Self Introduction: Nadav Har'El

[Nadav Har'El]

Hi, my name is Nadav Har'El. I'm here because I noticed that the
"python-cassandra-driver" driver was orphaned. When asking to adopt it, I
was told (https://pagure.io/releng/issue/9365) that because this package
had already been orphaned five months earlier, I should become a packager
and initiate a review process - and that I should come here to do that.

Although I have zero experience with Fedora management processes (so I'm
here to learn...), I do have many years of experience with Fedora, and in
developing free software. My Fedora experience started twenty-two years
ago, when I installed Redhat 5.2; Since then, I have used every single
release of Redhat, Fedora Core and Fedora that came out. Today I have 5
different computers at home running Fedora 30 or 31 :-) I have also been a
free software developer for many years: Among other things, I wrote the
Hebrew spell checker packaged by Fedora (hspell), I contributed to the KVM
hypervisor, to the OSv kernel (https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv) and
today, I mainly contribute to Scylla (https://github.com/scylladb/scylla)
an open-source project which re-implemented Apache Cassandra in C++ with
superior performance and other advantages.

Because both Apache Cassandra and our compatible replacement, Scylla,
require fairly elaborate cluster setups, I can (just barely) understand why
Fedora decided to deprecate the Cassandra server package. However, I was
troubled by the decision to drop the *client* library,
python-cassandra-driver. There's also other client stuff in the main
Cassandra package, and a Java library package, but for me the Python
library is personally more interesting.

I believe that the Cassandra *client* libraries are still interesting for
many Cassandra users and developers that use Fedora for client machines -
even if the server cluster is installed from source-code or some other
extra-Fedora mechanism. Yes, users can always install these client
libraries with "pip install", but I feel that this is not "The Fedora
Way",
and there is no real reason why the python[23]-cassandra-driver needs to be
dropped when Fedora packages over 2,000 (!) other Python packages. It
should be easy to keep up to date as it is mostly an upstream Python
package. So I wanted to adopt this package myself and continue having it on
Fedora.

So that's the story of why I came here :-)
Looking forward to fruitful collaboration,
Nadav.

--
Nadav Har'El
nyh(a)scylladb.com