Hi everyone,

My name is Quentin, or mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s/mh4ckwascut on the AUR and other Arch 
projects, and I'm applying to become a Package Maintainer. My application is 
sponsored by Robin Candau (Antiz) and Rémi Gacogne (rgacogne).

I'm a graduated CS/networking engineer who is pursuing his studies as a PhD 
student in cybersecurity at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France (for 
the curious an abstract of the topic of my PhD is available here: 
https://theses.fr/s374883).

I started programming in high school, and as I was more and more interested in 
"how computers work", I naturally started to tinker with Linux. After a little 
distro hopping, I wanted to dive more into the inner workings of a Linux 
distribution and Arch was the distro of choice. I fell in love with the rolling 
release, the always up-to-date packages, the wiki, and the AUR, among others. I 
now run Arch not only on my main laptop, but on my experimentation machines as 
well. I tried to go further, explored Gentoo and LFS, but I sticked with Arch 
as the distro allowing me to best tailor my computers to my needs while being 
fast and simple (who doesn't hate compilation times?).

With the time I familiarized myself with the AUR, adopted a package I was using 
that was orphaned, and started submitting my own packages. I ended using a lot 
of little-used packages from the AUR, such as pentesting tools (for Capture The 
Flags) and fancy stuff related to my PhD. Most of these packages were orphaned 
or had bugs, and I started the habit of regularly looking for abandoned 
packages that I was using and picking them up on the AUR.

A few times, I stumbled on outdated packages in the extra repo (ruby-iostruct 
and LLVM are the ones I remember), and I thought that if my beloved Arch was 
sometimes not up-to-date, maybe I could help and make Arch a little better. 
That's why I'm sending this mail today! Alongside packaging, I helped on other 
topics around Arch, such as becoming a package tester or improving a few 
articles in the wiki.

Alongside Arch, I'm involved in OSS in general, contributing to various 
projects I use. All can be found on my GitHub and GitLab profiles, but big 
projects I have contributed to are LLVM, GitLab and YunoHost. When I'm not 
coding something or maintaining my homelab, I'm running or reading to clear my 
head.

As a Package Maintainer, I would like to bring from my AUR packages to the 
extra repo podman-desktop, which I feel makes sense as podman and various 
related tools are already in extra, and a few WebAssembly packages such as 
wasi-tools. I also plan to merge my zaproxy-desktop package with zaproxy that 
is already in extra. As for the packages I can co-maintain, I would be happy to 
help with LLVM-related packages, or any other package that would need help and 
where I would be useful, like containerization or security tools.

Relevant links:

My AUR packages: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?K=mh4ckwascut&SeB=m
My GitHubs (perso and work): https://github.com/mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s and 
https://github.com/mh4ck-Thales
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s/
My personal website: https://www.mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s.xyz/
The YunoHost application I created and maintained for over a year: 
https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/searxng_ynh
My GitLab contributions: 
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=all&author_username=mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s
My LLVM contributions: 
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues?q=involves%3Amh4ck-Thales

Hoping that gives you a good introduction of myself and my motivations. Thanks 
for reading, cheers!

Quentin

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Reply via email to