[aur-general] TU application sponsored by David Reisner

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi everyone

I would like to apply for a Arch Trusted User position. It is
sponsored by my co-worker and bright engineer David Reisner.

My name is Anatol Pomozov, I grew up in Belarus but live in USA now. I
am an open-source enthusiast who uses Linux since about 2005. I've
been using several distros mostly Debian based. About 2.5 years ago,
when Ubuntu in-place upgrade killed my system once again, I've decided
to give a try to a rolling-release distro.

I had heard that Arch was difficult to use and unstable so I've been
skeptical that Arch would survive at my computers for a long time. At
my surprise Arch installation was easy and system was fast and stable.
Documentation is clean and very helpful. And package manager is
*FAST*! Yeah!  I fell in love with Arch from the very first day. A few
months later all my home computers were moved to Arch. And despite
that I usually do crazy experiments at my home machines I've never had
serious problems with Arch. Well, the only problem with Arch was in
systemd-207 that prevented my btrfs-root machine from booting.

About a year ago I started playing more active role in Arch community.
I adopted a lot of broken and out-of-date packages. Currently I own
350+ packages [1]. A lot of packages are for ruby gems that previously
were out-of-date or had broken dependencies. I improved existing
gem2arch tool [2] and it helps me with ruby packages herding.


At my day job I work on Linux kernel development/support at a large
server farm. My daily activity includes a lot of debugging,
performance profiling, code archaeology both for linux kernel and
in-house userspace code. Some of my linux changes went upstream, here
are few of them:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/4/12/391
http://marc.info/?l=linux-fsdevel&m=134750749009884&w=2
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/4/1/171

Google Chromebook developers reported that my last patch fixed one of
their top kernel crashes!

Recently me and my 6 y/o son started learning microelectronics and
digital design. Maybe some day we'll create MIPS-like CPU.


Why do I want to become a TU? I like Arch and would like to keep it
improving. It means making packages better, participate in important
discussions that define where the distro moves.

The short/mid terms plans for me are:
 - move some of my aur packages to community: rethinkdb, codespell,
tup, mldonkey, v8. There are some other aur packages that I use and
would also like to see in [community]: fatsort, digital design related
tools, ...
 - add android-sdk-* packages. Current AUR packages download binaries
and install binaries to /opt/bin. The binaries are 32-bit. Instead we
should build SDK from sources and provide proper 64/32-bit binaries.
This might be tricky as Android build system is complicated.
 - request moving Apache to [community] and finally update this package to 2.4

I can help with linux kernel issues, especially if they are related to
storage/block subsystem.

I also have experience with Ruby. This is my favorite scripting
language that I use for 10 years now and I'll be glad to help with
Ruby in Arch as well.

[1] aur.archlinux.org/packages/?SeB=m&K=anatolik
[2] https://github.com/anatol/gem2arch