[aur-general] TU application

[Antonio Rojas]

Hello Arch Linux community,

 This is my application to become an Arch trusted user. My name is Antonio 
Rojas, I'm a mathematician and professor from Spain. Andrea Scarpino has 
kindly encouraged me to apply and agreed to sponsor my application. 

 I started using Linux in grad school in 1999 (Red Hat). I 
quickly got to like it, but since it was preinstalled I was missing all the 
fun of installing and configuring it. Around 2004 I finally decided to install 
it in my own computers, first in virtual machines and then as the main OS. 
After trying a few distros I settled with Mandriva, and kept using it until 
the company started going downhill. Then I moved briefly to Fedora, until I 
discovered Arch around 2008 and I haven't left since then. It requires the 
perfect ammount of fiddling to make it work (for my taste) and I love always 
having the latest software available. 

 In the last few years I've been an active user in the forum [1] (mostly 
helping people with KDE issues) and bug tracker [2], both in Arch and in 
upstream KDE. Despite not being a programmer, I've occasionally sent small 
patches to fix some issues. 

 I've been maintaining packages in AUR for a few years, some of them have been 
moved to the repos. Currently I maintain close to 200 packages [3], most of 
them KDE related. I maintain the git versions of KDE Frameworks and Plasma, 
and created and maintained the first version of the Plasma 5 packages that 
were moved to [extra] last week. I think the next few months are going to be 
very exciting in the KDE world, with apps being ported to Frameworks and new 
apps popping up that could be moved to [community] when they become popular.

Among the KDE apps that I would like to maintain in community are some that 
were dropped in the past but are still maintained upstream, like 
partitionmanager or kmplayer, some addons for Plasma 5 like sddm-kcm or kde-
gtk-config (they are very recent so don't have many votes yet, but their KDE4 
version is quite popular), and other ones like bangarang or zanshin which were 
unmaintained upstream for a while but have seen very active development in the 
last few weeks. I could also maintain some orphan KDE/Qt packages in 
community: rekonq, kcm-touchpad, texmaker.

Besides KDE, my other interest is mathematical and scientific applications in 
general. Those tend to be quite specialized, so not many of them satisfy the 
requirements to be moved to [community]. What I would like to do however (if 
arcanis agrees, of course) is try to package sage-mathematics "properly". That 
is, instead of shipping the monolithic monster that upstream provides, with 
private copies of many system libraries (which sometimes cause conflicts with 
system libs, like it happened with the last major bash upgrade), package all 
missing dependencies and 
build the Sage library against them. This is a big task, since Sage has a huge 
number of dependencies, but Fedora and Mandriva (before it died) already do it 
this way since a few years ago, so it could be used as a model. Besides the 
obvious advantages in terms of disk space and runtime memory savings, this 
would also provide the individual components by themselves in the repos, so 
those interested could use them without having to install a 2.5 GB package. I 
looked into it when I was maintaining Sage in AUR, but I decided it wouldn't 
be practical to make people compile lots of different packages, now that it's 
in the repos it's a different story.

Some other packages that I would like to move to the repos: clipgrab, 
speedcrunch, some libreoffice-latex extensions (writer2latex and texmaths), 
opensc (dropped recently for lack of TUs interest). I would also consider 
moving the LXQt desktop, the port of lxde to Qt5 and KF5, which has seen its 
first stable release recently. 

Thank you all for considering my application.
Regards,
 Antonio

[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/profile.php?id=53078
[2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/user/5403
[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?SeB=m&K=arojas

 
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