Ubuntu development - joining...

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Samstag, den 03.11.2007, 17:42 -0400 schrieb Tim Hull:
> Hi,

Hello Tim,

> I have been generally lurking around Ubuntu development for several
> months now (since about the Feisty release), and previously had done
> the same around the Warty/Hoary time period.  Though I have found
> Ubuntu to be superior to other Linux distributions (save for maybe
> Debian, except that it doesn't release often enough), I still have
> noticed many issues that have stood out like an eyesore - especially
> when it comes to laptops and multimedia.  I want Ubuntu/Linux to be a
> more viable alternative to Windows, and it really seems like some
> improvements are needed in these areas especially if Ubuntu is to take
> the next step. 

Welcome! Thanks that you want to contribute to Ubuntu. Wanting to get
things done is a good starting motivation. Last week there was the
developer summit in Boston and next whole week all Canonical employees
will be at an internal meeting. So the lists and IRC have calmed down a
bit.

> Anyway, stemming from the issues I've been having, I've been quite
> interested in becoming involved in Ubuntu development.  However, so
> far, my attempts have seemed futile.  For one thing, I noticed a few
> bugs several weeks before Gutsy release - and posted detailed
> information (and in one case, even a patch) but never got a response.
> I keep gathering more information and updating said bugs, but they
> remain unnoticed no matter what I do.  Also, from what I gathered,
> there is no simple way to become a *developer* - yes, there is MOTU,
> but 97% of the issues I'm finding and am concerned about deal with the
> main system, not the universe.  I've also looked for any kind of
> "laptop team" and these seem basically nonexistent save for a couple
> dead mailing lists and a couple contacts that I've had no luck with. 

The best approach is to search a project/issue that you are interested
in, which seems to be improving the laptop experience. There is also a
lengthy document from Andreas Lloyd which lots of contacts:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu

> Does anybody have any pointers for me?  Would it be a good idea to try
> to become an "Ubuntu member" and/or join the QA team at this point?
> Would this make it easier to get my bugs/patches noticed?  I want to
> become involved, but as it stands it seems like I'm piping my efforts
> to /dev/null :) 

The Ubuntu membership is more a kind of reward for contributing a lot to
Ubuntu and expect of getting a nice email address you cannot do a lot
with it.

You will get commit access (motu/core-dev) if you have proved to be a
trustworthy and productive member of the community and the corresponding
privileges will help you to improve your work flow a lot. I don't think
that this is the case yet.

If you have a patch just nag the people on IRC about it.

> P.S. Some of the bugs in question include #151016, #137598, #147883,
> #63543 (reopened recently), #137792, and #141001.  I didn't file all
> of these, but I did reproduce them all and see a likely cause in most
> of the cases... 

All of the above mentioned bugs are very hard to reproduce and a "likely
cause" is not the relevant part of the code that has to be fixed or even
a solution. Furthermore it seems that in general the hardware support of
the MacBook doesn't seems to be very good: Perhaps some ACPI issues.

Cheers,

Sebastian
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