My contributor story
About you
- Preferred name: David Cantrell
- Remain anonymous?: no
About your Contributor Story
- Who is your story about?: Nick Clifton and the annocheck project
- What is/are their FAS username(s)?: nickc
My Contributor Story
One story that comes to mind is related to work I was doing on my rpminspect project. The rpminspect project provides a command line tool that developers and package maintainers can use to check the state of the built RPMs. Fedora and other distributions use this tool to check for package policy compliance.
In this instance I was working on rpminspect's use of the annocheck program. You can read about annocheck here. I was having some difficulties collecting the output from annocheck, so I decided to email Nick and explain what I was doing and if he had any suggestions. Many times when developers get questions from other developers regarding the use of their project, there is not a lot that you can do except answer API questions or usage questions. I was wanting to verify a few things and then maybe hope Nick had a suggestion or two.
Nick responded the next day and after some questions he had, I suggested that something like libannocheck that I could link with and use programmatically would be way easier. To my surprise, he agreed and was open to the idea. Very quickly he split the bulk of the work out of annocheck in to libannocheck and asked for my input on the library API. I had some suggestions and he made those changes and the end result was much better integration of annocheck functionality in to rpminspect than I could have hoped for. And the annobin project gained a public library API for other projects.
It was really nice having this developer interaction and being able to influence the direction of another tool and not just what I was working on. If you are confused with a particular library API or have a question about one, do consider contacting the developer. The Fedora Project provides a community that enables these sorts of interactions and that's one of the reasons I really like the project.