On Sun, 09 Dec 2012 18:21:43 +0100, Roberto Ragusa wrote: > I can only say that at > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_package_collection_maintainers > 23 steps are shown under "Becoming a Fedora Package Collection Maintainer". > > Some of them are technical and more or less unavoidable (koji, expiring certificates, > scm, bodhi), others are more social (ask a review, introduce, inform upstream, > get sponsorship), finally there is legal stuff (the CLA). Some are very small steps and only a very small hurdle. If you give up so early, it's likely that you would give up quickly also later when you are confronted with typical problems during ordinary package maintenance. For example, some packagers would be fed up as soon as they run into issues with Fedora Project development (arbitrary stuff they don't like or don't agree with), or Fedora infrastructure (even if just something like the move from cvs to git and a fundamental change in the tools being used), or other maintainers modifying their packages (even if following guidelines), or package dependencies causing build failures or run-time failures, or non-responsive bug reporters, … not limited to that. > My enthusiasm has never been powerful enough to overcome such an amount > of static friction. > I do not have a bag of packages to add to Fedora, so going through all the > steps just to maintain one rpm or two is costly. It has been mentioned a couple of times in past and similar discussions that the "How to join" guidelines are just a recommendation, a way that should work, but not the only way how to find a sponsor and how to become a maintainer/co-maintainer. It should be obvious that if somebody else already has packaged something for Fedora before, which you would also like to package, you cannot use such packages for Fedora Package Review requests. Still, you can contact the existing maintainer(s), offer help, tell about your plan of joining as a co-maintainer and ask them about their opinion. Even better if you contribute to the package regularly. It could be that they would welcome the offer and might sponsor you directly, so you could go ahead with package maintenance directly and prove that you are familiar with packaging and with how things are done at Fedora. In other cases, you would still need to find a separate sponsor, *but* there are ways to do that without any package review requests, especially if there is an agreement with existing package maintainer(s). > I'm sure that after being > "inside" the willingness to do more will raise easily, but the initial > investment appears unjustified. IMO, not seldomly it's the opposite. The "initial investment" is an effort you would need to go through only once. Once you are responsible for a package, however, you may need to show a lot more motivation as not become one of those, who have managed to join too easily and leave the project silently once a first roadblock is met. > Replying to random posts on the MLs or contributing patches to random projects > is more appealing (write mail, click send, finished). It's much more convenient, requires no dedicated commitment, you can stop any time. That's true. Especially if an upstream maintainer is much more responsive than a Fedora maintainer and your patch in Fedora bugzilla seems to be ignored, you may enjoy that more. Don't forget the added convenience of being able to touch Fedora packages yourself and not having to wait for somebody else. -- Fedora release 18 (Spherical Cow) - Linux 3.6.9-4.fc18.x86_64 loadavg: 0.47 0.25 0.16 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
