[aur-general] TU application from graysky

[Dave Reisner]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 04:24:31PM -0400, member graysky wrote:
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> Hi All.  Inspired by Allan's talk @ SINFO XX, I decided to throw my
> hat into the ring and formally apply to be a TU.  My linux history
> started with RH and SUSE over a decade ago.  I discovered Debian and
> Ubuntu.  I found myself wanting more control and up-to-date repos and
> discovered Arch.  I find it and its underlying philosophies, and its
> community to be to my liking.  I have an interest in giving back to
> the Arch Community though maintaining some packages in [community].

This is surely me being old and grumpy, but I miss the days when TUs
wanted to do more than just maintain a few packages.

Could you perhaps expand on what packages these would be? Is there a
specific category that interests you, perhaps? Have you discovered the
dozens of orphans in extra/community?

> Listed below are a few of my contributions for those of you who don't
> recognize me from the bbs or from other interactions.  I reached out
> to Xyne who kindly agreed to sponsor my candidacy for TU.

I'm replying to the rest of this with full disclosure: graysky asked me
to sponsor him first, and I've declined based on a lack of skill and
what I feel isn't necessarily the correct attitude for an Arch TU.

I'll reiterate some of my more salient points here.

> *Maintains an unofficial repo for >2 years now (http://repo-ck.com)
> whose main purpose is hosting linux-ck and related packages.
> *Maintains ~50 PKGBUILDs within the AUR; some legacy others of my own creation.
> *Wiki contributions, both original content, and standardizing many
> popular pages; member of Wiki Maintenance Team.
> *Contributed several open-source utils back to the community.
> https://github.com/graysky2/modprobed_db
> https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

I have strong feelings against even the concept of profile-sync-daemon,
and transitively (although moreso), anything-sync-daemon.

1) You, as a user, cannot possibly manage memory more effectively than
the kernel. Do not intentionally thwart the page cache.
2) To claim that you're saving your precious SSD "unnecessary writes" is
advanced silliness. Recent controllers don't have nearly the same
problems early SSDs had.
3) The only conceivable "benefit" is to move the startup time to bootup,
rather than to when you first run the program.
4) Shell is inherently dangerous. If you're bent on writing something
dangerous, you'd better know all the pitfalls of shell and what will
eventually go wrong in your script. To wit, reading the bbs threads
about these daemons will show at least 1 user who has suffered data loss
simply by upgrading the profile-sync-daemon package.

...and in some cases, the program you're running this on top of is simply
misconfigured for your needs. Firefox, for example, can be forced to use
more RAM before switching to disk cache.

> https://github.com/graysky2/profile-cleaner
> https://github.com/graysky2/backdrop-randomizer
> *Active contributor to Arch bugs.

I find that your bug reports routinely lack effort on your part in
deciphering the root of the problem leading to the bugs eventually being
discarded. I'd expect a lot more effort from someone interested in being
more than just an end user. Examples:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24850
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/26394
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/29182
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/30131
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34080

And some your feature requests are fairly misguided, often going against
Arch's patching policy:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31187
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/32204
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/33688
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/33974

In short, this isn't the kind of attitude or skill level I'd expect from
a trusted user.

Sorry,
Dave

> *Closely related to several upstream projects including: monitorix and
> the ck patchset
> *Active member on the bbs; usually helpful ;p
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