Arch Linux Veteran Morten Linderud Leaves the Project After 10 Years

Morten Linderud, known in the community by the handle Foxboron, has announced his departure from the Arch Linux project. Behind him lie ten years of work: he served as a package maintainer, a member of the security team, and a curator of the AUR repository. In his own words, the time had come to “let go” and move on.

What he did

Over his years of involvement, Linderud was responsible for the debug packages in Arch Linux, was there at the start of the project's migration to Git, and made many other contributions. In leaving, he isn't cutting ties with open source as a whole: the developer intends to keep working on topics related to TPM, Secure Boot, and adjacent security initiatives. This is only about stepping back from Arch Linux specifically.

Orphaned packages

In his farewell message, Linderud listed the packages that now need a new maintainer. The list is substantial: mkinitcpio, Bolt, nvme-cli, Go-Tools, Pacman, arch-install-scripts, archlinux-keyring, archlinux-repro, and others. Some of them he maintained single-handedly — WPA_Supplicant and fsverity-utils, for example. On top of that, over the years he had supported, to one degree or another, many other packages as well.

Losing the sole maintainer of components like Pacman (the distribution's stock package manager) or archlinux-keyring (the set of keys for verifying signatures) is no small matter: these are infrastructure pieces that every user's system depends on for functionality and security. The community now has to find people willing to take them under their wing.

Linderud also laid out his thoughts on the departure in a post on his personal blog.

Source: Phoronix