Welcome

Here we go, sorry for the delay, just after the ticket was created I caught a cold and haven't been up two writing an introduction, but here it comes.

I'm from Sweden and have been working as a systems engineer for some time, first in Sweden, then for about seven years in Thailand. I recently moved back to Sweden again and at the same time switched to a software development position. In my dayjob I maintain an enterprise product used by broadcaster, that's largely written in Perl, though a lot of my time is of course spent on the framework around it, including things like Ansible, Gitlab CI, container image building, &c.

What prompted me to try to become a Fedora packager now is somewhat work related, where it would really help me to get a few things currently in Fedora added to EPEL. In particular, this package: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/breezy . I've been messing about a bit trying to work out how I would get that to happen with some pull requests, but would be happy for any further pointers or advice about it. I also have the ambition to try to contribute in some way to Silverblue, at least by participating in test days and so on for it.

I'll just go ahead and answer the other questions in Q&A form here:

have you participated in FOSS before, or is this the first time?

I have from time to time, though just as an occasional contributor, I haven't maintained any projects with a lot of users besides myself. I've been a packager before at various times, first for Gentoo for a while, and later Debian.

how do you imagine your place in a FOSS community?

I'd mainly like to maintain some packages that I care about, in collaboration with others as appropriate. I already hang around in the Silverblue IRC channel and forums and try to answer questions when I can, and I plan to continue doing so.

community development and outreach, campaigning, journalism

I've been a political and union activist so have some experience with campaigning and so on, thought not from recent years.

Operating System (Do you use GNU/Linux as your main OS? Is Fedora Linux your main distribution?)

I'm a long-time Linux user, having used it since a friend of mine helped me install Red Hat 4.something, around 1997. Between then and now I've done a lot of distro hopping, only really getting back into the world of RPM based Linux distributions when I started my current jobs about 10 years ago.

Through all that I still used Ubuntu on my laptop, until being tempted over to Fedora by Silverblue a couple of years ago.

non-software development: design (Inkscape/Gimp/?), music/video/podcasting, marketing, language proficiency

I used to be very into photography, though that was during the brief time I had a MacBook, so mostly edited in Lightroom on that. I've also dabbled in podcasting, though only made three episodes.

software development related: command line, version control: git/hg/svn/?, rpm/packaging, programming languages/frameworks/utilities, testing, infrastructure/sysadmin

I'm a programmer, at work we have a custom package manager, but also build some things as RPMs. For deployment we use Ansible, so I know a bit about that.

have you used mailing lists before?

Yes, and I've also hosted some with Mailman, though it's a while ago now.

what is your preferred real time chat platform?

I'm on IRC but would like to use chat.fedoraproject.org, (see my PS below).

have you helped with moderating/administering forums?

As mentioned, I've hosted some mailing lists (way back now though). Currently I'm a moderator on a Mastodon instance (mastodon.sdf.org).

how much time are you looking to/are you able to spend on volunteering (approximate hours per week)?

I expect this will vary, I'll probably put in more time if needed, but I couldn't commit to more than 2-4 hours/week if we're talking about actual time commitment.

Best wishes,
Björn

PS: I would like to join the Matrix chats on chat.fedoraproject.org. Right now I can only use some of them that are bridged to IRC. I'm able to log in using my FAS account, but can't join any channels due the an issue I've thoroughly described in this forum thread: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/registration-difficulties-on-chat-fedoraproject-org/39072 If anyone here is able to toggle whatever flag would indicate that I've accepted the terms so that I can join channel, please help.

Hello @bkhl

This is just a follow-up ticket, It's been a while and we don't know anything about you, we would like to know:

How are your Journey in the Community?
Do you have any block/impediment/problem?
Do you have any doubt?
Are you doing some task in the Community?

Please feel free write all this information in your ticket and contact any of us in any moment, we are here to help you in your trvale

references

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-join/welcome/welcome/#_workflow_summary

Regards.,

Hello,

I'm alright, I'm participating in chats on Matrix &c. (I'm "bkhl" there also).

As far as my first goal, to help get Breezy into EPEL for RHEL 8, I've received responses on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2107044 indicating that the current package maintainers don't want to do that, which I guess means I could in principle be given permission to do it as a co-maintainer? I would like to know what I should do to proceed towards that.

Yes, if the fedora package maintainers do not want to maintain EPEL builds, you can request them to add you as a co-maintainer for the epel branches and you can maintain there. (src.fp.o. allows them to add you as a co-maintainer but for a specific set of branches)

There's some info on all this here:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/epel-faq/

Thanks to among others @carlwgeorge I've managed to get myself into the packagers group now and think I have enough support to get along, so closing this ticket.