Wiki » Becoming a Mageia Packager

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Synopsis: This page is meant for people interested in becoming Mageia packagers. It provides a guide for the first steps that lead to becoming an apprentice. If you are already a Mageia packager and want to become a mentor, see Becoming a Mageia Mentor.

What is needed to become a Mageia packager

To become a Mageia packager, you have to be mentored by an experienced Mageia packager. You will be an apprentice until your mentor considers you are ready to be a fully qualified packager.

There are very few general prerequisites.
The most important one is enthusiasm for Mageia, Linux and free software in general, as well as the enthusiasm to learn. The other prerequisites are more related to the basic usage of a Linux system, notably installing, removing packages, and good command-line skill.

Additional experiences, such as reporting and helping fix bugs, helping test programs (QA), patch triaging, as well as programming, are very useful. You might consider starting from there if you do not feel comfortable enough with taking on Mageia packaging, but this is not mandatory to become an apprentice.

To summarize, the prerequisites are:

1. enthusiasm for the project
2. enthusiasm to learn.

Everything else can be learned.

Joining the Mageia Community

Being a Mageia packager is being part of a community of people from all over the world. Becoming a Mageia packager, therefore, includes learning about and playing a part in that community.

Opening a Mageia account

The first step is to open a Mageia account (if you haven't already done so) at http://identity.mageia.org/. This will give you access to the various services that are used by the Mageia community.

Interacting with the Mageia community

There are two main ways for the Mageia community to talk: IRC and Mailing lists.

IRC is a good place for discussing in real time.

• development and packaging channel: #mageia-dev on Liberachat server
• mentoring channel dedicated to beginners: #mageia-mentoring on Liberachat server. This channel will be your communication channel with your mentor during your apprenticeship.

Meetings

The packaging team used to have bi-weekly meetings to speak about the global organization, coming releases, priorities to be fixed, link with other teams, new packagers, but has them less often now ...

• where: on IRC #mageia-dev on Liberachat server
• when: after an invitation for a meeting is sent to dev@ml.mageia.org, on the date and time mentioned in the invitation.

Mailing-lists

You should sign up to various mailing lists to keep track of the current choices that the community is making.

• discuss@ml.mageia.org is a list useful to all contributors, for general discussions of the directions of Mageia.
• dev@ml.mageia.org is essential for all packagers (or apprentices), for discussions about packaging and development.

Some other lists useful to packagers :

• bugs@ml.mageia.org: Bugzilla emails about submitted bugs
• changelog@ml.mageia.org: all new releases of packages submitted - we will work on a specific one regarding backports, this has to be defined later
• packages-commits@ml.mageia.org: all packages commits on Mageia svn

See the mailing lists page for details about subscribing.

Learning about the distribution

The purpose of the Mageia community is mainly to build the Mageia Linux distribution. As an apprentice, it is necessary to familiarize yourself with it.

The best way to get familiar with it is to run Mageia on your computers. There is the current stable version that you should run on your current machines. As an apprentice, however, your goal should be to run Cauldron, the development (unstable) version of Mageia, at least on a test machine, or in a virtual environment.

You will learn about Mageia also by participating in other tasks than packaging. You can help the Bugsquad, the Documentation team, the Internationalisation Team (i18n) or the QA Team. You can also just help informally by testing your favorite software and reporting bugs.

Another way to familiarize yourself with Mageia is to read and understand the documentation. This wiki is meant to play such a role and you will need it as a reference during your training.

Documentation to read

Here is a list of links you should read before starting, using Mageia documentation or more generic ones.

What is packaging?

• RPM Package Manager
• Package Management System

Mageia packaging links

• Packagers Howto start
• Packagers RPM tutorial - A Mageia tutorial for packagers
• Packaging guidelines
• Packaging for beginners - A page explaining packaging
• Packaging hints - A sort of FAQ or "don't forget" page about packaging
• RPM spec file policy

Packaging in other distributions

• Rpm.org : http://www.rpm.org/ and http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm-snapshot/

• Fedora RPM documentation
• Fedora packaging tutorial

• SUSE packaging tutorial (no info about target OS in the rpm name)

Finding a mentor

After reading carefully the previous paragraphs and following the tutorial as much as possible, the last step in becoming an apprentice is to find a mentor.

First, complete these steps :

1. Enter your info in the apprentice candidate table below. Be sure to include your email address, so a mentor can contact you.
2. Subscribe to and then post a request for a mentor on the dev mailing list.

