Hi!

My name is Pierre Neidhardt. I am sending my TU application under the sponsor of Alexander F Rødseth (xyproto). (Thanks again, Alexander.)

Before going on with the geekiness, a few things about me: my hobbies include cinema, reading & watching stuff on psychology and education, as well as quitting my job + moving out + travelling to another country every two years. I am a computer scientist. I am deeply interested in algorithms, languages and operating systems, but my main field remains computer graphics. I have worked in research and briefly for the video game industry. I am working / planning on getting games and engines running on Unices. I am also a little active in the Wine project and on AppDB.

I have been dealing with many different flavours of Unices for several years now. My preference goes to KISS / fundamental Unices, such as Gentoo, FreeBSD, or, surprisingly, Arch :D I love the robustness and the scientific approach of these distributions and their philosophy. (I have deep respect for the dreadful http://cat-v.org. :p)

I am fond of programming languages created with a technically simple and elegant design in mind. I am thinking of C, Lua and the younger Go. I've contributed to numerous open-source projects (dwb, Emacs, Mutt, ranger...), since I strongly endorse the opinion that upstream should be fixed first ;) I have created and maintained a few programs. One of them is demlo[1], a (very) dynamic and extensible music organizer. (Currently broken with Lua 5.3 because of an unported dependency... Will fix soon!)

I also used to be a TeX and LaTeX guru and I contributed to a major part of the LaTeX Wikibook[2]. (Beside new content, I helped for a massive re-organization, structure and progression clarification, duplicates removal and pointer use.)

Regarding Arch, I have maintained a few dozen AUR packages[3] in the last few years. (Some of which I have disowned out of a lack of interest.) Other contributions include numerous Wiki edits[4] (Cups, Emacs, Mutt, wifi), a few bug reports (everybody knows Arch has no bugs :p), some forum strolling and some documentation / patches around makepkg & co[5][6].

I have recently been working with Alexander on overhauling the Go package[7]: correct dependencies, strip binaries, update cleanup, set up cross-compilation tool-chain properly and remove unneeded binaries. This gave me even more motivation than before to become a TU. I have subsequently asked Alexander to endorse my TU application.

My focus is on Go packages, other CLI applications, Lua libraries and video games. I might consider packaging Go programs such as gur, camlistore, gotsync, oh, fnd, tabby, to name a few. The `go` compiler enforces static building (rationale: [8]), which often results in packages with no dependencies at all. (The `go` package itself has none!) This makes packaging even more relevant, as the requirements for building the package are much higher than for installing the result.

AUR packages that I would like to maintain in community include clyrics, docx2txt, tespeed, textadept, uncrustify, translate, trash-cli.

Thank you and happy voting!

Cheers!