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

[davidschi]

please unsubscribe me from your mailing list

On 6/10/21 1:15 PM, Caleb Maclennan via aur-general wrote:
> 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.