[packman] Volunteer reporting for duty

[Remco de Vreugd]

Hi there,

As a long-time user of openSUSE and Packman, completely aside from the fact that I am a Novell employee and routinely use SLES, I have a habit of running into software that is not available in the standard repositories -- of which I consider Packman to be one of the very few.

These are typically modest little tools, created as a one-off, but still quite useful. Installing them usually involves little more than a ./configure; make; make install, but that is still far removed from having them available for searching and installation through zypper or YaST. While I can certainly build RPMs for them and even set up a repository of my own, it would be useful, to both myself and others, to have stuff like this included in Packman as standard. So my question now is how to get it there.

I do not really know what it takes to become (and remain) a Packman maintainer. I am willing to invest some time, and seeing that the tools in question are not that likely to get updated further I would not expect there to be a need for frequent updates in content. Building a package once, for various distributions (openSUSE current, -1, -2 and -3, plus perhaps SLES current, -1, -2), and running a rebuild whenever a new generation of a distribution gets introduced, would certainly be an option for me.

Could you please let me know whether it would be acceptable for having such a 'maintainer light' added to your team, and what the terms and conditions would then be? I am a software developer with extensive experience in the Linux arena, and will have no trouble whipping up virtual machines for the building and testing against different distributions. So in practical terms I am not expecting many difficulties. I primarily need to know what would be expected of me.

Best regards,
Remco de Vreugd.