It’s October! That means its time for the annual Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean and DEV. Hacktoberfest is a month-long event that encourages contributions to open source software projects. Participants who register and submit at least four pull requests to GitHub-hosted repositories during the month of October will receive a free t-shirt.

In a recent Fedora Magazine article, I listed some areas where would-be contributors could get started contributing to Fedora. In this article, I highlight some specific projects that provide an opportunity to help Fedora while you participate in Hacktoberfest.

Fedora infrastructure

Bodhi — When a package maintainer builds a new version of a software package to fix bugs or add new features, it doesn’t go out to users right away. First it spends time in the updates-testing repository where in can receive some real-world usage. Bodhi manages the flow of updates from the testing repository into the updates repository and provides a web interface for testers to provide feedback.

the-new-hotness — This project listens to release-monitoring.org (which is also on GitHub) and opens a Bugzilla issue when a new upstream release is published. This allows package maintainers to be quickly informed of new upstream releases.

koschei — koschei enables continuous integration for Fedora packages. It is software for running a service for scratch-rebuilding RPM packages in Koji instance when their build-dependencies change or after some time elapses.

MirrorManager2 — Distributing Fedora packages to a global user base requires a lot of bandwidth. Just like developing Fedora, distributing Fedora is a collaborative effort. MirrorManager2 tracks the hundreds of public and private mirrors and routes each user to the “best” one.

fedora-messaging — Actions within the Fedora community—from source code commits to participating in IRC meetings to…lots of things—generate messages that can be used to perform automated tasks or send notifications. fedora-messaging is the tool set that makes sending and receiving these messages possible.

fedocal — When is that meeting? Which IRC channel was it in again? Fedocal is the calendar system used by teams in the Fedora community to coordinate meetings. Not only is it a good Hacktoberfest project, it’s also looking for a new maintainer to adopt it.

In addition to the projects above, the Fedora Infrastructure team has highlighted good Hacktoberfest issues across all of their GitHub projects.

Community projects

bodhi-rs — This project provides Rust bindings for Bodhi.

koji-rs — Koji is the system used to build Fedora packages. Koji-rs provides bindings for Rust applications.

fedora-rs — This project provides a Rust library for interacting with Fedora services like other languages like Python have.

feedback-pipeline — One of the current Fedora Council objectives is minimization: work to reduce the installation and patching footprint of Fedora releases. feedback-pipeline is a tool developed by this team to generate reports of RPM sizes and dependencies.

And many more

The projects above are only a small sample focused on software used to build Fedora. Many Fedora packages have upstreams hosted on GitHub—too many to list here. The best place to start is with a project that’s important to you. Any contributions you make help improve the entire open source ecosystem. If you’re looking for something in particular, the Join Special Interest Group can help. Happy hacking!

