Tomi Lähteenmäki
Fedora ProjectHow hard do you think it would be to start contributing to the Fedora Project?
Please share why you feel that way in a reply!
Very hard to do
Somewhat hard to do
Not so hard to do
Not hard at all
Poll ended at .
Teoh Han Hui@fedora Package maintainers are usually not responsive.
Jonne Kokkonen@fedora I think there's some relatively simple ways to contribute, like kernel testing weeks
gozes@fedora for me it's very unclear what I could do as an SWE that mostly golang, cloud stuff and finds packaging incredibly boring
Tor.sh 
@fedora I was a contributor for a while as a packager and infrequent tester. I've voted, contributed to plans, been in SIG meetings and tried to do good at what I was doing while I was doing it. It started out great. I may have gotten lucky getting my foot in the door given the extremely niche SIG (mobility) I got shuffled into on the coat tail of another contributor, aiming to be a co-packager. I found Bugzilla and the various infrastructure items confusing a lot of the time 😅 ...
Mike@fedora Very hard. I’ve tried in the past year and ultimately gave up out of frustration. There’s no direction, so as someone who’s never contributed to an open source project, I was completely overwhelmed and didn’t know who to turn to.
OrbitalMartian@fedora Somewhat hard to do, I have no idea where to start. Also I messed my install up and couldn’t get it reinstalled from a fresh ISO.
Joracle@fedora I have no coding experience nor do I think that I would do a good enough job translating
KJ Tsanaktsidis@fedora the mechanics of how packaging tool ecosystem works together is very arcane. rpm, rpkg, fedpkg, mock, rpmbuild, dist-git, source-git, …. Maybe there’s a need for a high level overview of how these things fit together.
Yes, this being a thread about contributions, perhaps _I_ should write it 😛
John Stracke@fedora How about an “I don’t know; no data” answer?
Viktor Pankraz@fedora I once filed a bug report because the font rendering was broken but got my first reply a version later where the bug was acknowledged and discussed. Not very motivating. Still love Fedora 😄
Neko the gamer 
@fedora packaging alone is a messy process to do
Tau 
@fedora
I daily drive Fedora and I would like to start contributing to packaging📦
The hurdles are more of a social nature for me—the new tools are definitely a challenge but overcoming that comes more naturally to me.
The documentation definitely helps, but has a lot of recursive links so getting an overview takes a minute :)
1/
@fedora
Joining mailing lists is a big part of that—I just *really* dislike sending emails. Not being able to edit my texts after sending causes me to overthink and spend wayy to long composing.
2/
@fedora
Reaching out to a potential sponsor is definitely a hurdle too, but I think once I manage to do that, a lot of the other issues are easier bc I can just ask my sponsor/mentor for help.
3/3
Fabio Valentini@tautropfli @fedora I don't think finding a sponsor will be difficult in your case :)
SlouchyThe guidelines are extremely overwhelming at the start, but as someone who just recently went through the process of becoming a maintainer, the single most useful and insightful source were the tutorials on how to package your app. It's step by step with explanations on why you need each thing. There are two tutorials, and I'd recommend both if you haven't done them yet.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/Packaging_Tutorial/
Quijote Libre@fedora The truth is that I don't know if it's hard or not, but I don't see how someone with little technical background, like me, could do it, and I would like to.