Over the past couple of days I got added to the packagers group in FAS and uploaded my first approved RPM – it has been a very interesting process, particularly going through the various policy pages on the wiki (which, while informative, are pretty badly laid out in my opinion – but that’s something I can help fix). Trying cvs again for the first time in years has been an odd experience.

I’ve already managed to make my first mistake – not incorporating changelog information into the commit message, which of course I realised just after I did it – but I’m taking things relatively slowly because I know there’s going to be plenty of stuff to learn still.

I have a couple of other packages which are waiting to be submitted; my rules on this are going to be pretty simple to begin with: I’m only going to submit stuff that I at least use, but mostly stuff that I develop or develop against. So, the first packages of log4c and iniparser are unlikely to set the world alight, but I feel I can do a better job as a packager that way to start with.

What is great is how friendly and helpful Fedora is as a community. nirik has been very helpful as a sponsor, and the whole process of trying to contribute to Fedora is really easy – a lot easier than I expected. I think some other projects could learn a lot from this.