I recently switched to xfce as I mentioned in a previous blog post. Since XFCE is going to be pulled from Fedora Core 4, I have stepped up to maintain the packages for Fedora Extras.

The process to become a Fedora Extras maintainer is still ramping up, but the base process is to announce that you want to maintain some package, then post some example packages, then get a sponsor who already is a maintainer to vouch for you, fax a form for CVS access, import your new package into CVS and maintain it.

For the xfce rpms that already were in Fedora Core, I took the latest spec files from the development CVS for Fedora Core and modified and cleaned them up. There weren't too many problems with them, but I did change a few things and had to regenerate a few patches.

For the xfce rpms that were not in Fedora Core before, I took the upstream spec files and fixed them up. rpmlint is a great help here, although it has a number of bogus warnings and errors that you need to just ignore.

The setup in Fedora Extras CVS is pretty sweet. There is a master Makefile.include that has all the basic targets. Your local Makefile just has the package name and includes the main Makefile.include file. You have your spec file in the same directory and any patches. make will download the source for your package, and do all the rpmbuilding steps. You can have it make your src.rpm or binary rpms. It's pretty nice for a build setup for a bunch of RPMS.

I have done the first 2 steps now, so we will see if someone steps forward to sponsor me.

The setup can be found on my home machine here:

xfce rpms for Fedora Extras
(Post Reply)