Karanbir Singh wrote:
EPEL is interesting and it has a lot of potential, but the fact that they only care about, build for and expect usage on RHEL tends to sort of exclude a lot of external participation in the project. So much so that a @redhat person said that the only aim they have in pushing epel is to they can go tell their customers about it!!
I think you have that wrong - there is an EPEL list now - everyone interested should join it: https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/ ...And read through the archives: - me asking if I could contribute to EPEL, and not Fedora Extras - answer was yes - https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-March/msg00080.html - Thorsten Leemhuis (one of the leaders of Fedora I think) saying they are waiting for CentOS beta for testing - https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-March/msg00086.html
Added to that the overhead of needing to sign papers with Redhat and the need to become a Fedora contributor first, only further increases the bar to entry and creates really un-necessary issues for people who are unable to, for various reasons to sign such papers etc. And given the fact that Fedora packaging dynamics are drastically different from packaging on *EL, whether the general Fedora guidelines and infrastructure is even usable long term for EPEL is itself doubt.
By sign papers you mean gpg sign - I did that, it was pretty painless...You don't even need to read them ;-)
Greg