MOTU Application

[Andrea Veri]

Dear MOTU council,

I'm asking to please consider this mail as my application to become an 
official Master of the Universe.

I started working with MOTUs exactly one year and two months ago (after 
becoming a Ubuntu Member) with my first upload to REVU dated 26 May 
2006, working closely with Jordan Mantha that started following my work 
reviewing and helping me out with first packaging tasks. Since the begin 
I was very interested in everything  torrent related, which taken me to 
create the MOTU-Torrents team, which takes care of a great number of 
torrent applications, like gnome-btdownload (I co-maintain in debian) in 
main, that was still at version 0.0.25 after several months of version 
0.0.28 upstream upgrade, which I packaged fixing tons of bugs reported 
since 2006.
I'm currently involved in debian too [1], working mostly on p2p 
applications, waiting verlihub (famous dc++ hub software) to join the 
archive soon with NEW processing, and recently on libagg, communicating 
with upstream to make it a shared library for next releases.
One of the most important things I believe in for hopefuls and for new 
contributors is the word "documentation", that's why I managed to write 
a new chapter for the official ubuntu packaging guide, named 
"Debian/Rules" [2], that takes care of explaining a lot of usefull 
informations regarding one of the most important maintainer scripts in 
debian/ , but makefiles in general. I've matured the decision to write 
such a document because I've seen a lot of requests/questions/problems 
regarding this specific file, and it seems that it has been appreciated 
looking into user's mail, I received. I worked a lot doing tons of 
merges and bug fixes [3] for a great number of applications, reporting 
the patches to the debian BTS too, to get them included improving both 
debian and ubuntu distributions to simplify MOTU's life while merging 
new revisions/releases in a second time.
Working directly with upstream is one of the main goals I usually have 
when starting a package; I currently maintain most of my packages using 
bzr where upstream can push new files or new previews, that can be 
simply merged with my branches containing debian dirs and finally 
building them using a great tool: bzr-builddeb.
During this long period, I've learnt to cooperate closely with upstream 
and debian maintainers trying to import ubuntu changes/bug 
fixes/patches, directly to debian, getting packages directly synced in 
ubuntu making everyone's life easier with new development circles.
One of the things, I would love most becoming a MOTU, is the sponsoring 
process, reviewing, giving hints, help new packagers to figure out their 
problems on REVU, and also learn making one more step forward from where 
I am now, improving my skills and experience just with helping who needs 
an hand.
I'll keep working on motu-torrents team, with the main goal to introduce 
a new libtorrent with the support for a lot of new clients and features, 
also processing incoming merges, improving the work with upstream, 
trying to move them to maintain their source directly using bzr branches 
on launchpad, working on bug-fixes and sponsoring new packagers joining 
the U-U-S team.

I've subscribed to this mail all my direct sponsors:

- Alexander Sack <asac at ubuntu.com> (sponsor both for ubuntu and debian)
- ZhengPeng Hou <zhengpeng-hou at ubuntu.com> (sponsor)
- Vladimír Lapacek <vil at ubuntu.com> (sponsor)
- Ante Karamatic <ivoks at ubuntu.com> (sponsor)
- Jordan Mantha <mantha at ubuntu.com> (first reviewer and docs sponsor)


[1] 
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=bluekuja%40ubuntu.com&comaint=yes
[2] http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/packagingguide/C/ch04.html
[3] https://launchpad.net/~bluekuja/+packages

thanks for the consideration and hear you soon,

--
Andrea Veri
Email: bluekuja at ubuntu.com
Email: bluekuja at ubuntu-it.org (Contact for Ubuntu Italy)
Email: bluekuja at edubuntu.org (Contact for Edubuntu related stuff)