Intro - where to begin

[Zach Villers]

Hello,

My name is Zach. I'm a former distro-hopper that found my "cure" in 
Fedora 20. I've only been using Linux for nine months or so now, but I 
love it. Fedora has been in the right place between stability and 
cutting edge for me. I've started studying for the RHCSA and would like 
to contribute in some way to the Fedora project. I don't have any 
serious coding ability or artistic talent. I think I could be an 
ambassador (plus I live in Ohio and could be at the OLF) , but I'm also 
interested in packaging. What's involved in each choice?

Thanks,
Zach

[Ankur Sinha]

On Thu, 2014-07-24 at 02:29 -0004, Zach Villers wrote:
> Hello,

Hi Zach,
> My name is Zach. I'm a former distro-hopper that found my "cure" in
> Fedora 20. I've only been using Linux for nine months or so now, but I
> love it. Fedora has been in the right place between stability and
> cutting edge for me. I've started studying for the RHCSA and would
> like to contribute in some way to the Fedora project. I don't have any
> serious coding ability or artistic talent. I think I could be an
> ambassador (plus I live in Ohio and could be at the OLF) , but I'm
> also interested in packaging. What's involved in each choice?

I'll describe the requirements of both sub-teams:

To be a Fedora Ambassador, you need to have a general idea of what's
going on in the community. This is rather simple, just keep an eye on
the various mailing lists, planet-fedora and the weekly meeting logs
from the other various sub teams. Since the primary duty of an
ambassador is to spread the word about Fedora, they generally attend
linux events in their areas and work with the rest of the community to
ensure a Fedora presence - set up booths, help Fedora sponsor the event,
get swag and other goodies to give out at the event, and the sort. It's
rather fun - you get to meet with other Fedora folks, discuss work, grab
beers! You'll need to start here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_Join_start

The package maintainer role is slightly more technical - package
maintainers take software and convert them into RPMs for Fedora.
Generally, software will use some sort of build system - autotools,
cmake, qmake, python-setuptools/distutils etc. It varies from package to
package. So, some information on these tools would be helpful, but it's
certainly nothing that you can't learn by looking at the tool's
documentation - that's how most of us learn. It's a good idea to know a
little about the package you maintain - so you can fix occasional bugs
that might crop up. If it's something too complicated, you can just
refer it to upstream, and then update the package when they make a new
release. It's quite a lot of fun too, once you learn the basics. You'll
need to start here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_package_collection_maintainers

If you run into any trouble, just ask a question - either here, or the
devel list, or one of the IRC channels. Folks are more than happy to
help newcomers learn. More often than not, you'll get a link to a wiki
page as an answer. Almost everything is documented on the wiki, one just
needs to know where to look.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Package_Maintainers