Ubuntu Core Developer application for Dustin Kirkland (kirkland)

[Dustin Kirkland]

Howdy MOTU-Council-

Please consider forwarding my application for Ubuntu Core Developer
Membership to the Ubuntu Technical Board.

I've discussed this with a number of my mentors and sponsors, and
received thorough encouragement to apply from at least:
 * Chuck Short
 * Colin Watson
 * Jamie Strandboge
 * Kees Cook
 * Martin Pitt
 * Steve Langasek

I have CC'd each of them on this email, and I hope they might advocate
on my behalf.

My wiki page is:
 * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DustinKirkland

As a developer on Canonical's Ubuntu Server Team, my daily work tends to
focus on core Ubuntu server functionality.  Additionally, I have a high
degree of interest in Ubuntu security functionality, which is loosely
tasked to the Ubuntu server team, but tends to benefit all flavors of
Ubuntu and its derivatives.

In the Intrepid Ibex release cycle, I feel that I tackled a number of
significant issues, delivering some important fixes and new
functionality.  Some of these items tended to be touchy subjects, and
required deft movement through minefields and flamewars.

I fixed some minor annoyances that simply needed attention, such as the
per-user editor selection, now provided by select-editor on the first
invocation of sensible-editor in debianutils (and forwarded those
changes back to Debian).  Another example is the "service" utility now
provided by sysvinit-utils, functionality equivalent to Red Hat's
"service" command and often requested by RedHat-to-Ubuntu converts.

I worked a standard method called "status_of_proc()" into Ubuntu's
lsb-base package (and achieved Debian's acceptance of the patch).  There
has been a broad effort to use this function in various init scripts to
display status in a simple and regular manner.

As Soren Hansen's backup, I covered the virtualization packages while he
was mostly out for a couple of weeks.  During that time, I created
HAL/PolicyKit policies for /dev/kvm (removing the dependency on kvm
group membership), solved the evdev keyboard mapping issue that plagued
kvm/qemu for several months, and fixed bootloader installation to virtio
disks.  I also triaged and linked upstream several dozen kvm and
virt-manager bugs.

I provided Ubuntu packaging expertise to the Landscape development team,
in refining the landscape-* and smartpm packages for main inclusion.  As
a side-effect of packaging landscape-sysinfo, I saw an opportunity for
some generally useful functionality and created the 'update-motd'
utility and package.  I successfully navigated it from its creation,
through REVU, into universe, through MainInclusion, and into main.

My most sweeping and challenging item in Intrepid was enabling Ubuntu to
configurably boot on a degraded RAID1 device.  This involved a number of
intricate changes to mdadm, grub, grub-installer, partman, and
initramfs-tools.  I learned a considerable amount about developing and
testing within the Ubuntu alternate/server installer.  And my newfound
debconf-fu has come in handy with several other packages, and helping
other developers.  Delivering this functionality has tested my patience
many times over.  I believe that I have maintained a professional and
friendly decor with even the most hostile users on several touchy
Launchpad bugs.

Perhaps my most visible contribution has been the per-user encrypted
~/Private directories optionally available in Intrepid.  The ecryptfs
kernel module has been around since the 2.6.19 kernel, but only basic
PAM and userspace functionality existed.  I wrote several new programs
from scratch, including ecryptfs-setup-private, mount.ecryptfs_private,
and umount.ecryptfs_private, and enhanced the pam_ecryptfs module.  All
of this code was developed in conjunction with upstream and contributed
back to that community.  Similar to the RAID development, there's no
shortage of opinions on the matter of encryption.  This was another
touchy area that required a level-head with some very opinionated
individuals.

From a community perspective, I develop two web-based tools that dozens
of Ubuntu developers use everyday.  The Ubuntu Manpage Repository, and
the Ubuntu Developer Documentation Search.
 * http://manpages.ubuntu.com/
 * http://people.ubuntu.com/~kirkland/search.html

As an upstream, I'm the maintainer, or co-maintainer of several
projects, including: eCryptfs (as a result of my recent work),
update-motd, musica, and bogosec (packaged in my PPA, to be uploaded to
Universe soon).

In terms of future development, I'm working on backporting the RAID
fixes to Hardy as an LTS server platform.  I'd like to have swap
encrypted by default (and without requiring any effort by the user) on
the majority Ubuntu installations.  I'd like to extend the encrypted
~/Private directory work by providing sensible SELinux/AppArmor profiles
for ecryptfs, and revisit the concept of encrypting a user's entire home
directory.  Also, I'd like to couple with the Desktop team to bring some
graphical management utilities to enable and configure one's encrypted
~/Private directory to Gnome, KDE, and XFCE.  I intend to enhance the
Ubuntu alternate/server installer and our init processes to more
completely support iSCSI as storage media.  I will continue to create
status actions for init scripts that need them.  I'm working on patches
to "man" itself to remotely retrieve manpages from a repository such as
manpages.ubuntu.com.  And I'm currently packaging "pwrkap", a
green-computing utility from IBM that is able to cap the power
consumption by servers.

I hope to become an Ubuntu Core Developer in order to work more
efficiently with Ubuntu main packages, and to continue to mentor other
developers.  Thanks for your consideration.

-- 
:-Dustin

Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Server Developer
Canonical, LTD
kirkland at canonical.com
GPG: 1024D/83A61194
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/attachments/20081024/f8be1dd3/attachment.pgp