[aur-general] TU Application

[Loui Chang]

On Fri 03 Jul 2009 14:40 +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> 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.

Indeed. Well said Allan.
That's pretty much how I feel about this application.