Posted in Arch Linux on 2012/03/11 by Allan

Today marks the 10 year anniversary since the first release of Arch Linux. I have been involved in Arch for only about half that time, but I thought it might be quite interesting to make a time-line of the major things I remember being involved with in my history with Arch Linux.

I actually first used Arch Linux in a virtual machine for quite some time prior to the start of this time-line. I was running a Linux From Scratch install and was looking to add better package management. Then I realized that it was quite a waste of time building my own packages when Arch was actually quite similar to what I was trying to achieve in a Linux install. The toolchain was the part I liked dealing with the most in LFS and now I get to play with it anyway, so things worked out well!

Here is a brief summary of my involvement with Arch Linux:

2007-06-09 – Joined forums
2007-06-20 – First non-VM Arch install
2007-12-04 – First patch to the pacman project (fixed compressing man pages in makepkg)
2008-01-09 – Applied to be a Trusted User (TU)
2008-01-23 – Voted in as a TU (23 yes, 1 abstain!)
2008-06-03 – Joined the forum moderation team.
2008-06-04 – Became a Arch Linux developer!
2008-08-17 – First big rebuild. I made all ncurses applications use the wide-character library for better locale support.
2008-09-01 – Interviewed in the Arch Newsletter – yes, there used to be one of those…
2009-04-04 – Resigned as a TU
2009-04-22 – First complete toolchain build after becoming the toolchain maintainer (gcc-4.4 update)
2009-06-07 – Broke module-init-tools due to missing a file failing to compile in the PKGBUILD. (makepkg would catch such an error these days and the missing file would be noted using the checkpkg utility)
2009-07-17 – libjpeg-7 rebuilds enter [extra]. I think this was the first major rebuild to severely break KDEmod.
2009-08-02 – pacman-3.3.0 released with package splitting support in makepkg
2010-03-05 – Fix a bug introduced by my first patch to makepkg… In true Allan style, the commit message contains a typo so does not point at the right bug!
2010-07-02 – Resigned as forum moderator. Mainly because I wanted to be able to be grumpy on the forums when…
2010-10-18 – python3 transition – Probably the single most controversial thing I have done in Arch…
2011-02-28 – A minor bash update resulted in non-booting systems…
2011-03-16 – pacman-3.5.0 released for which I contributed reading the sync databases directly from the downloaded tarball, disk space checking and storing package information in a hash table.
2011-10-13 – pacman-4.0.0 release with full PGP signing support for packages and databases.

Of course there have been lots of other things I have contributed to Arch, including 1000s of package updates and about 400 patches to pacman. But these are the ones I found most memorable.