Ten Years of Arch Linux
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.
Nice post. I was expecting to see a little more breakage in that timeline, but I guess that is the stuff of legend…
Lovely post allan
thanks for all the work and fun times with breakage 
Keep up the good work!
I’d love to see a story about the allan broke it t-shirt.
See ya on irc
Python3 was not the most controversial thing you’ve done. Bringing back info pages, one of the original three pillars of Arch, clearly takes that award
Thanks for your work Allan! Happy birthday Arch!
PS I’ve read 3 or 4 posts like this and saw in almost all that authors resigned as TU after some time. What’s the reason for that because you still participate to Arch?
The reason for most developers resigning as a Trusted User is lack of time, but also we try to keep the Trusted Users running as a fairly independent group.
Oh I see now, “resign” just sounds scary. Cheers and another ten or better a hundred great years!