[aur-general] TU application: Laszlo Papp

[Xyne]

Sorry about the novel...

Biru Ionut <biru.ionut at gmail.com> wrote:
> not many days ago you asked be if is frustrating to have 300 packages in 
> comparative with the number of packages that some TUs have. i see that 
> you got now only 78 packages. Can i asked you why did you got rid of the 
> rest? you picked up only the good ones?

Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> > Daniel J Griffiths wrote:
> > I don't think the issue was that the orphaned packages were worse per 
> > se, I think the issue was that recently he had been bragging about how 
> > he had more packages than most TUs/Devs as if it was a status thing, 
> > and putting down some of us for it... Now all of a sudden he dumps the 
> > majority of his packages. Just seems a bit hypocritical.
> 
> My guess is that it is because we tend to associate huge numbers of 
> packages with not enough time to maintain them and thus lower quality 
> (something I had discussed with him earlier).  So I believe this to be 
> more of an optimizing the changes of being a TU rather than a 
> reassessment of priorities.  Orphaning the several hundred vim 
> plugins/themes only a couple of weeks after putting them there is a bit 
> weird.


My personal opinion is that uploading good-quality packages to the AUR
doesn't hurt even if you decide to orphan them quickly. They provide a
starting poing for anyone else looking for those packages.

See below though.







Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> I don't vote on TU matters anymore, but I will put this out there.  The 
> recent spike in Laszlo's activities leads me to be concerned about 
> longevity and some accuracy in his original application.  He claims to 
> be using Arch for ~1 1/2 years.  But it was only two moths ago I saw him 
> on IRC asking some fairly basic questions about pacman features and what 
> was the equivalent to doing some emerge (Gentoo) operations.  Two months 
> also corresponds to his here registered on the forums.  That concerns 
> me, but I could be entirely wrong here.
> 
> Allan

Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been speaking to Laszlo over the past month and the impression that
> I get is that he really doesn't understand boundaries when it comes to
> communication. This can become extremely frustrating for the person he
> is talking to.
> 
> When we first started talking, he asked me about many past TUs, and
> about the reasons they quit, etc. I wondered why he wouldn't speak to
> them directly instead of bothering me with such questions.
> 
> There has been multiple times that he has asked me for solutions to very
> trivial problems. To make things worse, in one instance, he would shoot
> down every one of my offered solutions.
> 
> Instead of choosing the most relevant route of communication, he will
> choose the method that he believes will give him the fastest response,
> no matter if it may cause disruption.
> 
> Example: He asks the same question to some of us directly via Jabber
> rather than asking in an IRC channel (which we are all present in), even
> after being asked to stop.
> 
> Example: He would contact me directly about something on the mailing
> list that I had no involvement in, rather than sending an email to that
> mailing list.
> 
> He has recently become extremely annoying.
> 
> His application does look impeccable though.
> It's partly the result of lots of feedback from me, and probably other
> Trusted Users.
> 
> I don't know if this should be a barrier to becoming a Trusted User,
> but the fact is that I'm wary about working with him, and I can imagine
> that other users might feel the same way.
> 
> I admire Laszlo's enthusiasm, and respect his goals but I don't think he
> would be a good candidate for a Trusted User right now.


>From the introductory message, I think Laszlo's technical experience is
impressive. I think that having a TU who focuses on making Arch a
viable alternative for embedded systems would be a great asset to Arch
overall. Looking over his PKGBUILDs I would say that most of them look
good at first glance.*

I haven't particularly focused on Laszlo in the mailing list although I
have been aware of his name popping up in the "From" column recently. I
did instantly recognize his forum avatar though, although I hadn't
connected that account to the posts on this list.

In the last week or so I've been very aware of Laszlo posting on the
forum. He is very often the first to respond in thread when someone is
seeking help. My impression has been that his posts often come across
as agressive or overly enthusiastic (the two are easily mistaken). He
does provide useful information in some cases, but often it feels as
though he would be shouting at someone face-to-face.** I realize
that this may be a cultural and/or linguistic issue and the
latter is not something that I would criticize someone for. The finer
nuances of tone is easily lost in written communication even among
native speakers, but still, it does come off quite abrasively sometimes.

What concerns me the most though, in conjunction with Allan's and
Loui's remarks above, is the very real possibility that Laszlo is
attempting to socially engineer his way to becoming a TU. I present
this merely as an idea and I honestly do not mean to offend anyone if
this is not the case. It just seems suspicious that his forum activity
has increase so much just shortly before posting an application,
especially if he's been using Arch for nearly one and a half years, as
he states in his introductory message (and as Allan points out, the
statement's he made there do not fit well with registration dates or
the types of questions that he was asking other TUs recently).


It feels like he's trying to game points by being visibly "helpful".
"Bragging" about how many packages he was maintaining, as Ghost1227
put it, seems in line with this idea. I would suggest looking over his
forum and mailing list posts with this in mind, especially the ones
which appear to jump in on answers that have already been given. I'll
leave that there for now though so as not to overly bias anyone's
opinion before they've given this more consideration.


As I said, this may be just a cultural/linguistic issue. A lot of
enthusiasm can easily come across the wrong way too, but at this point
I remain hesitant about this application. I really don't expect my
opinion to weigh in that much though because I still feel like "the new
guy" here. ;)



* I'm not sure what the symlinks are doing in this one though:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libftd2xx/libftd2xx/PKGBUILD
and there are a few that still have "$startdir" in them, but I see that
you're in the process of changing them so that's not an issue at all:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nesc/nesc/PKGBUILD

**examples:
from a previous mailing list message, before the user could even reply
to Biro's message: "Follow suggestion from Biro Ionut!"

A forum-thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=77032