Hi Stephen, thank you for your interest in contributing to Fedora. I can totally understand that the current policies may seem overwhelming so that becoming a packager might be seen as some kind of "elite" status. I think I would feel the same way if I didn't become a packager ~10 years ago. However I would like to emphasize Ben's point:
I think becoming a packager is not as complicated as you’ve written. To become a packager, you must convince a packager sponsor to sponsor you. That’s all; there is no rule about how to do the convincing.
Maybe you do 1-2 package updates or fixes (pull request via src.fedoraproject.org) and check the Fedora wiki pages for a list of sponsors. Try contacting some of them directly after you verified they are still active (mailing list/src.fedoraproject.org). Also it helps usually if these sponsors are interested in the languages/tech stack which you tried to improve.
That being said: Java in Fedora is one of the hardest areas to tackle. Several "high profile" packagers had to give up on that task (despite heroic efforts) because it is just too much for one person (or a small team).
Part of the problem is that the Java upstream "culture" does not matches the processes of a traditional Linux distribution like Fedora. Lots of bundled dependencies, "secret" build processes and on top a huge number of small packages.
I can understand that "keeping Eclipse in Fedora" is a worthy goal for sure but really a lot of work. Other areas like Python packaging are much easier as applications tend to be smaller and bundling is less common in the Python world. (Also great efforts by our Python team!)
One of the things I'd be interested in is "reprocible builds" which I think might be easier to contribute. While there is a lot of infrastructure to build (= a lot of work) you can also just fix one package at a time (probably with a few upstream commits). Even if you stop contributing to Fedora after some months or years you advanced the state of Fedora/Linux anyway.
Felix _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
