[aur-general] TU Application

[Kaiting Chen]

Hi aur-general, my name is Kaiting Chen and Xyne has decided to sponsor me
for my TU application.

I'm twenty one years old and a senior at Duke University studying Biomedical
Engineering with a minor in Economics. I have also been a web developer and
systems administrator for about four years now and am currently working on a
rather long and protracted project for the university. I have been using
Linux on a daily basis for about seven years now starting with Red Hat
Linux, then Debian, Gentoo and finally Arch Linux for the last three years.
And I use C, C++, x86 ASM, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Javascript on a
daily basis.

I have Arch installed on four servers in total as well as on one virtual
machine. I'm not ashamed to admit that I run a Windows 7 notebook as my only
physical computer; though it's only role these days is to not bother me
while I SSH into my Linux machines.

I maintain a small cluster running Arch where I hand out free shell accounts
to anyone who wants them. Currently this cluster has one hundred and twenty
five users though I am in the process of updating its infrastructure to
(hopefully) scale up to a couple thousand. The most important services on
this cluster are/were glusterfs, nfs, ntpd, httpd, vsftpd, postfix, dovecot,
postgresql, ejabberd, slapd, openvpn, memcached, pvpgn (this list is being
updated quite often).

I currently maintain thirty packages in the AUR, most of which I do not use
but would be unhappy in seeing them orphaned.

I would like to become a Trusted User simply because I would like to
maintain packages more effectively. Recently there's been a thread on
aur-general about the possible removal of hundreds of packages from
[community] which makes me very worried. Packages such as cacti, courier-*,
ejabberd, freeradius*, ipsec-tools, monit, roundcubemail, scilab, and *ircd
are very important to people who run Arch on the server such as myself. This
list evinces a fundamental problem however that there is simply not enough
manpower to maintain the current repositories. Because I am able (or
hopefully will be deemed so by the powers that be/grant TU priveleges) I
would like to help alleviate this condition. Arch allows me to focus on the
work that I do; it should be obvious that helping to ensure that Arch
functions smoothly and efficiently is a necessary task for anyone who has
made this distribution a valuable part of their workflow.

In more concrete terms of how I want to contribute, I would like to start by
adopting python-openbabel, freeimage, metakit, gen2shp, tdl, python-bsddb,
and other orphaned packages in [community] once I have the chance to take a
closer look at the orphan list. I'd also like to pull smalltalk, burp, bti,
liboauth, and vim-align into [community]. I would also like to work on
bringing some of the packages in [community] up to date such as rsyslog,
pyinotify, openntpd, and ngspice.

I would also like to work on maintain the Arch web presence. I think that a
separate login is needed for each part of the site is something that should
be fixed. The AUR is also somewhat outdated and I in large part agree with
the page here: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_2.

That's about all I can think of for now. Please feel free to ask any
questions and thanks for taking the time to consider my application.

Kaiting.

-- 
Kiwis and Limes: http://kaitocracy.blogspot.com/