Dear Quentin, I wish you luck for your application. I'm just a Arch user with no background in security and I'm not really qualified to judge the application. So, this is a question rather than anything else. Your username is quite kind of obfuscated. My naive intuition tells me that this is bad security practice because it would be quite expensive and error-prone to verify if a user I've received a mail from is indeed you or someone who's username is slightly different from you. Is my intuition right or wrong? If wrong, why is it wrong? Thank you. -- Best Jayesh Badwaik Profile: https://www.fz-juelich.de/profile/badwaik_j Legal Notice: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/legal-notice On Wednesday 24 July 2024 22:38:00 CEST mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s wrote:
Hi everyone,
My name is Quentin, or mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s/mh4ckwascut on the AUR and other Arch projects, and I'm applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Robin Candau (Antiz) and Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne).
I'm a graduated CS/networking engineer who is pursuing his studies as a PhD student in cybersecurity at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France (for the curious an abstract of the topic of my PhD is available here: https://theses.fr/s374883).
I started programming in high school, and as I was more and more interested in "how computers work", I naturally started to tinker with Linux. After a little distro hopping, I wanted to dive more into the inner workings of a Linux distribution and Arch was the distro of choice. I fell in love with the rolling release, the always up-to-date packages, the wiki, and the AUR, among others. I now run Arch not only on my main laptop, but on my experimentation machines as well. I tried to go further, explored Gentoo and LFS, but I sticked with Arch as the distro allowing me to best tailor my computers to my needs while being fast and simple (who doesn't hate compilation times?).
With the time I familiarized myself with the AUR, adopted a package I was using that was orphaned, and started submitting my own packages. I ended using a lot of little-used packages from the AUR, such as pentesting tools (for Capture The Flags) and fancy stuff related to my PhD. Most of these packages were orphaned or had bugs, and I started the habit of regularly looking for abandoned packages that I was using and picking them up on the AUR.
A few times, I stumbled on outdated packages in the extra repo (ruby-iostruct and LLVM are the ones I remember), and I thought that if my beloved Arch was sometimes not up-to-date, maybe I could help and make Arch a little better. That's why I'm sending this mail today! Alongside packaging, I helped on other topics around Arch, such as becoming a package tester or improving a few articles in the wiki.
Alongside Arch, I'm involved in OSS in general, contributing to various projects I use. All can be found on my GitHub and GitLab profiles, but big projects I have contributed to are LLVM, GitLab and YunoHost. When I'm not coding something or maintaining my homelab, I'm running or reading to clear my head.
As a Package Maintainer, I would like to bring from my AUR packages to the extra repo podman-desktop, which I feel makes sense as podman and various related tools are already in extra, and a few WebAssembly packages such as wasi-tools. I also plan to merge my zaproxy-desktop package with zaproxy that is already in extra. As for the packages I can co-maintain, I would be happy to help with LLVM-related packages, or any other package that would need help and where I would be useful, like containerization or security tools.
Relevant links:
My AUR packages: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?K=mh4ckwascut&SeB=m My GitHubs (perso and work): https://github.com/mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s and https://github.com/mh4ck-Thales GitLab: https://gitlab.com/mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s/ My personal website: https://www.mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s.xyz/ The YunoHost application I created and maintained for over a year: https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/searxng_ynh My GitLab contributions: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=all&author_username=mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s My LLVM contributions: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues?q=involves%3Amh4ck-Thales
Hoping that gives you a good introduction of myself and my motivations. Thanks for reading, cheers!
Quentin