I, Alessandro Astone, apply for Ubuntu Contributing Developer.

I am applying because:

• I'd like to get some recognition and trust from the community, and not just that of my employer.

• I'd like to show my engagement on the path towards upload rights, for which I'm aiming to join the ~ubuntu-desktop delegated team.

Who I am

I am a Software Engineer specialized in operating systems, and more specifically the Linux userspace.

I started getting involved in open-source software around 2018 with LineageOS, the #1 community-made custom Android distribution. There I contributed to the build-system and common system frameworks, and ended up becoming the maintainer of the Recovery OS, as well as a few device ports. This was my first experience being part of and, in some sense, lead a large and distributed open-source community.

Around the same time I started using Fedora Linux on my home workstation, with the KDE desktop. As the little bugs annoy the software tinkerer, eventually they'll want to try and fix them, and so I did. I started participating in the IRC chats and contributing fixes to the packaging, and eventually I became a member of the KDE-SIG where I help maintain the large KDE desktop stack in Fedora. This is where I gained a large experience with packaging software with what we now call the "traditional" package managers.

I've always enjoyed contributing my fixes upstream in order to benefit all users of the software, and thus after sustained contributions I became an upstream KDE Developer.

I'm also the primary maintainer of the Waydroid project, which is a container-based approach to run Android applications side-by-side GNU/Linux applications in your GNU/Linux desktop: this is where I gained experience working with the Wayland windowing system.

All of that to say that I end up getting involved in too many things; but I love it and it's great fun!

My Ubuntu story

My first sustained interactions with Ubuntu must have been around 2018, where I was using an Ubuntu VM from a Windows host in order to compile the Android operating system. Ever since, I've been using Ubuntu in VMs or containers for some of my software tinkering.

My second notable interaction with Ubuntu comes from being the maintainer of the deb package for Waydroid, although that's hosted on a separate APT repository and not in the Debian/Ubuntu archives.

Finally, I joined Canonical's Desktop Team in June 2024, which is when I really started contributing to Ubuntu. It's been interesting to explore the Ubuntu culture and processes, as someone coming from other different communities. I've grown to truly appreciate the attention to detail that comes into every package upload.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• I've handled merges from Debian. Some examples of non-trivial merges:

  • brltty for which we track a diff in systemd/udev rules to handle brltty being pre-installed but not always enabled.

  • gnome-session whose patches for defining an Ubuntu desktop session needed non-trivial rebasing.

• I've handled FTBFS issues with the archive rebuilds:

  • gtk2, gtk3, libssh, libgphoto2, gnome-settings-daemon, libblockdev, etc...

• I've packaged one new package from scratch:

  • adwaita-icon-theme-legacy

• I've added some autopkgtests:

  • wsdd (1), wsdd (2)

• I've handled many SRUs

• I've handled a few MIR requests:

  • exfatprogs

  • wsdd (partially)

• I've handled one library transition in both Debian and Ubuntu:

  • poppler (Ubuntu)

• I've closed too many bugs

Areas of work

Let us know what you worked on, with which development teams / developers with whom you cooperated and how it worked out.

Things I could do better

Plans for the future

General

What I like least in Ubuntu

I don't like how most SRUs end up being verified by the author of the patch. That's quite pointless, as presumably the author of the patch has already verified that it works. What's extremely important is feedback from users running the most diverse setups to test for regressions and for edge cases that the author/SRU reviewer didn't think of. And this is both about manual feedback and automated feedback. As an example of missing automated feedback, the errors.ubuntu.com tracker may have received a new crash report that triggers after the patch, but this feedback is never surfaced to the developers during the testing phase so it will only be discovered after the update is released, or in phasing.

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it.

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 ===