"RPM Fusion is ready for F10 announcement" for fedora-announce-list

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:15:59 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> What RPM Fusion really needs is IMHO not an announce writer. RPM Fusion 
> for a healthy and hopefully growing project afaics need way more people 
> that take care of all those "other things" 

How about a fat "Help needed" section on the main web page?

Just a few lines that explain what kind of help is needed and how
contributors may join and become productive. The lack of information is
not specific to RPM Fusion, it is a growing problem also for Fedora.
IRC-centric organisation and desolate Wiki pages. Few people in key
positions (approx. the same people who are praised in official
announcements) with not enough time to handle everything. Hurdles
for potential contributors.

> - infrastructure (that is a whole big field with lots of sub-points I 
> won't list here;

Still you need to start somewhere if you're overwhelmed and seeking
for help. What can potential contributors expect? What target OS?
SSH access? What privileges? Any issues with trusting strangers?

> dep-checker script is one example)

It's not rocket-science.

It just needs somebody to become familiar with yum-utils'
/usr/bin/repoclosure, which works just like my modified script (which is
derived from an older yum-utils). Once you get it to produce valid output,
running the modified script and the report script is not more
difficult.

However, the "somebody" to do it is missing. Not just at RPM Fusion. Look
at EPEL! The broken deps report is damaged for more than half a year. Most
of what it does is to annoy packagers, who receive false positives in
multiple mails. Every week. The RHEL repos are hidden away in the depth of
the Fedora infrastructure. The scripts are somewhere "in git". Trying to
find out what's necessary to edit them and push them to the system where
they run in cron would take extra efforts and probably time-consuming IRC
communication with bottle-necks. The person who has broken them doesn't
find any time in many months to fix them, but sits in the steering
committee. It bears a big resemblance with the pre-Fedora era, where many
things were locked down inside Red Hat.

> - make sure things are documented properly
> - keep the wiki in shape

I think the German "Weniger is mehr!" translates to something like
"Do no more than what is absolutely necessary". Focus on brief
information that's easy to find instead of creating a maze like
the Fedora Wiki.

> - make sure people get answers to their questions

Make sure people ask in places where you can guarantee that questions are
seen. Frequently asked questions => bottom-up FAQ building.