I, Jonathan Thomas, wish to apply for core-dev.

Who I am

I am, as of November 2009, an 18 year old student. I love KDE and Kubuntu and probably spend more time than I should on both. I like computers, videogames (old-school Sonic especially) and Mexican food, in the sense that Taco-Bell is "Mexican".

My Kubuntu story

After floating between Fedora/KDE and Windows for several years, my father came home with an Ubuntu CD. (This was probably around Dapper times). I inserted the disc and immediately did not install it due to the brown wallpaper and theme. Later my father and I discovered that Ubuntu did not come with KDE and that there was a KDE variant, Kubuntu. This suited my tastes much better, and by mid-2007 I was using Kubuntu almost all the time, using windows as just a fallback for gaming and such.

By chance I found myself browsing dot.kde.org (now kdenews.org) and saw a story covering the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Now, 4 is obviously bigger than 3, meaning that it must be cool and new and exciting. So I started researching the matter and became excited about the potential for awesomeness that KDE 4.x would bring. Come release candidate time I tried a Kubuntu-KDE4 live cd and did various bug testing on it. Aside from bugs I saw some implementation details that could use some polish. (Though that really was to be expected. :P) I voiced my opinions in #kubuntu-kde4 and was nicely invited to share my opinions with the developers in #kubuntu-devel by one Lydia Pintscher (Nightrose). I hung around and eventually became involved in bugs, then packaging.

I started seriously contributing during the Kubuntu 8.10 cycle and have contributed heavily to the development of subsequent Kubuntu releases as well as with the packaging of new KDE releases. During the Kubuntu 8.10 cycle. I became a Kubuntu Member. Shortly after 8.10 was released, in January of 2009, I became a MOTU. I became a member of the Kubuntu Council in July 2009, a position that I currently hold. On November 30, 2009 I became an official "Kubuntu Developer". Within the mere two weeks from the time I was confirmed at the time of this writing I found the package upload rights for the Kubuntu Developer team to be severely limiting. I can only upload about half of the package set that I regularly contribute in, and due to software inadequacies the package set cannot easily be extended at this time to include all the appropriate packages. This puts me where I am today; applying for a position as an Ubuntu Core Developer so that I can get work done.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• KDE package maintenance in general.
• Heavy maintenance/upgrade/merge work with third-party software built with KDE technology.

• KDE merges with Debian: Karmic, Lucid

• My shared-desktop-ontologies package, which Debian basically uploaded wholesale and invited me to co-maintain
• All of the Plasma widgets I've been able to package. (Incomplete list at my wiki)

Areas of work

I mainly am involved with the maintenance of our core KDE packages. I am also quite active with other non-core KDE packages that are in main, such as Konversation. As an aside I regularly contribute to the Universe section of the archive, with an emphasis in KDE and Qt-related packages.

As it stands, staying with being a Kubuntu Developer means that I cannot upload the following packages, to which I am a regular contributor and often have sponsored: qt4-x11, akonadi, soprano, libattica/attica, phonon-backends, kde4libs, kdebase-runtime, kdebase-workspace. While this is an incomplete list, it is still an enormous set of packages that I can't upload to.

I know my stuff, and can do library transitions, upgrades, merges, etc. I can make packages with both cdbs and debhelper (pre-short rules) and have for the past cycle done all of these with my contributions to Kubuntu packages in the main archives. I know when to ask questions when venturing into areas outside my general expertise (e.g. more complex gnome packages) and would not jump into anything out of my depth in regards to uploading packages that cause breakage for major K/Ubuntu components. (Basically I won't break your GNOME or X packages :P) I know packaging, but I also know my limits.

Things I could do better

I sometimes overlook tiny things, as shown here. While it's not a major fault, it is something that could be improved.

Plans for the future

General

I plan to keep on maintaining the core KDE packages as well as non-core KDE applications in both main and universe. I also plan to continue to contribute to Kubuntu-specific coding projects such as kubuntu-notification-helper, kcm-gtk and the QuickAccess Plasma widget. On the non-Kubuntu front I will to continue to maintain my weather wallpaper plugin for Plasma, which is part of the official KDE Software Compilation.

What I like least in Ubuntu

See: Project Timelord

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

ScottKitterman

General feedback

I believe Jon would make a great core-dev. He has done a really great job in Kubuntu and is definitely ready to have upload rights for the parts of it that touch more on the core. I have no idea how many packages I've uploaded for him and I don't recall any significant problems. He does a lot of really great work and is more than ready to upload core stuff. In addition, I believe he's shown good judgment and asked when he needed to rather than upload and get in over his head. He's working on policykit-1 integration now.

He also does great work in bug triage and helping new people get involved. He is also one of the few people working in Kubuntu able to doe C++/KDE development and that's a big asset to the project.

Specific Experiences of working together

I can't think of any specific major issues. There have been a few little things. There was a small case recently where he didn't notice a new build-dep for a package was still in Universe and the package was in Main, but his stuff is almost always very good. It's gotten to the point where I don't feel a great need for any review.

Areas of Improvement

As with anyone, he could sometimes stand to be a bit more careful, but with a small team and a large number of complex packages to deal with, developers need to be somewhat aggressive (at least early in the cycle) to get all the work done.

JonathanRiddell

General feedback

Jonathan is one of the most active and hard working of Kubuntu contributors.

Specific Experiences of working together

He did a good number of the merges for opening Lucid and few changes were needed for any of them.

Areas of Improvement

He missed some changelog entries in one of the merges and a missing space made one of his changelogs have invalid syntax. We'll forgive him because he's good looking.

Harald Sitter

General feedback

I sponsored like a thousand packages (it might not actually be far off due to KDE releases), and I guess that says all. Ever since Jonathan became minion of Kubuntu development and later on MOTU, he constantly improved his packaging quality, his quality of code and also his specific understandings of the Ubuntu _and_ Kubuntu workflows. Today he is one of the few souls in the development community, I absolutely trust, not only because he knows how to do things, but also he will most likely make the right decisions.

Jonathan is also incredibly active in other areas of development, for example bug triage (which I really consider just as important as bug fixing). He is a first class bug triage and does one awesome job at getting Kubuntu related bugs triaged ASAP. Hadn't had any complaints there either.

Specific Experiences of working together

He is one of the active mergers each cycle, for which I have reviewed a couple of diffs, but didn't find any major flaws there. He is quite active with uploading completely new packages too, of very esteem quality. I have never ever seen one of his KDE core package changes cause major problems.

Areas of Improvement

I really can't say anything packaging related here, since I was largely involved in raising him to become a core developer applicant, he does everything exactly as I would do it ;). More QA can't hurt though (can't hurt no matter how good one is for that matter).

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.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication