I, Brian Murray, apply for MOTU.

Who I am

I'm Brian Murray and work for Canonical as a QA Engineer on the Ubuntu Platform team. I primarly focus on bug reports, bug workflow, bug statistics, special reports of bugs - basically everything bug related! I've been using Linux since 1999 (wow, that's 10 years) starting with Red Hat. I actually used to be an RHCE.

My Ubuntu story

I've been using Ubuntu since 2005. I've been involved with the Ubuntu community since December 2007, starting out with the documentation team.

My involvement

Some of things I am involved in, or have been in involved in Ubuntu include:

• organizing and leading bug days
• performing Stable Release Update verification of proposed packages
• developing and packaging updates of bughelper and python-launchpad-bugs

• working on the launchpad greasemonkey scripts project

• managing the Ubuntu Bug Control team

• creating opportunities for harvest

• documenting bug workflows and triaging procedures to reduce the barrier to entry for new contributors

• documenting and collating debugging procedures for many packages

• giving classes at Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week

Additionally, during my time working on Ubuntu I've run across a few patches in bug reports that I've wanted to see integrated into the package. I'd like to be able to get these bugs fixed directly.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I've worked a lot on python-launchpad-bugs and bughelper and have had lots of uploads sponsored for them. In addition I've been working on getting patches in bug reports included in packages and helping out with https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager.

• In ciso I improved an included patch and setup the package to use dpatch.

• In makeztxt I updated the debian watch file and updated the package to a new version.

• I updated the firefox-launchpad-plugin to include a few new searches, from Steve Beattie, and added distinct icons for the searches. I also updated all the search plugin formats to new xml formatting.

• I've also incorporated some patches into apt-cacher and added some Ubuntu specific patches to allow update-manager to work with it.

• For imdb-tools I incorporated a patch and forwarded the bug upstream so the package can be synced again in Karmic.

• For iperf I prepared a debdiff including a reporter's patch but that ended up being a sync request since the bug fix was already in Debian.

• For hwtest I prepared a debdiff of a patch which also became a Stable Release Update.

• I backported an update to flashplugin-nonfree so I could complete an SRU verification of another bug.

• I cleaned up someone else's patch to seahorse so the bug would really be fixed.

I've also added apport package hooks to usplash and compiz. I'm really proud of these and the printing hook for apport, used by cups, as they increase the quality of bug reports in Launchpad and make them easier to triage.

Areas of work

The packages I've worked on the most are bughelper, python-launchpad-bugs and update-manager. With update-manager the work has been done in bzr and having my branches merged.

Things I could do better

In my work I see a lot of bug reports that need to be forwarded upstream and instead of doing the forwarding I sometimes open an upstream task. So, I could do a better a job of actually forwarding them and adding the bug watch.

Plans for the future

General

I plan to continue working on bugs with patches and ensuring that they get tested, incorporated into the Ubuntu package and forwarded upstream where appropriate. Additionally, I'd like to continue see apport package hooks added to the most popular (in terms of bug reports) packages.

What I like least in Ubuntu

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

CategoryMOTUApplication