Sponsor shortage

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 12:04:01 +0200,
  Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
>Nowadays, I would likely shift the prerequisites to highlight the
>importance of
>
>  - the "fedora-review" tool
>  - Mock, as needed by fedora-review and used by koji
>  - koji, the Fedora Build System

I started out as a user, and as time went by started doing more bug 
reporting and participating on some of the mailing lists. Eventually 
I wanted to become a packager so I could get colossus into Fedora. I 
had been partipatng in the games SIG to some extent so I brought 
discussion about the game there. I think working with a SIG where 
people might be interested in package is a good way to attract a 
sponsor. Before I even got sponsored, I ended up getting sucked in 
as the games spin maintainer. I suspect being a contributor in other 
ways also helped me get looked at by a sponsor.

Since then most of my new package work is rescuing old games packages. 
I don't do reviews, as I don't think I am very good at them and I am 
swamped by the packages I am currently maintaining. I figure it is 
best for me to contribute to the project where I seem to be best 
able to help. I came close to getting burnt out when I stepped up 
to temporarily do some stuff I really didn't want to while a replacement 
was looked for, but the process took too long. Now I am trying to be 
more careful to get stuff done, without taking on so much that I burn out.

I think we should really encourage people to be users first and move 
slowly into packing or other ways of contributing. I would also suggest 
de-emphasizing the new package approach to packaging, but rather 
co-maintaining packages. Fedora has a lot of packages already, and we 
really need more people helping with the existing set of packages, 
than adding new ones. This could also end up freeing time for some of 
our best packagers to work on getting some tricky packages into Fedora 
that are too hard for new packagers to do succesfully.