[aur-general] TU application - Segaja - Aur-general

15 Nov 2021


      Hi everyone,
My name is Andreas Schleifer, in the internet also known as Segaja, and I would
like to apply to the position of a Trusted User. My sponsors are Levente Polyak
and Jelle van der Waa, thanks for that ;)
I'm a 34 years old DevOps engineer in the same company as Levente is currently
working in. I have started as a (PHP) developer and have over time migrated to
also doing devops work.
My Linux "career" started around 2005/2006 during my university time with Ubuntu.
A few years later a friend of mine kindly pointed me to Arch Linux. At the
beginning it was a bit uncomfortable for me but I quickly embraced the fact that
there was no UI to configure anything and that you have to work directly on the
configuration files.
In the past year I have started to become more interested in packaging for Arch
which made me adopt two orphaned AUR packages ([1] and [2]) and upload one new
package [3]) to AUR. Some packages I started as AUR packages were later moved by
Levente into the official community repository: [4], [5]
At some point I also got interested in the reproducible builds topic and helped
out there a bit [6]. This is also where I got in contact with Jelle and we talked
a few times on IRC back then.
When I got interested in becoming a TU I talked with Levente about this and he
suggested that I should try to get some more packaging experience, so he suggested
me to try to (re-)package schleuder [8] which was in a very old and broken version
in AUR back then. It took me quiet a while and I learned a lot, but in the end
I eneded up packaging schleuder [9] and schleuder-cli [10]. The biggest learning
from that for me was
1) that packaging is much more then "dumping" an upstream tool into a PKGBUILD file
    to be installed on a users system and
2) that the ruby ecosystem can be very annoying to deal with. A lot of inconsistent
    tools to be used for testing and a lot of cyclic dependencies which makes writing
    PKGBUILD files with check() functions very difficult.
In the process of packaging the schleuder packages I also ended up with a host of
other ruby packages which were needed [11].
In order to be able to package the schleuder packages I also worked closely with
the upstream maintainers to resolve issues that came up in the Arch Linux build
environment.
I have some devops experience from my daily work and I would like to also offer
this to Arch Linux over time. I already talked with Jelle and Levente about some
of the devops projects that were going on in the past. I'm currently also working
on an ansible role to install schleuder on Arch Linux infrastructure [12] in order to
handlesecurity@archlinux.org  [13].
As TU I would also like to help out Levent and other package maintainers to keep
their awesome packages up to date with upstream changes/releases (e.g. [4], [5],
[7]). I would also like to migrate hss [1] and stern [2] to the official
repositories, as I believe they are both very useful tools for people who work
with servers (hss) and kubernetes (stern) often.
If you have any questions or want to know more you can also reach me on IRC
in #archlinux
Best regards
Segaja
[1]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/hss/
[2]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/stern/
[3]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/prometheus-dnsmasq-exporter-git/
[4]https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/aliyun-cli/
[5]https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/alicloud-vault/
[6]https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2020-06/
[7]https://archlinux.org/packages/community/any/ls++/
[8]https://schleuder.org/
[9]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/schleuder/
[10]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/schleuder-cli/
[11]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=Segaja&SeB=m
[12]https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/infrastructure/-/merge_requests/497
[13]https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/infrastructure/-/issues/178
GET | 200 | 709 ms | cloudflare