Joining Arch Linux

So, it's been a while since my last update on my life. It's not because nothing has happened. Oh no. If anything it's probably because I haven't had to time or motivation to sit down and write out a post in a while.

The biggest thing that has happened is that I was accepted as a Package Maintainer in the Arch Linux team, which has long been a goal of mine, ever since I was in Manjaro. The further upstream I can fix things the better.

The Process

I thought about applying for the role of package maintainer in Arch Linux for a long time. Maybe a year or so. And late 2024 I took the plunge and started asking current package maintainer for sponsorship, as is required, but I didn't hear back from anyone.

Then in January, I believe it was, Foxboron reached out to me and asked if I was serious about it, because he would be willing to help me get the last sponsor and get the application ready for the mailing list. Quickly after that, Carsme joined as my second sponsor and I was in full swing putting together my application.

This also required me to get my AUR packages in line with packaging guidelines. I started fixing my pkgbuilds and after a month or so the application and my AUR packages looked promising and I got the go-ahead to send it in.

The comment and voting periods came and went and I was accepted as a Junior Package Maintainer. Now begins the onboarding process.

Onboarding

First I had to correct my user profiles in AUR and then set up my archweb user to be as accurate as I could.

Next step was to setup a new GPG/PGP key to be used for packaging in Arch. Arch Linux uses openPGP for this and a tool called sequoia-sq and hardware tokens. I had a token, which I thought I could use, but OnlyKey does not seem to handle pgp very well. Carsme recommended I got a Yubico YubiKey instead, which I quickly got. Pretty straight forwarde to set up, but had to redo it a couple of times because of my own mistakes.

After the key is created, published and functional, it needs to be signed by the master keys of Arch Linux and be included into the archlinux-keyring package. So I have created an MR to the package git repo that was merged after a few weeks of signing.

So my key is now part of the keyring and I can start contributing packages, which I have started doing. But as a Junior Package Maintainer I can only publish to [extra-testing] as a form of trial period. So I have started adopting a few orphaned packages and getting used to the devtools of Arch, like pkgctl, which handles most of the process.

Next step is to try adding a new package to the repository to get a feel for that process too.

My role

Currently I am a Junior Package Maintainer, which means I am on a trial period. When that ends, I will be a regular package maintainer. That means that I am responsible for some packages in the main Arch Linux repository plus moderating the AUR together with a lot of other people.

I currently don't have any plans on getting more involved than that, because I have a full time job, family and hobbies other than Arch Linux. So time is limited.

My plan is to introduce some of my AUR packaged into the main Arch repositories, because I feel they would add value. Other than that I want to maintain and co-maintain some of the packages I use and feel comfortable with. Hopefully when I get more experience with the devtools I can help with more packages, but time will tell.