I was having a look at the current state of the Arch Linux repositories today in terms of the number of packages each person maintains and thought it interesting to see who did the packaging last year. So here are some numbers!

Firstly, the real repos (i.e. the repositories that TUs can not touch!). Note that the y-axis in this plot is the number of commits made to the repos and not the number of packages updated. Updating a package generally takes two commits and additional commits are done every time a package moves between repositories (e.g. moving packages out of [testing])

First, the two most prolific committers are Andrea Scarpino and Sven-Hendrik Haase. They both package KDE, which is in itself a lot of packages, but they get bonus commits for the [kde-unstable] repository where a lot of beta and release candidates are packaged. There is a lot of scripting going on for those rebuilds too, so don’t give them too much credit! Sven also deals with boost lately and the required rebuilds.

In places 3 and 6 are Jan Steffens and Jan de Groot who do our GNOME packaging. Rounding out the major desktop packagers is Evangelos Foutras in 9th place. In 4th, we have Andreas Radke who packages Xorg among other things including LibreOffice.

Eric Bélanger takes 5th place. I think he needs a specific shout out here because of all the effort he puts into maintaining the packages that officially have no maintainer. He regularly updates these packages and fixes their bugs. He also does far more than his share during rebuilds.

I am in 7th. This appears due to rebuilds for the removal /sbin et al., and the static libraries removal I pushed this year. In 8th is Tobias Powalowski who maintains the kernel package and deals with most of the module rebuilds.

Now a quick look at TU controlled repository commits. This includes the [community] and [multilib] repositories.

Not surprisingly, in first place we have Sergej Pupykin. He maintains about a 1/3 of the packages in the [community], although only has 1/6 of the commits… In 2nd place is Alexander Rødseth, who as far as I can tell does not maintain any specific package groups, so is just working hard! Bartłomiej Piotrowski is in 3rd (and who also rounded out the top 10 for the main repos) and we see Sven-Hendrik Haase again in 4th.

I’d also like to note the importance of all (or at least some!) of the people who have relatively few commits. In fact, I think we need more of them. I’d like to see the [extra] repo be almost exclusively the big package groups (Xorg, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, perl, python, etc) and [community] be all the additional packages with many more packagers each being responsible for a handful of packages that they are really interested in. So if you are thinking of applying for a Trusted User position, look at the tail of the distribution and do not let the big packagers put you off.