[aur-general] TU Application

[Allan McRae]

nathan owe. wrote:
> Well my name is Nathan Owe.  I am applying to be a TU, a person with 
> the username Ghost1227 looked at some of my pkgs i have made, and he 
> made suggestions on what i should do to improve my PKGBUILDs. well i 
> downloaded all my packages and fixed them according to his 
> suggestions. I do believe my packages do conform to the guidelines. 
> The reason for applying for TU is because i love arch linux and i want 
> to contribute back to this great OS. I love that i can contribute the 
> way i am now, but i want to try and contribute to the development of 
> AUR more by trying to help others as well. I have currently over 60 
> nearly 70 pkgs and still counting. I currently don't have a sponsor. I 
> usually am signed into the IRC channel but usually don't talk much due 
> to working on packages to contribute. my nickname is ndowens on both 
> IRC and AUR.
>
>

Hi Nathan,

I'm not longer a Trusted User so I do not get a vote in this anymore, 
but knowing how this works I would suggest that your application is 
coming too soon.  In the past month, you have been asking for a lot of 
help doing what I consider fairly easy packaging.  This is not saying 
that asking for help is a bad thing, but rather I think that you need 
more time to learn packaging techniques and get used to fixing problem 
situations. 

When you maintain packages in the [community] repo as a Trusted User, 
you are expected to be able to deal with breakages that occur.  These 
are somewhat frequent in a rolling release distribution as updating a 
package that is in the dependency chain of one of your packages can 
cause your package to stop working properly.  The TUs need to be 
confident that you will be able to handle such breakages (whether they 
need a patch or a simple sed line).

I encourage you to continue learning the packaging system and try to 
become a TU at a later date.  Most TUs had been packaging for half a 
year by the time of their application.  Remember, there is a lot you can 
contribute to Arch without being a TU.  In fact, the only thing TUs can 
do that you can not is put binary packages into the [community] repo.  
I'd suggest looking for bugs on the bug tracker and seeing if you can 
replicate the problem, try to fix it and post the fixed PKGBUILD to the 
bug tracker if you can.  That teaches you how to deal with problems 
while proving your ability to become a Trusted User.  

Also remember that it is not the number of packages you maintain, but 
the quality of those packages.  So try to help out in irc or the forums 
rather then taking another package just because you can.  Packaging only 
software you are genuinely interested in helps keep the motivation going.

Cheers,
Allan