I talked many times about getting involved with developing Ubuntu and how it can seem daunting and that there’s much to learn. When I talked to contributors who had reached the critical point where they understood what they can do, who they can talk to and how the processes roughly work, most of them said that three things helped them to get to the point: the documentation, talking to the people, code reviews....
Congratulations everyone, we got a fantastic LTS release out, some of the reactions of our users you can see here. Well done! :) At the same time understandable, but also worrying is the look at our sponsoring page. Silently with all the release freezes in place, the number of open sponsorship items has crept up to ~70 again. If you are an Ubuntu developer or can help out with reviewing patches, please head to the sponsoring queue and help out....
New contributors who don’t have upload rights to Ubuntu yet get their code reviewed and their packages uploaded by Ubuntu developers. This process is called “sponsoring” and our current process has been in place since pretty much forever. It has even gotten easier over time, so new branches or patches show up on our review queue. Two years ago when we were struggling with getting code reviewed, we put in place “patch pilots”, a great concept we borrowed from the Bazaar team....