Since gemi has had to retire from Fedora, we’re in danger of losing some very interesting little languages in Fedora. For the full list, see this link.
It’s a shame these advanced languages don’t get more attention, since they are clearly better languages than the ones most programmers use day to day, and would solve their problems if only they tried them. But it’s even more of a shame if people won’t even be able to try these languages because we lose them from Fedora entirely.
Richard WM Jones 
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Erlang is safe – I’ll take care of it.
Is this one of those situations where desperate means I can learn the language as I help out? I have an interest in learning Erlang…I got my start via Scheme in college and haven’t really used it for the past few years. Can someone like me jump on board and actually help?
I don’t really think it’s that necessary to learn the languages. You should have a passion for the languages.
Packaging is quite a distinct skill from being a programmer or a user. You have to be a jack of all trades, and prepared to jump in and learn little bits of anything that could come up. Often “anything” is obscure autoconf m4 macros, unique custom build systems, or fragments from some giant code-base. Packaging ocaml for Fedora has involved far more C & make than anything much else.
Hello,
Elizabeth Rather at Forth Inc. might be able to help with Forth.
http://www.forth.com/
I wrote a wonderful little Forth-based web framework in less than 30 lines of code. I just don’t know enough how to interface it into a webserver. Wish I did.
For Erlang, you might contact marc at worrell.nl
Best wishes,
Lloyd R. Prentice
Is there more than gforth in the Forth bucket? gforth moves *very* slowly – the current version, 0.7.0, was released in early November of 2008. It’s in the openSUSE Build Service in both source and binary RPM form.
I’ve built it from scratch before – it’s pretty simple, but you need a working binary to bootstrap it. But if you’ve got gforth 0.7.0 already, you’re probably safe for the next six months. 😉
Which Lisps do you have? The CCRMA computer music project at Stanford University is Fedora-based and has a lot of Lisp-based software. I’m sure someone there could help you out on packaging. You need Clisp for sure, and probably Steel Bank as well. The others seem to be less used – Steel Bank obsoleted CMUCL and I don’t think GCL is maintained any more.
jonesforth maybe 🙂
Shouldn’t it be better if someone would update the Fedora link with the people that already required to maintain a specific package ?
Also, I would be interested in maintaining one of the erlang or lisp package, but since there are probably more capable men out there I’ll leave it to them.
It would be interesting if someone could post a link with what a package maintainer has to do and what are his responsibilities.
For the last question:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join