Application: Ubuntu Contributing Developer - Matthieu Clemenceau

Community Ubuntu Developer Membership
1

I, Matthieu Clemenceau, apply for Ubuntu Contributing Developer.

Contact Information

About Me

Well hello there o/

I’ve been working with Linux professionally since 2001, experimenting with Gentoo at first and eventually settling with Debian and Ubuntu around 2010.

My public contribution to Ubuntu started in 2020 when I joined Canonical as the lead for the Ubuntu Foundations team. As director of engineering, I’ve been part of the planning and execution of about 12 Ubuntu releases from Focal Fossa 20.04 LTS to Resolute Racoon 26.04 LTS with a team’s scope including: boot stack, package management, crypto libraries, toolchains, Architectures (Pi, ARM, RISC-V) and the release process.

While leadership responsibilities kept me plenty busy, I also enjoyed the opportunity to contribute actively with the team helping me learn and understand what developers in the archive need — and to build tools to help with that.

Why I Am Applying

  • Well first it is about time, I should have done it sooner …
  • I’ve been surrounded by some of the most formidable Ubuntu Contributors daily and I want to formalize my ongoing contributions to Ubuntu Development for them and to support new contributors in the future
  • I want to continue contributing regularly to packaging and tooling and work further toward increased upload permissions
  • Signal a long-term commitment to Ubuntu development beyond my day job
  • mclemenceau@ubuntu.com sounds pretty cool

My Ubuntu Contributions

Full sponsorship history (49 uploads): https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?render=html&sponsor=&sponsor_search=name&sponsoree=*clemenceau*&sponsoree_search=name

Merges

Package Bug Notes
debmirror LP#2115273, LP#2139017 Questing + Resolute
syslinux LP#2116046, LP#2131558 Questing + Resolute
quassel LP#2115232
dpkg-dev-el LP#2115457
mdk3 LP#2097796 FTBFS fix
mlucas LP#2098099 FTBFS fix
aevol LP#2071412, LP#2098425 FTBFS fix
toybox LP#2098577 FTBFS fix
opensp LP#2083245

SRUs

Package Bug Releases
skiboot LP#1904585, LP#1905393 Xenial, Bionic, Focal, Groovy
bash LP#1878517 Focal
apport LP#1732962 Xenial, Bionic
valgrind LP#1887974 Bionic, Focal
openssl-ibmca LP#1926960 Focal, Groovy, Hirsute
shim-signed LP#1856422 Bionic
libgcrypt20 LP#2083245 Questing

Bugs

I’ve filled various bugs over the years. always trying to keep my work documented with proper LP bugs coverage. I’ve also open some bug during ISO testing or while living on the edge running the devel series trying latest features before GA. Fun!

Other Ubuntu Work

While packaging is a lot of fun and always different, I have a dear interest in improving visibility on the development process or any aspect of the package life cycle.

In particular I’ve got interest into the Ubuntu excuses and wrote visual-excuses, CLI tool and Snap for visualizing the Ubuntu proposed-migration dependency graph. Filters by team, component, age, and FTBFS status.

More recently, I put together, with the help of AI, ubuntu-mission-control, Real-time release tracking dashboard built on the tests.ubuntu.com API, showing artifact approval status, build freshness, and manual test progress at a glance.

Areas for Improvement

  • My contributions have been uneven in cadence, bursts of activity rather than a steady rhythm. Ubuntu Contributing Developer status is partly motivated by wanting to commit to a more regular pace.
  • My SRU experience is solid but concentrated in older cycles; I want to be more active in current-release SRU work going forward.
  • MIR activity is a strong miss on my upload history, I would like to find a few MIR opportunities
  • I would love to find some packages not in Ubuntu yet and go through the new package process!

Future Plans

  • Keep doing merges, FTBFS, bug fixes and other contributions on a regular basis
  • Continue developing tooling to make Ubuntu development more visible and accessible to contributors
  • Work toward package-specific upload rights over time

Thanks for your consideration

6 Likes
2

I endorse Matt for Ubuntu Contributing Developer membership.

Sponsoring feedback

As I am not as active in the Ubuntu community, it’s been a while since I last sponsored any packages, so my memory is a bit blurry. One thing I do remember: Matt was always open to feedback, and always had the attention to detail one would expect from a valuable contributor.

Specific experiences of working together

I have worked with Matt for many years. He was present on multiple Ubuntu in-person release sprints, actively helping with the preparation of the new release. He not only helped us keep focus and stay organized, but also performed testing, QA and reviews. Matt was always interested in contributing to Ubuntu, even though he was super busy with management activities. His knowledge of Ubuntu, the ecosystem and the community is on a core-dev level.

Areas of improvement and next steps

I think Matt is on the right course; he just needs to keep moving forward, one step at a time. And one day applying for MOTU or core-dev.

2 Likes
3

I endorse Matthieu for Ubuntu Contributing Developer membership.

Disclosure: I should disclose that Matthieu is my second line manager in Canonical. I suspect those that know me realise that is unlikely to colour my decision to endorse, but it should be taken into consideration nonetheless.

Sponsoring history

While I’ve only sponsored one thing for Matthieu, he’s been an active contributor now for several years (as evidenced by his upload history linked in the main post), and what I’ve seen of his submissions have always been of good quality, ready for sponsorship. He’s always been open to feedback and accepting of advice.

Beyond packaging work, (as noted by Łukasz above, but also from my personal experience) he’s worked directly with the release team on several releases, even contributing a live dashboard to track release progress during resolute’s release.

Future steps

Matthieu’s already worked productively on bugs, package merges from Debian, and SRUs across many releases. I suspect he’s easily ready to apply for a PPU on any packages he has a consistent history with. Perhaps even MOTU in the not-too-distant future?

4

I also endorse Matthieu for Ubuntu Contributing Developer membership.

Disclosure: Matthieu has been my direct manager in Canonical for the past year and a half, so I obviously can’t be objective (spoiler: nobody really is anyway). Nevertheless, this decision to endorse is mine and mine alone, and we actually didn’t even discuss his application in our weekly 1:1.

Sponsoring feedback

I’ve only sponsored one package (yes, I’ve messed up the -v, that was among my first sponsorships :sweat_smile:), and it wasn’t straight ready for upload, but Matt took the feedback very seriously, and grabbed the opportunity to learn more about git-ubuntu and our badly named mergerebase process.

Specific experiences of working together

Despite not being a very active package uploader, Matt is very active driving the Canonical Foundations team, and more particularly the Ubuntu Release Management team. That usually means having a high level view and coming up with new tooling to help improve the teams efficiency (like visual-excuses or ubuntu-mission-control). Those personal initiatives he took, definitely not part of Canonical’s roadmap, have already helped make Ubuntu development and release easier.

Areas of improvement and next steps

Yes, we always need more uploaders, and something like MOTU would be an obvious choice as a next step. But in that case I would rather encourage Matt to keep doing what he does, and find some other places where a huge and/or obscure and/or scattered chunk(s) of text could be efficiently replaced by some visual dashboard/view, because I’ve found he’s very efficient at this, and it usually has a great impact on many people at once.
In addition, I would encourage him to polish a bit more his little pet projects, to actually bring them to a point where they can become official tools that are documented and people rely on. I’m thinking for example about visual-excuses’s performance in complicated entangled situations.