> In our environment, porting a package to our OS may require a little, or sometimes a fair bit of modification to make it work and we often need to be able to read/understand the upstream code in whatever language it's in and change/add to it.
What one needs to understand will vary so much depending on the upstream package and how it's normally built (what it expects) that I think even someone with experience in packaging will sometimes get stuck or need to seek help or advice. The more substantive the porting work is, the more that will be true.
That said, this kind of thing is pretty common for Linux distro packagers, and the weirder the Linux distro is, the more true that is. It's not at all unusual for Nix folks to add special build params, patch upstream software, or mangle binaries with sed in a post-build step to get them to understand NixOS' unusual filesystem structure, or to build offline in the restricted sandbox.
So I'd reach out to contributors to BSD ports systems, especially if they added ports for Linux-centric software, and contributors to really weird Linux distros (NixOS, GuixSD, GoboLinux, Void Linux, etc.).
I've never been in charge of hiring decisions anywhere so idk what the overall landscape of DevOps job candidates looks like. But I've done DevOps and I definitely do, and my friends in roles associated with that title can definitely do at least some coding and scripting in a way that I think suits most packaging tasks well. If a DevOps person has a CS degree of previously worked as a developer, they can probably figure out what they need to when it comes to patching upstream software to get it to build. Even if they don't, if they do some recreational programming, they can probably push through.
What one needs to understand will vary so much depending on the upstream package and how it's normally built (what it expects) that I think even someone with experience in packaging will sometimes get stuck or need to seek help or advice. The more substantive the porting work is, the more that will be true.
That said, this kind of thing is pretty common for Linux distro packagers, and the weirder the Linux distro is, the more true that is. It's not at all unusual for Nix folks to add special build params, patch upstream software, or mangle binaries with sed in a post-build step to get them to understand NixOS' unusual filesystem structure, or to build offline in the restricted sandbox.
So I'd reach out to contributors to BSD ports systems, especially if they added ports for Linux-centric software, and contributors to really weird Linux distros (NixOS, GuixSD, GoboLinux, Void Linux, etc.).
I've never been in charge of hiring decisions anywhere so idk what the overall landscape of DevOps job candidates looks like. But I've done DevOps and I definitely do, and my friends in roles associated with that title can definitely do at least some coding and scripting in a way that I think suits most packaging tasks well. If a DevOps person has a CS degree of previously worked as a developer, they can probably figure out what they need to when it comes to patching upstream software to get it to build. Even if they don't, if they do some recreational programming, they can probably push through.