Having recently been through the process, I've managed to come out
the other-side with some some advice for anyone taking this on.

I've always been puzzled that, quite often, a package is totally silent for a long while (say a month or two), and suddenly, you get two or three bug reports the very same day, distant from any release or transition to testing. I've seen that mostly with libqt4-ruby and
pmount. This seems to be rather general: it really looks like events of our lives don't even remotely follow uniform probabilities.

I’ve come to the realisation that yum and up2date completely and utter suck. Why is it yum has spent the last 20mins downloading rpm headers from the dag repository? Why is it up2date can’t search properly? why does yum return search results in an unreadable way? why do both of them, at the mere hint of something going wrong, spurt out a big python backtrace that is very little use to very many people. Why are these tools SO BAD? How difficult IS THE PROBLEM? Debian have got it right with apt. Headers are downloaded in 30 seconds, search supports regular expressions! There is even an RPM ENABLED version of apt. Why wasn’t this used in Fedora? Why up2date with it’s crappy secretive SSL and XML and SOAP and crapness.