Ten Years of Arch Linux

11 Mar 2012

“Arch Linux turns 10 today”:https://www.archlinux.org/news/arch-linux-01-homer-released/. It’s pretty spunky for a pre-teen! Inspired by some fellow developers, I figured I’d post my (alebit short) involvement with Arch over the past 2 1/2 years:

2009-10-22: Wiped Ubuntu, installed Arch and joined the forums
2010-03-21: First release of cower
2010-04-25: Applied for junior dev position, and was rightfully turned down!
2010-07-11: “First commit”:http://projects.archlinux.org/mkinitcpio.git/commit/?id=9ef825ced to Arch’s codebase (Thomas later reverts it!)
2010-07-24: “First commit”:http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?id=7f5c486666c to pacman
2010-11-04: “My first breakage”:http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?id=4fb3cfc48f6 – later “fixed”:http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?id=40a6c5c5e
2010-11-30: “Applied to be a TU”:http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2010-November/012054.html – thanks Ionuț for sponsoring me
2010-12-11: Accepted as TU! (Yes: 29, No: 0, Abstain: 1)
2011-03-01: Applied for initscripts maintainership (I passed this role to Tom Gundersen, who’s done an awesome job)
2011-03-19: libfetch is removed from pacman, and my curl branch is merged
2011-03-20: systemd joins [community]
2011-06-13: Dan McGee (aka toofishes) sponsors me to be a developer (thanks, Dan!)
2011-10-04: My first release of mkinitcpio (0.7.3) as maintainer
2011-10-12: pacman 4.0.0 is released into the wild with curl
2011-12-20: kmod enters the repos
2012-02-12: systemd moves to [extra]

I consider several of the subsequent mkinitcpio and pacman releases fairly memorable as well, but I’ll leave those off the list. I can honestly say that working with Arch has been an amazing experience. Ignoring the 1s and 0s, the people backing Arch Linux are an amazingly intelligent group of individuals, all with differing strengths working towards the same goal.

Having only picked up Linux as my daily operating system in the summer of 2009, I can honeslty say that without the flexibility and transparency that Arch offers, there’s no way I could have learned as much as I have in the past few years, elsewhere. Thanks to what I’ve learned I’ve become involved, to varying degrees, with other upstream projects. I’ve made numerous contributions to systemd, util-linux, and kmod.

I’m truly honored to be a user and developer of this awesome distro. Here’s to 10 more years!