - support with, and provide access to, Canonical's IBM Z (s390x) hardware infrastructure.

The packages I mainly work on are s390-tools, opencryptoki and the kernel.

On top I do contractual, testing, reporting, collateral, enablement and external collaboration work.

Things I could do better

• Have a closer look at Debian

• Become more confident in packaging.

• Be more '-EvIL' and '+pedantic' .

• Avoid by-passing Launchpad for bug work and communication.

Plans for the future

General

• Get more familiar with autopkgtests.
• Give back and help others (since I got a lot of help from many people too...)

What I like least in Ubuntu

• The fact that different teams (or even people) do the package maintenance in a slightly different way. Hence reviewers and sponsors partially have a slightly different opinion and focus

• That it is impossible to address everything that's coming in to Launchpad.
• That we left the community a bit out of the focus.

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.

Lukas 'slyon' Märdian

General feedback

I know Frank since about 2 years, when we have supported each other several times. He helped me figuring out how to run an installation of Ubuntu on (and getting access to) 'big-iron' s390x machines, that was needed for debugging an early-boot (initrd) issue in my role as an Ubuntu Foundations Engineer and I helped him with his packaging efforts on s390-tools and pcre2. Frank is very much on top of all his bug reports and wanted to move faster (not waiting for peers to help with solving certain issues), therefore he started contributing patches (for foundations-owned packages) himself. I reviewed several of those patches – mostly for s390-tools[-signed], which has quite some special bits to it (wrt. to package signing on Launchpad) – and uploaded those into the devel and stable (SRU) series. In the beginning I had some minor comments about his patches and Frank was really quick and motivated about reading up on and learning from the feedback, incorporating it into the next uploads. With each patch submission he improved the quality and reached a very good level. Frank is very pleasant to work with, understands the Ubuntu processes and he is strongly connected within Canonical and the Ubuntu community; I fully trust that he's making decisions in the best interest of the Ubuntu community.

Specific Experiences of working together

Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.

I have not sponsored any universe packages for Frank, thus cannot comment on the MOTU qualities specifically, but from my sponsorings into main for s390-tools[-signed] and pcre2 I can assess Frank's motivation and quality of packaging work. I'd suggest for him to apply for s390-tools PPU at the same time or quickly after MOTU as this is (to date) one of his most touched packages, that he'd not be able to work on with just MOTU privileges. The uploads I sponsored for Frank have been of high quality and Frank wasn't shy to ask about any uncertainities when preparing those patches. He has mostly been working closely with s390-tools upstream and then incorporating/cherry-picking certain patches into the Ubuntu packages for the development and stable series; following through on the full SRU process, always on top of his bugs and responding quickly to sponsor or SRU team requests.

Areas of Improvement

The version bump for pcre2 might have been a bit rushed, that was due to the FeatureFreeze being close. The version bump included a soname bump in the library and triggered a small transition that we needed to work out after the freeze. Not a big deal but I'd recommend learning more about transitions (https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/transitions/index.html) to better understand the impact of library version bumps.

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 ===