Hello all,

I've been working with RHEL and CentOS packages since about 2011, but mostly in the domain of private Yum repositories. I've done some work in the past with the SUSE Build Service also. I'm familiar with Redhat/Fedora packaging guidelines but not with Fedora-specific development tooling. I've also been involved in the Redhat bugzilla and submitted several library patches for packaging (but never managed a package or package branch itself).

Since RHEL/CentOS 8 has been released now, I'm interested in helping with the migration of packages into the EPEL-8 repository. My focus is on some particular scientific computing packages which are available in EPEL-7 but not yet in EPEL-8. I've not been able to find any good information about this type of thing; does anyone have any pointers?

My first thought would be to start rebuilding "fc28" packages for "el8" but I don't want to duplicate effort if there is already coordinated EPEL-8 targeting for some of these packages. The link at <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_do_I_request_a_EPEL_branch_for_an_existing_Fedora_package.3F> points to the old "PackageDB" process but that appears to be superseded by the "fedpkg" tool. I suppose I need to be an approved package developer even to do local EPEL-8 -targeted builds.

Thanks,

Brian Sipos