About me
I'm the head systems administrator for the Mathematice Department at the University of Houston. We use Fedora extensively on the desktop, and I'm interesting in useful scientific and sysadmin applications into the distro. Along with a few more games, of course.
I work on the Packaging:Committee. I was a very early FESCo member, back when the 'E' meant 'Extras', but left years ago.
I have probably over a thousand completed package reviews at this point. I don't really do them any longer, but if you really need something reviewed, feel free to ask me. IRC is best.
What I'm Doing
Outside of committee work and trying to clean up the packaging guidelines, I'm spending most of my time trying to enhance the packaging experience by simplifying specfiles. Lately (early 2016) I've been adding macros to EPEL in order to enable more packages to build there without needing specfile changes. This benefits Fedora by having fewer specfiles that have outdated constructs which get copied into other packages without thought.
I'm also working to hide as much bizarre specfile magic as possible behind macros.
Tips
Occasionally people ask how I have my editor set up so that it yells about specfile issues. I use vim (though I also use emacs, so no editor wars please) and have the syntastic module set up to call rpmlint whenever I open or save a file.
Install Plug according to its installation instructions.
In my .vimrc I have:
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
Plug 'scrooloose/syntastic'
call plug#end()
let g:syntastic_spec_rpmlint_args = "--file=rpmlint.cf"
Open vim and enter :PlugUpdate and then restart vim or :so ~/.vimrc.
If you're editing a spec and rpmlint complains about something it shouldn't, just create a file rpmlint.cf in there with the spec and add options and filters. For example:
setOption('NetworkEnabled', True)
addFilter('unversioned-explicit-provides')
addFilter('mixed-use-of-spaces-and-tabs')
will quiet the editor when working on the zsh specfile and check that the source URLs are correct.
Bug me at:
- Email: tibbs@math.uh.edu
- GPG key: http://www.math.uh.edu/~tibbs/tibbs.gpg
- tibbs or tibbs|w on freenode. I'm almost always in #fedora-devel.