I, adrien, apply for core-dev.

I am applying because:

• I'd like to eliminate delays in getting my work sponsored.
• I'd like to reduce the burden on my sponsors.
• I'd like to pay back all the review time I've benefited from.
• I'd like to help people who seek sponsorship.
• I'd like to also help with transitions.

Who I am

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My Ubuntu story

Tell us how and when you got involved, what you liked working on and what you could probably do better.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Include your existing sponsored uploads for the packages for which you are seeking upload rights. You can link directly to an upload by following this pattern.

Areas of work

I've been taking care of cryptography-related packages since I joined Canonical in late 2022.

The most notable of these package is openssl. It is a large package with many direct and recursive reverse dependencies, it has frequent updates and is also known as a package for which updates are likely to introduce regressions. Every cycle, I prepare its most recent release we can have in Ubuntu while ensuring stability and the ability to do long-term support, including for security updates.

I have also been dealing with gnutls which shares a number of similarities with openssl but on a smaller scale on each count.

For both, there are many language bindings that need to be updated and fixed on a regular basis to match openssl and gnutls updates.

For cryptography in general, I have been working on crypto-config for which the specification was recently released on discourse. The main motives are to centralize and unify how cryptography is configured in Ubuntu, and make it more manageable to disable deprecated algorithms. Extra care has been taken to make it possible to integrate this gradually in the distribution in order to avoid flag days and disruptive transitions. For instance, the first package change is already in Oracular's openssl but is without effect until the opt-in 'crypto-config' package is installed (currently in a PPA, targeting universe during February).

For all these, I interact regularly with the Security and Server teams in addition to Foundations. I need to pay attention to the schedule of my changes, foresee potential regressions and either prevent or fix them.

I've also been deeply involved in the armhf 64-bit time_t transition, also known as t64. I worked around the clock to analyze and diff the ABI of thousands of packages. This is a work that had been started collaboratively in Foundations but I then specialized in it. I worked with uploaders and maintainers, including in Debian, to answer their questions (for instance about the sources of ABI incompatibilities).

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 feel like the tooling situation is unsatisfactory. There are several repositories of tools with sometimes overlapping functionalities. Most often, the documentation is succinct and not discoverable. I am also confident that almost any time spent on tooling is recouped within weeks or a few months at most.

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 ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication