Package Maintainer Application - Hyacinthe Cartiaux
Hi, My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support. I live near Metz in France and I've been working as an HPC sysadmin at the University of Luxembourg for the last 15 years. You can find me by my first name on IRC or my unix login "hcartiaux" anywhere else. My Linux journey started in the 2000s with Mandrake 8.2 which was a magical (pun intended) experience, discovering all the desktop/window managers packed on the 3 CD-Rs, as well as Dreamcast-Linux which I used to write my first Hello World in C. I then used Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo, before settling on Arch Linux in 2007, convinced by its design and the KISS philosophy. This experience has definitely shaped my professional skills and mindset. In the past years, I've shared my personal projects on GitHub[0] and more recently on Codeberg[1] as well. Among others, I've been particularly active in the dn42 community[2] and developed a BGP auto-peering service[3] which I had the opportunity to talk about at FOSDEM this year[4]. I also build and release OpenBSD cloud images[5] with cloud-init. On the Arch Linux packaging side, I am maintaining some packages on the AUR[6] and I've submitted a fair amount of Merge Requests on the Arch Linux gitlab, most notably to add missing nvchecker integration to packages[7]. I've also been active in the testing team, and started working on small PoC package testing suite using bash, bats and podman[8]. Some packages should obviously be tested on real hardware but, currently, testing packages is a quite repetitive and not well documented task, so I think that centralizing test cases as code could be a good idea. Aside from packaging-related contributions, I submitted two Merge Requests to pacman (pending approval): * one to fix compilation warnings (and make the CI green)[9] * another one to fix a bug (#297) regarding temporary directories left in /var/cache/pacman[10]. I genuinely enjoyed reading the pacman code. C is not my day job but I'm interested in everything low-level. Outside of the cyberspace, I like biking and hiking in the forest, ping me and I'll happily share my preferred spots in Luxembourg and in the greater area ;) If I'm accepted as a Package Maintainer, I'm especially interested in maintaining HPC and sysadmin related packages in [extra], such as: * clustershell * lmod * env-modules * netcalc * autofs I'd also be interested in moving the following AUR packages: * cvmfs * turbovnc * screen-message * ruby-hiera-eyaml * puppet-lint I'm willing to adopt some of the currently orphaned packages in [extra] (e.g. encfs, cdrdao, sg3_utils, nss-mdns) and also to help maintain some packages that only have one maintainer at the moment (e.g. bats* packages, gocryptfs, parted, iotop, smartmontools, autossh, python-paramiko, expect, ncftp, cdparanoia, powertop, unrar/unzip...). I may be interested in contributing to other areas as well in the future, such as bug wrangling and maybe infrastructure/devops (since I'm fairly accustomed to Ansible/Terraform). Thanks in advance for your feedback and for considering my application! Best, Hyacinthe [0] https://github.com/hcartiaux [1] https://codeberg.org/hcartiaux [2] https://hcartiaux.github.io/dn42/ [3] https://github.com/hcartiaux/dn42-sshd-autopeer [4] https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/RPJHYK-automating_bgp_peerings_in_the... [5] https://github.com/hcartiaux/openbsd-cloud-image [6] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?SeB=M&K=hcartiaux [7] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/groups/archlinux/-/merge_requests/?author_usern... [8] https://codeberg.org/hcartiaux/archlinux-testing [9] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/merge_requests/349 [10] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/merge_requests/348
On 4/12/26 3:59 PM, Hyacinthe Cartiaux wrote:
Hi,
My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support.
[...]
Hi, I confirm my sponsorship, I think Hyacinthe would be a good addition to our team :) Good luck! -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz
On 12.04.26 at 15:59 (UTC+0200), Hyacinthe Cartiaux wrote:
Hi,
My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support.
I live near Metz in France and I've been working as an HPC sysadmin at the University of Luxembourg for the last 15 years. You can find me by my first name on IRC or my unix login "hcartiaux" anywhere else.
