Core Developer Application for Harald Sitter (apachelogger)

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday 28 August 2008 21:05, Harald Sitter wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Please accept this mail as a differnt kind of application to become one of
> the Ubuntu Core Developers.
>
> To get my application please add
>   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/apachelogger/ubuntu intrepid main
> to your sources.list and install 'apachelogger-core-dev-app'.
>
> The application is startable via a terminal or the Utilities section of
> your preferred application menu.
>
> I CCed my sponsors Jonathan Riddell and Scott Kitterman, as well as some
> people to testify my commitment on getting new people to join the Ubuntu
> Developers (as stated in the Advanced section of my application).

I've been a bit conflicted about how to respond to this application.

Harald clearly has substantial technical expertise in KDE and QT development 
and packaging, is a good community member, and extremely energic and does a 
lot of good work.

It does seem to me though that sometimes he lets his enthusiasm get ahead of 
himself.

I've only actually sponsored one upload that made it to the archives and it 
was fine.  Recently however he asked me to sponsor a fix to Bug 256261:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/256261

It took some good detective work for him to discover that kdm's init was being 
run in the wrong place in the boot sequence:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase-workspace/+bug/256261/comments/14

He asked me to sponsor his change and included in the request (on IRC) was the 
statement:

"ScottK: you don't need to testbuild"

Of course I did and also tried to verify that the fix worked correctly and in 
the process discovered that while the change fixed the bug in question, it 
would have left new installs without a running kdm.

Now this is only one upload and we all make mistakes.  I have the impression 
Harald was in a rush because he was asked to fix this bug in the course of 
comments on his application.  It does leave me a bit doubtful, but as I said, 
it's only one.

Harald: How do you believe things would have gone if you'd already been a 
core-dev and uploaded this yourself?  How can we be confident that your 
(quite wonderful) enthusiasm won't get the best of you again in the future?

Scott K