On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 4:14 AM, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:
Sorry about the novel...
My personal opinion is that uploading good-quality packages to the AUR doesn't hurt even if you decide to orphan them quickly. They provide a starting poing for anyone else looking for those packages.
See below though. From the introductory message, I think Laszlo's technical experience is impressive. I think that having a TU who focuses on making Arch a viable alternative for embedded systems would be a great asset to Arch overall. Looking over his PKGBUILDs I would say that most of them look good at first glance.*
I haven't particularly focused on Laszlo in the mailing list although I have been aware of his name popping up in the "From" column recently. I did instantly recognize his forum avatar though, although I hadn't connected that account to the posts on this list.
In the last week or so I've been very aware of Laszlo posting on the forum. He is very often the first to respond in thread when someone is seeking help. My impression has been that his posts often come across as agressive or overly enthusiastic (the two are easily mistaken). He does provide useful information in some cases, but often it feels as though he would be shouting at someone face-to-face.** I realize that this may be a cultural and/or linguistic issue and the latter is not something that I would criticize someone for. The finer nuances of tone is easily lost in written communication even among native speakers, but still, it does come off quite abrasively sometimes.
What concerns me the most though, in conjunction with Allan's and Loui's remarks above, is the very real possibility that Laszlo is attempting to socially engineer his way to becoming a TU. I present this merely as an idea and I honestly do not mean to offend anyone if this is not the case. It just seems suspicious that his forum activity has increase so much just shortly before posting an application, especially if he's been using Arch for nearly one and a half years, as he states in his introductory message (and as Allan points out, the statement's he made there do not fit well with registration dates or the types of questions that he was asking other TUs recently).
It feels like he's trying to game points by being visibly "helpful". "Bragging" about how many packages he was maintaining, as Ghost1227 put it, seems in line with this idea. I would suggest looking over his forum and mailing list posts with this in mind, especially the ones which appear to jump in on answers that have already been given. I'll leave that there for now though so as not to overly bias anyone's opinion before they've given this more consideration.
Archlinux Contribution isn't my short distance plan only. I like to do it, I like to give helping hand for the newbies. I wouldn't like to be a Social Engineer or a one who expect respect from others. I just try to do my best in this activity. I don't have any background purpose with forum/maillist posts, because it wouldn't be good to do this with that distribution/community which counts for me so much. I wouldn't have liked to brag with my packages, it wouldn't be the best habit, correct from anybody, I think so too. Then I've just realised the TUs said, lesser, cleaner packages are better.
As I said, this may be just a cultural/linguistic issue. A lot of enthusiasm can easily come across the wrong way too, but at this point I remain hesitant about this application. I really don't expect my opinion to weigh in that much though because I still feel like "the new guy" here. ;)
* I'm not sure what the symlinks are doing in this one though: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libftd2xx/libftd2xx/PKGBUILD
It makes the symlinks to the present version of library/archive.
and there are a few that still have "$startdir" in them, but I see that you're in the process of changing them so that's not an issue at all: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nesc/nesc/PKGBUILD
Oops, I've forgotten to update, solved, thanks.
**examples: from a previous mailing list message, before the user could even reply to Biro's message: "Follow suggestion from Biro Ionut!" A forum-thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=77032
It was just a confirmation I think, like the well-known '+1' :) No problem about novel, thank you once more time the reply. Best Regards, Laszlo Papp