[aur-general] TU membership application

[Eli Schwartz]

On 8/16/19 3:19 PM, Jean Lucas via aur-general wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> My name is Jean Lucas, and I'm sending this email to submit my candidacy
> for Trusted User member. As per the latest TU bylaws, I'm being
> sponsored by both Alexander Rødseth and Sergej Pupykin.
> 
> I've been an Arch Linux user since around a little before I registered
> my AUR account (January 2015, username "flacks" [1]), and I've recently
> had a few of my packages adopted into [community], namely "cage",
> "coturn", and "swaybg".
> 
> I'm currently a computer science student with a particular interest in
> software engineering ranging from low-level (with a few contributions to
> projects like coreboot and postmarketOS) all the way up to web
> development (my current focus), and as such, would love to help maintain
> Arch's [community] repo in an official capacity to be part of the team
> that gives Arch users a robust, high-quality Linux software experience;
> as well as to help maintain, manage, and watch over the operation of the
> AUR and it's vast sea of software packaging recipes.
> 
> If I were accepted to become a TU, I'd like to adopt and move the
> following packages (all having over 10 votes in the AUR) from the AUR
> into [community]:
> 
> anydesk, downgrade, exercism, flutter, godot, itch, mattermost-desktop,
> nvm, reaper, spotify, teamviewer, thermald, unity-editor, and unityhub,
> for starters!

In the case of Spotify specifically, the AUR maintainer is already a TU,
and had you asked him before being eager to move it to community he'd
have probably told you that you're not the first or even the second (or
third? I lose track) person to propose moving it.
I think someone may have also suggested it in a TU application before...

Either way you should definitely ask the maintainer if it is okay to
move it to community. If that maintainer is a TU, and they haven't moved
it to community on their own, there is probably a reason.

downgrade:

I'm quite hesitant to have "downgrade" in the repos, it seems to be an
immense antipattern --  not quite as bad as an AUR helper in[community],
but nearly. Also isn't even well written as it does a ton of parsing
HTML files and pacman.conf in sed, instead of using either pacman-conf
or an HTML parser. I really wish that people who wrote complex
integrations around pacman/makepkg would follow pacman development -- in
fact, many of the current crop of AUR helpers do exactly that, which is
why I would even dare use some of them.

If we *were* going to add a program to pander to the desire to have
partially updated systems, I would prefer to create a new tool from scratch.

Also "downgrade" indexing archive.archlinux.org (with sed or anything
else) is problematic due to the fact that we no longer store many
versions of packages but upload them to archive.org and delete them from
our own server (and use rewrite rules to let users download the files,
but that doesn't help to build an HTML index). So I'm decidedly unsure
how useful it's supposed to be even at fulfilling its desired goal.

> Additionally, I would express my willingness to help co-maintain
> "firejail" (already in [community]), as its a project I have a higher
> interest in and contribute to occasionally; as well as to help get
> "ghidra" in good enough shape to propose moving it into [community],
> since I've had lots of fun building it [2], its a phenomenal piece of
> open-source software, and it'd be nice to have it officially supported
> by the Arch community (it also has a nice number of votes in the AUR)!
> 
> Thank you for your time, and thank you to all who help make Arch a great OS!
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Jean Lucas
> 
> 
> [1] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/flacks
> [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/?h=ghidra-git
> 


-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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