[aur-general] TU Application - Andrzej Giniewicz (giniu)

Fri Jun 29 01:53:57 EDT 2012

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Hello,

today I decided I want to apply to become an Arch Linux Trusted User. My nick
around is giniu, it includes Arch Wiki, AUR and forum. My e-mail is gginiu,
because gmail said to me that 5 letters is too short. Thomas Dziedzic (td123) is
my sponsor for this application. My public GPG key is linked from my Arch wiki
page [2].

My name is Andrzej Giniewicz and I'm 26 years old, living in Poland. I'm working
towards getting my PhD in Mathematical Statistics (same discipline I graduated),
meantime working as an IT guy at the same institute. I'm interested in
photography, typography, game development and some more common stuff like good
music or books. My adventures with using Linux started in year 2001. It was
quite some time ago and the distribution that came with my new computer was just
released Red Hat 7.1 (back then, with new and shiny kernel 2.4.2). I used this
distribution for some time, but after getting internet connection I started
looking for alternatives, especially that back then the development was fast and
changes were visible every day – mostly due to the look of Gnome 1. Anyway,
I later traveled trough multiple distributions including Mandrake, Debian,
Aurox and some others that no longer exists. I even tried Ubuntu and used it for
15 minutes. After long search, around 7 years ago I switched to Slackware and if
it wasn't for slow glibc updates (and bug in old version which stopped me from
using Hight Performance Erlang virtual machine) I would probably be still using
Slackware, but now, I'm happy Arch user for 5 years (starting with version 0.7).
Right now I maintain 5 machines running Arch, including two workstations and
3 servers, both at home and at work. I decided it's finally time to give
something back to community for saving me so much time during those years.
I started by providing packages. First one landed in AUR in 2009, so 3
years ago.
In 2011 I was asked about becoming a TU for the first time, but back then
I decided I don't have enough time. This year I sorted some stuff, including
fixing quality of lots of my packages and finding more free time, so I decided
to give it a try.

Right now I maintain 72 packages, list of which you can see at [1] and [2] with
some description. Most of my packages are related to science, this includes two
scientific distributions of Python – Python(x,y) and Enthough Python
Distribution plus dependencies. I try to keep them in shape because I teach
using Python, Sage, OpenCL and (soon) Arduino. Also I'm an active developer for
some projects and less active for others. I haven't done anything for some time
for Wings 3D although I'm still on list of active authors [3], I'm also on
developer map of mathematical package Sage [4]. I also wrote LaTeX package for
typesetting books for CreateSpace self-publishing service [5]. Other project
that started directly in AUR are scripts for The Elderscrolls Arena and
Daggerfall AUR packages. They are scripts in Perl and Python which provide
support for launching and modding the game (it includes about 2500 lines of
code). I also sent smaller patches to other projects like MyPaint. During the
transition for linuxwacom to xf86-input-wacom I worked on AUR package providing
latest patches cherry-picked from git and reported results to mailing list every
week or so. As for languages I actively develop in, I mostly use Python, Erlang,
BASH, OpenCL and some C/C++. To name some more I also know Haskell, Perl, Ocaml,
Java, Lua, TeX (including coding some exotic stuff like calculating natural
logarithm using TeX primitive commands) and some domain specific languages
(Mathematica, Matlab, R). There are also some other languages I did one or two
projects in and not use anymore. This allows me to fix a large amount of bugs
I encounter in packages I maintain or cooperate with upstream to fix them.
I usually try to get back to person reporting bugs no later than 2 days after
I receive notification about comment in AUR and replicate it so I can try
fixing it.

The visible part of my contacts with Arch community isn't that high, but this is
mostly because I'm direct kind of person. Usually I prefer to get in touch with
people by e-mail or gtalk, asking very specific questions or answering questions
I get. I follow multiple mailing lists including aur-general and arch-general
and I always react if e-mail is related to packages I maintain. I try to scatter
rest of my time in multiple directions, without favoring one place or another.
This includes other projects wikis and mailing lists, like linuxwacom-devel,
sage-devel, sage-support or even Daggerfall hacking pages on uesp.net where
I discussed things I learned when creating modding support for the game. You can
also meet me at forums on eeeuser.com (talking about Eee 901) or love2d.org game
engine forum (I was especially active in community developed game “A Whiff of
Steam” which unfortunately died last year because of lack of interested
developers with time to contribute, I still moderate a top-level sub forum for
this project there). I'm active on kickstarter.com discussion pages of projects
I backed (Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns – I really hope the change how games
are made). I also write in comments of photo related pages like
strobist.blogspot.com blog, Analogue Photography User Group or Fuji X100 fan
page. You can see me in countless other places, without single major place
I hang every day.

If I become TU I will try to take care for bringing some of my more popular
packages into community, it include languagetool and vim-languagetool with
118 and 17 votes respectively. Also some parts of mentioned Python distributions
which met the requirements for inclusion. Anyway, I hope this will be only
a beginning, later I plan to look into improving photography stack on Arch
Linux, means I will look at AUR packages related to color profile aware editing
and  printing. I will also try to increase my time spent with Arch community, at
least that's the plan.

Thanks,
Andrzej.

[1]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?SeB=m&L=2&K=giniu
[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Giniu
[3]: https://github.com/bjorng/wings/blob/master/AUTHORS
[4]: http://sagemath.org/development-map.html
[5]: https://github.com/aginiewicz/createspace

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