I wanted to elaborate on one of the ideas I threw out during that discussion.
We (need to|should|strive really hard to) treat new packagers more like new volunteers for fedora infrastructure. Except that we should accept that packaging is really, really hard when you don't know where to start and offer more hand-holding. The infrastructure process seems to work really well (for infrastructure, at least) and the new packager process seems to _not_ work really well, so.... Note that I'm assuming here that we don't have that miraculous review handling program (fresque). I know someone was working on it, and I should probably see what state it's in, but I'm way behind after being on vacation for a month. It wouldn't really alter the central point anyway. My random proposal for that is to: 1) Add more "front end" to the process (which, yeah, means more process when we already have too much process). Packagers should send an introduction and such, perhaps even before they have a package. They may need help doing that, after all, and we should be providing that help. 2) At some point, they should be assigned three (or some other reasonable number) mentors, including (if possible) one from the same region (from the ambassadors pool or one of the regional groups) just to help with language issues in case they come up. These don't have to be sponsors, but at least two should be packagers. Hopefully one is familiar with and has interest in the "type" of software they intend to package. (Python, Java, games, whatnot.) 3) They should also be assigned a sponsor from the sponsor pool, if one is not part of the mentor group. This person will oversee the process and actually give the permissions, though they don't necessarily have to do the heavy lifting. 3) These mentors should be "on hand" to assist the packager, answer questions, etc. 4) We should encourage that new packagers put their specs in pagure so that people can file pull requests against them. Probably small specs for easy packages don't need this. This conveniently gives them a base to have copr pull from, assuming I understand that functionality of copr. They'll still have to post updates to bugzilla but we might be able to automate that. 5) A whole bunch more automation to get packages checked and people pinged would of course be quite useful here. - J< -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
