Who are Packager Sponsors?
Packager Sponsors are maintainers that have a good record of maintaining packages, doing reviews and assisting others with the processes and procedures of Fedora. Sponsors act as mentors for new contributors to help point them to areas they would like to contribute, assist them with processes and procedures and assist them when they need general guidance. Sponsors also are responsible for fixing mistakes made by their sponsored maintainers if they are unable to do so. Every Fedora package maintainer should have a sponsor.
Make sure the maintainers you sponsor follow guidelines
Sponsors should try and keep up with the doings of their sponsored maintainers. When needed, sponsors should guide the sponsored maintainer to do the best choices in packaging and reviewing, and to follow the guidelines. Initial sponsored maintainers should have more scrutiny than long established maintainers with a known record of good efforts.
Bugzilla has the ability to let you know via email all activity for a given address. Later, more avenues will be available, such as watching all VCS activity for a given package, rss feeds of package updates, and the like.
To watch a maintainers activity in Bugzilla do the following:
- Login to bugzilla.redhat.com with your account.
- Click the Preferences button at the top.
- Click the Email Preferences tab.
- In the User Watching section at the bottom of the page, enter a comma-delimited list of users email address(es) in the add users to my watch list text entry box.
- Click submit changes
Help answer maintainers questions
Packager sponsors should be available to their sponsored maintainers to answer questions. It's up to the sponsor if they wish to be available via IRC, email, bugzilla, mailing list posts, phone or the like. In the event a sponsor is unable to answer a question, they should escalate it to the approprate list, FESCo, FAB or the like and get an answer passed back.
Questions sponsors should answer in particular are all the questions related with practical aspects of Fedora (Build system, VCS, FAS, updates...).
Guide the sponsored maintainer in the Fedora Project
Packager sponsors should also be able to guide (or coerce) the sponsored packager in other aspects of Fedora. For example point to maintainer policies appropriately, help the sponsored maintainer to feel at ease in the Fedora community and explain what is Fedora and what it is not.
Fix issues caused by sponsored maintainers
If one of your sponsored maintainers is unable to fix an issue in their package(s), it's up to the sponsor to step in and make the needed fixes. This might include pushing a security update when the maintainer is unavailable, applying a patch, removing a improperly build package, or other time or security sensitive issue. Note that the maintainer should be shown the fix and how to manage the issue moving forward.
NOTE: the current ACL system does not allow this. Hopefully it will be fixed.
Revoking Sponsorship
A sponsor may elect to revoke their sponsorship of a maintainer in rare and extreme situations.
These situations might include: A maintainer that no longer wishes to contibute to Fedora, a maintainer that refuses to follow guidelines, or irreconcilable differences between the maintainer and the Sponsor. In this event it is the responsibility of the Sponsor to orphan the maintainers packages, and do any other needed cleanups.
FESCo should be notified of the reasons why a sponsorship is being revoked.
Sponsorship Duration
Sponsorship of a maintainer begins when the Sponsor approves them in the Fedora Account System. Sponsorship of a maintainer ends when that sponsorship is revoked, or when that maintainer themselves becomes a Sponsor.
Who Sponsors the Sponsors?
Once a maintainer has been granted sponsorship status (via a vote of FESCO), that Sponsor will be held accountable by FESCO, and not their previous Sponsor. More on becoming a sponsor.