Looking for a "release manager" for "RPM Fusions repos for EL & EPEL"

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

# CCed to epel-devel-list, as the audience there might be interested in
# this mail as well; nevertheless please send replies to
# rpmfusion-developers at lists.rpmfusion.org only, tia!

Hi!

As some of you may know: RPM Fusion ( http://rpmfusion.org/ ) not only 
supports Fedora, it also wants to support EL (e.g. RHEL and 
clones/derivatives like CentOS) & EPEL for EL >=5 similar to how RPM 
Fusion supports Fedora(¹), as a lot of people asked for such a repo. The 
testing repositories for this are online and filled with the most 
important RPM Fusion packages for quite a while now; see
http://thorstenl.blogspot.com/2008/11/rpm-fusion-for-el-in-early-testing.html
for details how to enable those repos.

In the past weeks there hasn't been much progress to move the packages 
to the normal repos and to officially announce support for EL & EPEL. 
The main reason for that: We have quite a few packagers that are 
interested in having the most important RPM Fusion packages available in 
a RPM Fusion for EL & EPEL, but afaics nobody really wants to do the 
surrounding work that is needed. Hence RPM Fusions look for a volunteers 
(or maybe two) that act a bit as "Release-Engineers/-Managers" for RPM 
Fusion's EL repos.

The position means a bit of work, but not to much if everything works 
well. And the latter (making sure everything works well) is basically 
the job description already; e.g. make sure the repo as a whole work is 
in healthy state and now and in the future makes users and contributors 
glad. That means things like:

- use the repo yourself on at least one, better more systems to get 
aware of any problems directly
- watch or run repoclosure reports and poke maintainers if important 
problems are not fixed
- poke maintainers if they don't fix other important bugs that might be 
bad for the repos reputation
- watch the most important relevant communication channels (IRC, mailing 
lists, webforums and such that are EL specific) and look out for reports 
of general problems with the repo; help users, poke maintainers or 
improve docs if needed to avoid similar problems in the future
- make sure new contributors find their way into the project and 
understand how things work
- if important packages are missing in RPM Fusion's EL repos but are 
present in the repos for Fedora try to find a maintainer that takes care 
of the packages in RPM Fusion EL branch (there are a lot of RPM Fusion 
packages that are not yet in the EL branch)
- help solving technical hurdles as they show up
- interact with the EPEL project and its contributors where needed, as 
the RPM Fusion repos depend on the packages from EPEL
- some others things that rel-eng in Fedora does for Fedora or I do for 
RPM Fusion

IOW: politic and technical skills are needed for the job. Maybe more 
politic than technical skills, as trying to doing everything yourself 
could lead to a quick burn out.

Note that above are just a few examples that outline how I think the job 
needs to be done(²). Some of those things above might sound like more 
work then they are actually; I otoh might have forgotten a few things in 
above list, so don't yell at me if it turns out to be more work then 
estimated later ;-) But don't be frightened, I'll help a bit here and 
there as well.

Are you interested? Then drop me a mail in private or reply to 
rpmfusion-developers at lists.rpmfusion.org

CU
knurd

(¹) read as: rely on EL and EPEL, don't replace any packages from EL or 
EPEL, normally don't ship packages that could be in EPEL as well;

(²) I'm doing that job for RPM Fusion's Fedora repos already; but I 
would prefer if someone else that actually uses EL more than I do does 
the job for RPM Fusion's EL repos