To find a mentor, you then do any (or all) of :

1. Ask for a mentor on IRC (#mageia-dev).
2. Contact a mentor directly, listed in the Becoming a Mageia Mentor page.

If everything works correctly, a mentor should contact you within a couple of weeks. Coming regularly on IRC (#mageia-mentoring) and asking there will speed up that process.

Once you get a mentor, follow the page Packagers Howto start.

Packaging apprentice candidates

Packaging apprentices looking for a mentor may add their name at the end of this table.
Before doing this, be sure to read the previous sections. To add your name to this list, you have to be logged in to the wiki using your Mageia identity account.

Mageia_id name	email	time zone	(opt) languages	date added	interests / skills / comments
example ex name	example@foo.org	UTC+3	pt, en	YYYY-MM-DD	What you would like to work with (example areas/programs), what coding and tools you master or like to learn, are you a long time user, do you work on other parts of Mageia.
magicd3vil Michael Slíva	michael@sliva.dev	UTC+1	cs, en	2022-03-12	I am a Linux enthusiast, programmer, sysadmin, and avid supporter of open-source software and community. After a lot of distro-hopping, I chose Mageia back in 2018 and never turned back. I want to give back to this great community as a packager while learning something useful and new at the same time. I am knowledgeable at using terminal, shell scripting, bash, and I've repackaged a few packages for myself before. I've also contributed to the Czech translation of the Mageia doc_installer on the Transifex in the past.

Packaging apprentices:

In edit mode, copy the template line below to end of table (just before "|}"), and add your info.

{{Pkg:appr-cand| | | |UTC-| |2011-mm-dd|interests+skills }}

email	Required for contact
time zone	e.g. UTC+1 for France, UTC-8 for California, etc.
languages	(optional) Languages preferred, if not only English
date added	To see how long you have been waiting for a mentor

Main Apprenticeship Principles

As an apprentice, your goal is to learn, and for that, your mentor will help. He will set some tasks for you and will supervise your progress. You are of course free to suggests the packages you might be interested in.

A packager contributes to the distribution by two main means: svn (the repository for package sources) and the build system (which produces the binary packages and propagates them). As an apprentice, you will go through the following stages:

1. Apprentice (Initiate): no svn commit rights, everything goes through your mentor except for the bugzilla part, where the mentor must ask for bugzilla edit rights to qa or sysadmin list.
2. Apprentice+ (Padawan): svn commit rights, but your mentor reviews and submits the packages
3. Packager (Jedi): all the rights ... and the responsibility :-)

Graduation Criteria

From Initiate to Padawan, the apprentice needs to have:

1. posted a presentation email to our dev mailing list.
2. attended the Packaging Seminar 1
3. opened a bug report
4. fixed a bug (from a bug report, all the way to the end, can be the same)
5. helped validate at least one update for QA
6. mentor committed at least 5 patches to spec files without problems

The mentor, in agreement with the mentoring manager, decides when the apprentice is ready to become Padawan.

From Padawan to Jedi, the apprentice needs to have:

1. attended the Packaging Seminar 2
2. provided an update for a stable release (with patching, bug report, advisory)
3. mentor pushed at least 10 packages touched without problems
4. mentor/SIG sends email on -dev.

The packager meeting decides about graduation.

Apprenticeship in progress

This table should be updated by the mentoring manager.

Mageia ID	Mentor(s)	Initiate						Padawan
		Intro email	Seminar 1	Bug report	Fix Bug	QA valid.	5 Patches	Seminar 2	Update	10 Packages	Graduation email Or last update
Template	Example	2025-08-25	Done	Done	Done	Done	5/5 app1 app2 app3 app4 app5	Done	Done	10/10 app1 app2 app3 app4 app5 app6 app7 app8 app9 app10	Done 2021-02-14
Moufinure	papoteur	2025-08-25					caprice32
marja	doktor5000	Done	Done	Done	Done	Done	5/5 ?	Done
Crox	pterjan	Done	Done
yannick56	ofaurax	2013-07-xx	Done	Done	Done	..	..
nmartin	philippem	Done		Done	Done	Done	5/5 ?		Done
TheSuperGeek	neoclust	Done	Done	Done	Done
JMiahMan	ngompa	2017-07-13	Done	Done	Done
yoriy		2018-04-07
dima2387	kekepower	2018-12-08		Done
jybz	neoclust	2020-02-12	Done	Done
emel_punk	neoclust	2020-06-26 2022-02-17	Done
linuxero	neoclust		Done
joselp	papoteur,mokraemer	Done		Done						photomontage gimp-batcher-plugin
zekemx	kekepower	Done					1. conky			displaylink new-lg4ff oversteer
irton	daviddavid	2026-05-17

For mentors, see Becoming_a_Mageia_Mentor

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