Becoming a Fedora Packager

2024-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

I recently decided to finally become an active package maintainer. Quickly I had to realize that there are different ways to become a Fedora Packager. All have in common that, what a surprise, you maintain or co-maintain a package.

But, from all options, the most "classic" way seem to:

Create a package
Submit a Review Request
When it's approved ask for a Sponsor
Get sponsored into the packager group
Publish your first package

The Fedora project has tons of documentation. I found it on the one hand great as a greenhorn to find all these information. And at the same time it was overwhelming and sometimes unclear which is current.

So I put together a short list with resources that helped me most. They are not necessary in a logical order. They will also not cover each and every question you might have. But you can use them as a starting point.

What if you still have question?

Don't be shy, write to the devel mailing list and or join the Fedora Devel Matrix room!

After many many years in the industry, a lot of touch points and contributions to open source projects, I finally made the jump to become a package maintainer.

I learned so much in the last month and went from zero to ~15 Fedora and EPEL packages I became responsible for. This feels like a great success and a valuable way to give something back to the community.

Adopting orphaned Fedora packages or how one thing leads to another

2024-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

Recently I started to become an active Fedora packager, which is something I really enjoy. It happens, for various reasons, that a package gets orphaned by its maintainer. Lack of time, changes in upstream that make it hard to package a new version, or incompatibilities and no updates. In such a case, packages can be adopted by other packagers.

I stumbled across php-aws-sdk3 and even though I'm not actively using the SDK right now, I found it appealing to maintain this package. Might be a good opportunity to understand PHP packaging for Fedora better and brush up my old PHP knowledge a bit. And then I started to realize how fast one package can become many ;)

The magic word: Dependencies. Of course, php-aws-sdk3 depends on other packages. Some of them are orphaned to. Some need and update to be compatible. Others don't exist yet in Fedora. I ended up adopting three other packages and with ~14 new packages on my list :O

So it will take me some time to reach my goal, to keep php-aws-sdk3 alive. But I will learn a lot on that journey and build some cool and valuable packages.

The Wombelix Post - Packager

Becoming a Fedora Packager

Adopting orphaned Fedora packages or how one thing leads to another