MOTU report - Issue 1

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello everyone,


=> What is this about <=

this is the first issue of the MOTU report, a report coming to you
monthly to give you the big picture of what the MOTU (Masters of the
Universe) have been doing. It is supposed to be a big thank you to all
the volunteers and should show you that you can actually make the
change.

The MOTU team currently consists of Jonathan Riddell (Riddell), Oliver
Grawert (ogra), Paul Sladen (sladen), Brandon Hale (tseng), Chuck Short
(zul), Martijn Van De Streek (Treenaks), Daniel T. Chen (crimsun),
Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) and Daniel Holbach (dholbach). 

If you want to get involved in maintaining the Universe, have
suggestions towards Universe packages or want to make us aware of bugs,
please drop in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net


=> Fresh blood in the MOTU crew <=

We feel most obliged to get new members into the process, so first some
notes on the fresh blood in the team. The most active new contributors
have been: Aaron Lake (metalikop), who worked on the Python
transition[1], specifically gnome-mud, duplicity, cfv, imgsizer and
eyed3 now support Python2.4. Niall Sheridan (dredg) also worked on [1]
(mbot, offlineimap and serpento) and added a new star to the Universe:
gaim-encryption. Jani Monoses (jani) worked on [1] too; pythoncad and
pyopenal specifically. Jorge O. Castro (whiprush) made pysol support
Python 2.4 too. Sivan Green (sivang) fixed quite a couple of bugs,
although not in Universe, he needs to be mentioned as well:
gnome-system-tools and yelp now are more usable due to his efforts. On
another side, together with Enrico Zini, he worked on the early planning
and organization of what has become the Ubuntu Documentation Project.
Current efforts are done by Scott Ritchie (YokoZar), working on wine for
Hoary. Jerry Haltom, Mattias Eriksson, Luke Yelavich and Hervé Cauwelier
are on the Community Councils agenda, too.


=> MOTU work <=

Jonathan Riddell (Riddell) Riddell gave his love to KDE in general and
to unsermake, kynaptic and amarok specifically. He says: "if you have
KDE problems, I'm your man".

Oliver Grawert (ogra) maintains graveman and gcursor, laid his hands on
nicotine, streamtuner, ecasound, mol, roundup and ion3 and is busy as
the MOTU master, hwdb master and MOTU enthusiast.

Brandon Hale (tseng) has been involved in porting mono to Ubuntu since
the very begining. Soon after the Warty pre-release his work on mono &
co was merged into universe. tomboy, and the latest packages for muine
and f-spot followed in Hoary. He works closely together with Debian Mono
team and upstream developers, and maintains the packages actively. His
latest achievement was gtk-sharp2 in Hoary.

Chuck Short (zul) describes himself as "kernel team member, 386 port,
patch monkey for ubuntu kernel", a really incredible understatement. He
co-leads the team, while fabbione is on holidays and fixes the nasty
parts of your Ubuntu distribution. Great work!

Martijn van de Streek (Treenaks) and Tollef Fog Heen (Mithrandir) have
just been made MOTU master and are happy to help you get into the MOTU
crew.

Daniel T. Cheng (crimsun) worked on gtk-gnutella, python-pymad, XFce 4.2
& rox-filer migration and beep-media-player ALSA fixes. 

Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) worked on boa-constructor, revelation,
python-id3, mboxcheck-applet, pyro, pyro-gui, webcheck, gnue-common and
viewcvs in the Python transition and actively maintains gnue-common,
gnue-forms-wxgtk, gnue-designer, gnue-appserver, gnue-reports,
gnue-navigator, treecc, pnet, pnet-assemblies, pnetc. 

Daniel Holbach (dholbach) worked on a couple of Python packages, now
maintains bluefish, bwm-ng, gparted and timer-applet in Universe, works
on coaster, tries to organise the amount of work and gladly helps new
MOTUs to find their way in.


=> Future plans and wishes for the future <=

Future plans include packaging of python-matplotlib by Michael F.
Rimbert (tritium) and a very eager project: Java Packaging [4] by Jerry
Haltom (wasabi).

All of the MOTUs are quite busy, because PreviewFreeze [2] is near and
we want to get as much work done as possible, nevertheless we welcome
each and everyone to drop into #ubuntu-motu and tell us about bugs you
would like to fix, packages you would like to work on, etc. 

As you can see from the list above: it is your involvement that counts
and although it may be a bit of work getting into it, you CAN make the
change. Start here: [3].

I'm sure I forgot someone, sorry for that in advance. If _you_ tell me
what you've been doing in the MOTU world, I'll definitely write about it
next time.

Have a nice day,
 Daniel

[1] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UniversePythonTransitionTODO
[2] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryReleaseSchedule
[3] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/MOTU
[4] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/JavaPackagingProgress