Co-maintainers to assist upstreams with their packages in Extras

[Rick L Vinyard Jr]

Linus Walleij wrote:
> I'm happily upstream and maintainer for three packages, libnjb, libmtp 
> and gnomad2.
>
> Being part of Fedora has increased quality of all three projects, 
> perhaps not much but to some extent. The package review process brings 
> up many issues, and I have the privilege to avoid patching and sending 
> patches upstream, instead I just FixIt(TM) and release a new version.
>
> When releasing upstream, the fact that the tarball also survives the 
> build server environment is a good acceptance test that ensures 
> release quality.
>
> Being both upstream and contributor is quite unproblematic, always 
> was. And it's not much work at all, once you get into it.
>
> Linus
>
I'll second that. I'm upstream on bit, bitgtkmm, conexus, conexusmm and 
papyrus. Because I needed cairomm to support papyrus, I packaged it as 
well. To support another project, clipsmm, I packaged clips. Because I 
use Fedora as my development platform I also packaged tetex-IEEEtran and 
adopted (adopted in a way) nqc.

I too gained alot of insight on the distribution of the packages (thanks 
Ralf Corsepius, Michael Schwendt, Paul Johnson, Gérard Milmeister, Jason 
Tibbitts and everyone else that provided feedback).

I think being a part of Fedora Extras has made my upstream packages 
better, and I think that the Fedora community should encourage, rather 
that discourage, participation by upstream authors as long as said 
upstream author's packages meet Fedora standards.

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Rick L. Vinyard, Jr.