[aur-general] TU Application: Thore Bödecker

Wed May 10 11:49:47 UTC 2017

Hey folks,

My name is Thore Bödecker (a.k.a. foxxx0, or just foxxx depending on
nick availability) and finally I have taken the time increase my
involvement with Arch Linux. I'm 26 years old now and living in small
town called Falkensee, near Berlin in Germany.

First of all thanks to Florian Pritz (Bluewind) who is sponsoring my
TU application.

I heard you like stories so I'm happy to tell you about my way through
the Linux world.

I have been using Linux in various flavours for a long time, if memory
serves correctly it all started with Ubuntu 6.10 somewhere in 2006
while I was still in school.
At first it was merely some experimentation and exploring a whole new
world but quickly I got really interested. Being a totally addicted
gamer at that time it was not a real option for daily usage but I went
ahead to build a small fileserver with it and continued to learn new
stuff while doing so.

After switching back and forth between Ubuntu and Debian for a couple of
years and a bit of Gentoo in the middle I ended up renting a server to
host some stuff with Debian.

In October 2010 my bachelor studies in some sort of technical computer
science started at HTW Berlin (for the German speaking people, the
course of studies was called "Informationstechnik/Vernetzte Systeme").

This surely had quite some influence and not much later Arch Linux was
the OS on my laptop. And oh it was good and enjoyable (even without
systemd back then! :P).

During my studies I had less and less time for gaming which eventually
made me install Arch on my desktop at home.
At that point it was already quite clear that there was no alternative
for me.

Having used Arch for some years on a daily basis made me more and
more annoyed with my rented server, that was still running Debian.
I got really upset with APT and the "Debian-way" of doing things, having
seen how simply and enjoyable they were on Arch Linux.

You can pretty much guess what happened, I ended up with Arch on my
rented server as well.
And a second one.
And on my router at home.
I even build a custom archiso for home PXE setup, doing which is really
pleasing too.

Please bear with me, I'll try to wrap things up :)

Since October 2013 I am studying computer science at the TU Berlin which
has been quite an adventure thus far and if everything works out I'm on
track to start my master thesis near the end of this year.

As I am also providing hosting services on that server to a small group
of customers, the PHP 7 release was quite cumbersome. I had to find a way
to provide support for two different PHP versions on my server.
Gladly I found a fellow sufferer in Mickaël Thomas (mickael9 in the AUR)
and we started working on the php56 AUR package [1].
It was a bit messy at first but in the end it worked out and I've been
running php56 together with the upstream Arch Linux php packages for over
a year now. I have been a co-maintainer of that package ever since and
tried to push the security releases out as quickly as possible.

In order to retain as much features of php56 as possible, I created some
additional packages for that, which could co-exist with upstream
Arch repo packages as well:

[2] php56-apcu
[3] php56-geoip
[4] php56-memcache
[5] php56-memcached
[6] php56-xdebug

So why am I doing this all?

I love using Arch Linux, it has been a joyful journey most of the time
and I'm looking forward to what might come.

But why do I want to be a TU some of you might ask.

As I am providing hosting services for customers I am also acting as
an email service provider for my customers (and for myself too).
Over the last few month there were some nasty spam mails glitching
through my spamassassin setup.
Naturally I investigated and found that I couldn't really do *anything*
while using Arch Linux repo packages only (which I highly prefer for
critical infrastructure).
I have been in touch with Florian very, very much over the last few
years and we shared the same desire: amavisd-new.

So last week I did an experiment with a combination of opendkim +
opendmarc + amavisd-new.

When I discovered that there was no AUR package for amavisd-milter I
went ahead and created one. But somehow when I tried to push my package
to AUR it said "Permission denied". As it turned out, another fellow
Arch Linux user has done the exact same thing and pushed to the AUR a
couple of hours before me. So I got in contact with said Person, Karol
Babioch (kbabioch) and he was happy to let me take ownership of
amavisd-milter [7].

I countinued to experiment and it seemed the opendmarc internal SPF
check wasn't really working in the Arch Linux repo version.
This made me build opendmarc using libspf2 which did the trick and I've
put that together in opendmarc-libspf2 [8].

To make all these parts easily and comfortably available to all
Arch Linux users I would like to move these few packages to [community]
(if Yardena Cohen a.k.a. yar agrees for amavisd-new).

As you guys want to make sure that I am capable of writing high quality
PKGBUILDs, Florian pointed out some AUR packages that were orphaned and
could use some makeover.
So I went ahead and tried my best to get them back into shape, feel free
to give feedback:

[9] awl
[10] davical
[11] webalizer

You can find all packages that I currently maintain here: [12].

Last but not least I would like to throw in my own open source project,
that I created to easy management of my hosting:

[13] vhost-api

It is currently undergoing a rewrite in order to improve the modularity,
expandability and maintenance. Sadly my time for that is a bit scarce
right now and it is not urgent as has been working quite well thus far.

The packages that I would like to move to [community], if the current
maintainers agree, are:
  - amavisd-new
  - amavisd-milter
  - perl-convert-tnef (required for amavisd-new)
  - perl-convert-uulib (required for amavisd-new)
  - libspf2

Additionally I would like to take maintainership of opendmarc if that is
okay with Sergej, in order to build it against libspf2.

Apart from maintaining the mentioned packages I am also quite capable
regarding server and service hosting and happy to assist in maintaining
and improving the Arch Linux infrastructure. :)

The best ways to reach me are either through email: me [at] foxxx0 [dot] de
Or over on split^Wfreenode: freenode/foxxx0

Thanks for taking the time to read all this and for considering my
application.

Cheers,
Thore

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/?h=php56
[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/php56-apcu
[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/php56-geoip
[4] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/php56-memcache
[5] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/php56-memcached
[6] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/php56-xdebug
[7] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/amavisd-milter
[8] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opendmarc-libspf2
[9] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/awl
[10] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/davical
[11] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/webalizer
[12] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?SeB=m&K=foxxx
[13] https://github.com/vhost-api

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