Hello all! My name is Caleb Maclennan (AUR moniker “caleb”, most other places “alerque”). I’m a long time Arch Linux user and AUR contributor looking to get more involved, and specifically to join the TU group so that I can help out with packages in [community]. I’m particularly interested in the Lua ecosystem (which thanks largely to @Daurnimator is much less of a mess than it was a year ago when I first started looking into becoming a TU, but could still use a helping hand) as well as anything related to font development or typesetting. As you’ll see I have some experience in FOSS, software packaging, and Linux in general, but maybe the most important thing is I can still learn and I’m open to learning and adapting so that my contributions are in cooperation with the rest of the community, not in conflict with it. Two existing TUs, Daurnimator and Archange, have agreed to sponsor my application: * https://archlinux.org/people/trusted-users/#daurnimator * https://archlinux.org/people/trusted-users/#Archange For full disclosure I did put out feelers about a year ago looking for sponsors and didn’t get any takers at the time. Nobody outright refused but several emails went unanswered and TUs in IRC commented on various things but nobody “bit”. As for the minimum basic requirements: * I definitely know my way around shell scripts (I prefer ZSH, but have a good grasp of Bash and POSIX usage too) and also most VCS systems. * I’ve been maintaining hundreds of AUR packages for some years, some of them cleaner than others. I would expect anything destined for [community] to be held to a high standard of cleanliness and testing and won’t be offended if some hacks I’ve let slide in the AUR aren’t appropriate for other repos. * The weak point in my application may be my low bbs/mailing list involvement, but you can check my Stack Exchange profile or other places to see that I’m not clueless. I’ll be willing to keep in touch with other TUs (and the bug tracker, which I feel like is sometimes neglected for community packages). * Yes I can Google words. * Below I’ll outline some packages and my various interests in them. * I have some past involvement reporting in the Flyspray and GitLab trackers for Arch packages and projects. * I don’t recall sending patches for any Arch projects yet, only patches for packaging. * I have lots of other FOSS involvement, everything from well known projects like Harfbuzz or Pandoc to esoteric VIM plugins. I have upstream contributions to dozens of projects in [community] already and a large chunk of the things I current package on the AUR. Packages I have previously maintained in the AUR which have already been adopted into [community]; where extra hands are welcome I could still help with these: * age * birdfont * gentium-plus-font * git-annex * git-crypt * gitlab * gitlab-workhorse * grunt-cli * lua-filesystem * lua51-penlight * mattermost * otf-libertinus * pqiv * python-hsluv * python-pytoml * shutter (later demoted back to AUR for good reason) * ttf-hack * xkcdpass * yq Other packages already in [community] which interest me and I would potentially be interested in co-maintaining, help keeping up to date, fixing packaging bugs, etc: * hledger: upstream contributor \ Flyspray packaging reports have taken months and some years * lilypond * lua-penlight: upstream contributor \ has often been months OOD even when patches in Flyspray * pandoc: upstream contributor \ is less ofter a problem recently but historically was often OOD in \ community, I know the Haskell deps are deep dark depths, but having \ it OOD has been a constant pain point for me * sword * tridactyl: upstream contributor * vim-nerdcommentor: upstream maintainer * vim-nerdtree: upstream contributor Current (semi) orphans in [community] I might pick up: * python-fonttools \ (current maintainer Andrzej recently said they need help) * python-unicodedata2 (same) Things I currently maintain in the AUR that I would like to see eventually migrated to [community], of course dependent on all the packaging details and usage stats being copastetic: * asterisk * csvkit * epubcheck * font-manager * gitlab-pages * lua-busted * lua-posix * marktext * myrepos * praat * programmers-dvorak * sile: upstream maintainer (+12 lua-* deps) * ttfautohint * vcsh * xiphos * zerobane-studio * zettlr Things I don’t maintain in the AUR but would like to see moved someday (off the top of my head, I’m sure there are more): * bottom * duf * git-delta * gitahead * gitlab-glab * wp-cli AUR packages: * Maintainer (553): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=caleb&SeB=m * Co-maintainer (90): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=caleb&SeB=c Even with hundreds of AUR packages I only get a trickle of OOD flags because I follow most of the projects I package upstream. At the very least I subscribe to release notices, but often I’m more involved and use the packages myself, so am motivated to keep them up to date. I have just a wee bit of *nix experience over the past 27 years, for example you can have a look around my Stack Exchange profile for the Unix & Linux site: https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/1925/caleb?tab=topactivity Over the years I’ve been involved in quite a few FOSS projects: * Github profile: https://github.com/alerque * Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/alerque * OpenHub profile: https://www.openhub.net/accounts/alerque This won’t even be my first Linux distro rodeo. After cutting my teeth on early RedHat (when it came on 4 floppies!) I eventually became heavily involved in PLD Linux development from 1998 to 2012 (when I started switching to Arch Linux). I was a member of the CDG (Core Developers Group) and contributed thousands of packaging updates. I was always in good standing with the other team members. My current Arch usage includes use or admin responsibilities OS on 9 desktops, 4 laptops, 13 assorted devices (RPis, print and NAS servers), 6 permanent cloud servers, 3 bare metal servers, and any number of containers (ephemeral cloud server instances, local and remote Docker/lxc services, VirtualBox, etc.). It has been my daily driver for desktop and server use for 9 years now. Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hopefully many more years of being part of a great distro! Caleb P.S. Obligatory flame war fodder: (Neo)vim forever, always use Oxford commas, spaces not tabs, döner and tacos.