Inspired by @decathorpe and the release of Fedora 30, I’ve decided to start making semi-weekly updates of my packaging work in Fedora. I only say “semi-weekly” as I’m not sure I can commit to every week. Here’s a short look back at the past few years of packaging.

I started packaging quite some time back using copr to create Fedora packages for some things I’ve worked on (ObsPy, Cartopy, etc.), but only started officially packaging things in August 2017. I started out with GIS- and cartography-related Python packages, but eventually branched out into other things. Now I maintain about 50 or so Python-based packages. Some of the more interesting applications are generally OCR-related, like OCRmyPDF and Paperwork.

One of the other reasons to get into packaging was to update git-annex to something recent. This lead down a pretty deep Haskell dependency tree. There are over a hundred there, but I’m not sure I quite understand any Haskell yet.

Speaking of git, I also packaged git-lfs, which lead to a lot of Golang. There are about 40 packages there, including tools such as fzf, git-time-metric, and godoctor. As a member of the Go SIG, I also try to get other packages up-to-date as necessary, and am working on some internal packaging tools.

However, the language with by far the most packages is, surprisingly, R. I’m not really a heavy user of R, but I had a thought of getting the tidyverse set of packages into Fedora. This turned into a long and arduous task which is perhaps only just barely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve reached over 200 packages, but fortunately many of them are old and rarely updated, which reduces the burden somewhat.

All told, that’s >400 packages which is pretty surprising to me. It just sort of grew unexpectedly. They’re mostly in a bit of a niche though, so it allows me to work reasonably independently. And fortunately, they don’t all release at the same time, which spreads out the load significantly. All of this probably wouldn’t be possible without reviewers like @eclipseo, who I’m pretty sure reviewed 95% of my packages.