[aur-general] TU application for Caleb, aka alerque

[Caleb Maclennan]

Hello all!

My name is Caleb Maclennan (AUR moniker “caleb”, most other places
“alerque”). I’m a long time Arch Linux user and AUR contributor looking
to get more involved, and specifically to join the TU group so that I
can help out with packages in [community]. I’m particularly interested
in the Lua ecosystem (which thanks largely to @Daurnimator is much less
of a mess than it was a year ago when I first started looking into
becoming a TU, but could still use a helping hand) as well as anything
related to font development or typesetting. As you’ll see I have some
experience in FOSS, software packaging, and Linux in general, but maybe
the most important thing is I can still learn and I’m open to learning
and adapting so that my contributions are in cooperation with the rest
of the community, not in conflict with it.

Two existing TUs, Daurnimator and Archange, have agreed to sponsor my
application:

* https://archlinux.org/people/trusted-users/#daurnimator
* https://archlinux.org/people/trusted-users/#Archange

For full disclosure I did put out feelers about a year ago looking for
sponsors and didn’t get any takers at the time. Nobody outright refused
but several emails went unanswered and TUs in IRC commented on various
things but nobody “bit”.

As for the minimum basic requirements:

* I definitely know my way around shell scripts (I prefer ZSH, but
  have a good grasp of Bash and POSIX usage too) and also most VCS
  systems.
* I’ve been maintaining hundreds of AUR packages for some years, some
  of them cleaner than others. I would expect anything destined for
  [community] to be held to a high standard of cleanliness and testing
  and won’t be offended if some hacks I’ve let slide in the AUR aren’t
  appropriate for other repos.
* The weak point in my application may be my low bbs/mailing list
  involvement, but you can check my Stack Exchange profile or other
  places to see that I’m not clueless. I’ll be willing to keep in touch
  with other TUs (and the bug tracker, which I feel like is sometimes
  neglected for community packages).
* Yes I can Google words.
* Below I’ll outline some packages and my various interests in them.
* I have some past involvement reporting in the Flyspray and GitLab
  trackers for Arch packages and projects.
* I don’t recall sending patches for any Arch projects yet, only
  patches for packaging.
* I have lots of other FOSS involvement, everything from well known
  projects like Harfbuzz or Pandoc to esoteric VIM plugins. I have
  upstream contributions to dozens of projects in [community] already
  and a large chunk of the things I current package on the AUR.

Packages I have previously maintained in the AUR which have already
been adopted into [community]; where extra hands are welcome I could
still help with these:

* age
* birdfont
* gentium-plus-font
* git-annex
* git-crypt
* gitlab
* gitlab-workhorse
* grunt-cli
* lua-filesystem
* lua51-penlight
* mattermost
* otf-libertinus
* pqiv
* python-hsluv
* python-pytoml
* shutter (later demoted back to AUR for good reason)
* ttf-hack
* xkcdpass
* yq

Other packages already in [community] which interest me and I would
potentially be interested in co-maintaining, help keeping up to date,
fixing packaging bugs, etc:

* hledger: upstream contributor
  \ Flyspray packaging reports have taken months and some years
* lilypond
* lua-penlight: upstream contributor
  \ has often been months OOD even when patches in Flyspray
* pandoc: upstream contributor
  \ is less ofter a problem recently but historically was often OOD in
  \ community, I know the Haskell deps are deep dark depths, but having
  \ it OOD has been a constant pain point for me
* sword
* tridactyl: upstream contributor
* vim-nerdcommentor: upstream maintainer
* vim-nerdtree: upstream contributor

Current (semi) orphans in [community] I might pick up:

* python-fonttools
  \ (current maintainer Andrzej recently said they need help)
* python-unicodedata2 (same)

Things I currently maintain in the AUR that I would like to see
eventually migrated to [community], of course dependent on all the
packaging details and usage stats being copastetic:

* asterisk
* csvkit
* epubcheck
* font-manager
* gitlab-pages
* lua-busted
* lua-posix
* marktext
* myrepos
* praat
* programmers-dvorak
* sile: upstream maintainer (+12 lua-* deps)
* ttfautohint
* vcsh
* xiphos
* zerobane-studio
* zettlr

Things I don’t maintain in the AUR but would like to see moved someday
(off the top of my head, I’m sure there are more):

* bottom
* duf
* git-delta
* gitahead
* gitlab-glab
* wp-cli

AUR packages:

* Maintainer (553): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=caleb&SeB=m
* Co-maintainer (90): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=caleb&SeB=c

Even with hundreds of AUR packages I only get a trickle of OOD flags
because I follow most of the projects I package upstream. At the very
least I subscribe to release notices, but often I’m more involved and
use the packages myself, so am motivated to keep them up to date.

I have just a wee bit of *nix experience over the past 27 years, for
example you can have a look around my Stack Exchange profile for the
Unix & Linux site:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/1925/caleb?tab=topactivity

Over the years I’ve been involved in quite a few FOSS projects:

* Github profile: https://github.com/alerque
* Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/alerque
* OpenHub profile: https://www.openhub.net/accounts/alerque

This won’t even be my first Linux distro rodeo. After cutting my teeth
on early RedHat (when it came on 4 floppies!) I eventually became
heavily involved in PLD Linux development from 1998 to 2012 (when I
started switching to Arch Linux). I was a member of the CDG (Core
Developers Group) and contributed thousands of packaging updates. I was
always in good standing with the other team members.

My current Arch usage includes use or admin responsibilities OS on 9
desktops, 4 laptops, 13 assorted devices (RPis, print and NAS servers),
6 permanent cloud servers, 3 bare metal servers, and any number of
containers (ephemeral cloud server instances, local and remote
Docker/lxc services, VirtualBox, etc.). It has been my daily driver for
desktop and server use for 9 years now.

Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hopefully many
more years of being part of a great distro!

Caleb

P.S. Obligatory flame war fodder: (Neo)vim forever, always use
     Oxford commas, spaces not tabs, döner and tacos.
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