Hi, nice to see another HPC guy coming in. How many Arch Linux nodes does your cluster have? 😉 Cheers, Jakub
Hi Hyacinthe! My name is Benedek.. TLDR; I'm an open source newbie and I ask dumb questions; While this is my first reply to the aur mailing list and I have almost no reputation for contributing to open source or archlinux, I would like to kindly ask you the following question and I hope you will answer at your discretion and a level of detail you are satisfied with; I'm not the right person to decide the fate of your application, I'm only curious and I love prying into topics I have little knowledge about:
I genuinely enjoyed reading the pacman code. C is not my day job but I'm interested in everything low-level. TLDR; Fun fact: Working with C could be anywhere from easy to terrifying as a package maintainer imo but maybe I'm mistaken.
Having worked for so long being a sysadmin, could you please give us an overview of how low of a low-level you are talking about? I have clicked through your repositories but at first glance (but I'm sure there's more) I only found shell scripts and configuration files for containers. Is it just adventuring into C itself as a programming language that you are interested in, or would you go deeper than that, like maybe even to the extreme of working with things like microcode, graphics drivers, fileystems? So this is a spectrum of course, but on a scale of 1 to 10? I understand that as a package maintainer there is less responsibility on you than on the programmer, but to properly test these things can prove to be difficult. Now I apologize if my question is inappropriate for a package maintainer application. I just had this idea in my head as someone who is concerned with detail and things working well; and most of all security. And correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that it comes with great responsibility to maintain projects with low-level code. If you dislike this question I won't mind if it goes unanswered. Have a lovely day. Yours truly, Benedek On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 at 20:32, Jakub Klinkovský <lahwaacz@archlinux.org> wrote:
On 12.04.26 at 15:59 (UTC+0200), Hyacinthe Cartiaux wrote:
Hi,
My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support.
I live near Metz in France and I've been working as an HPC sysadmin at the University of Luxembourg for the last 15 years. You can find me by my first name on IRC or my unix login "hcartiaux" anywhere else.
Hi,
nice to see another HPC guy coming in. How many Arch Linux nodes does your cluster have? 😉
Cheers, Jakub
On 4/12/26 8:32 PM, Jakub Klinkovský wrote:
nice to see another HPC guy coming in. How many Arch Linux nodes does your cluster have? 😉
No Arch at work except for my laptop (plenty of Debian and RHEL/Rocky systems though), but we offer a bare-metal redeployment feature to our users so it's absolutely possible. That said, I will not start this side quest myself ;) -- Hyacinthe
Hi everyone, On 4/12/26 15:59, Hyacinthe Cartiaux wrote:
My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support.
I confirm my sponsorship, Hyacinthe has demonstrated fine skills and eagerness to contribute to Arch, in addition to being very friendly :) Good luck! Rémi
On 4/13/26 9:43 AM, Remi Gacogne wrote:
Hi everyone,
On 4/12/26 15:59, Hyacinthe Cartiaux wrote:
My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support.
I confirm my sponsorship, Hyacinthe has demonstrated fine skills and eagerness to contribute to Arch, in addition to being very friendly :)
Good luck!
Rémi
Both sponsors have confirmed their sponsorship. This marks the beginning of the discussion period which will last for two weeks and will end on 2026-04-27 :) -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz
On 4/13/26 9:52 AM, Robin Candau wrote:
On 4/13/26 9:43 AM, Remi Gacogne wrote:
Hi everyone,
On 4/12/26 15:59, Hyacinthe Cartiaux wrote:
My name is Hyacinthe and I'm hereby applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is sponsored by Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne), whom I met at FOSDEM this year, and Robin Candau (Antiz). I sincerely thank both of them for their availability and support.
I confirm my sponsorship, Hyacinthe has demonstrated fine skills and eagerness to contribute to Arch, in addition to being very friendly :)
Good luck!
Rémi
Both sponsors have confirmed their sponsorship. This marks the beginning of the discussion period which will last for two weeks and will end on 2026-04-27 :)
Hi, Friendly reminder that there is one week left for the discussion period. If you have anything to say to Hyacinthe, now is the time :) -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz
participants (5)
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Hyacinthe Cartiaux
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Jakub Klinkovský
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Remi Gacogne
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Robin Candau
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Shard smp