Wakey wakey everyone (or: Why we need to think about contributing to other areas of Fedora)

[Nigel Jones]

As it seems to be the season for everyone to get their radical views
about how Fedora should be etc, I think I'll post some of my personal
views on where I think Fedora can improve...


It seems that after the merge, quite a lot of discussion has revolved
around the whole idea of "Why did you implement that, I don't like it,
it interrupts my 'workflow'?" or "I liked it how it used to be" or
even
(I kind of agree with this) "Why wasn't I told? Why didn't you tell me
before hand I'd have to learn a whole new set of make functions?"

Some of the complaining I think is justified, personally I find a lack
of specifics on what I have to do to get my updates into F7 a little
annoying but I'm not making a big deal about it.

Over my last ~2 months of contributing I think that both FESCo and
rel-eng have done great work of late, it's noticeable, and it's allowed
me to make great use of my limited time that I have to contribute to Fedora.

Personally I think we also owe a lot of credit to the packagers who
dedicate a lot of time to sets of highly useful, related packages (three
main examples come to mind (cweyl (packager of a large number of high
quality perl modules), xulchris (packager of a large number of high
quality PHP Pear modules), and than (main packager for KDE packages)).



The issue I see though is while groups such as Fedora Docs have well
designed goals (I can't remember who pointed this out), I'm sure they
could do with extra hands to produce some of the docs WE as maintainers
both need and want.

The infrastructure team need more people knowledgeable in python for
their projects, and I'm sure the L10n and i10n groups could also use an
extra hand from people knowledgeable in Fedora.

So, please, lets all think twice about how we contribute to Fedora,
instead of counting how many packages we each own like Scrooge does with
money, but lets judge people by what their role in the community is,
someone may only have limited spare time, and wish to maintain a couple
of packages, but I think people that are serious about contributing to
Fedora should also look into helping other areas.



What I'm essentially trying to say is, lets get involved in other areas
of Fedora, not just packaging.

There is PackageDB in the works, if you want documentation for that in
advance, maybe we should think about discovering what is required to do
that and help get that done for release.

Bodhi is nowhere near complete (they admit it on the trac too), maybe
the packaging community should where possible help with that too!


Thats my 2 cents (quite possibly nearing $1),

N.J.

P.S. Yes, I myself am happy to eat my own words and look into helping
other areas where and when I can.

P.S.S. A couple of clarifications:
* I'm not saying anyone is doing a bad job at maintaining, I'm just
saying we need to make other aspects of Fedora better for our users,
ourselves (i.e. current maintainers), and future maintainers.
* I've missed quite a few people that have also done excellent work for
Fedora and it's maintainers this is not intentional