Dan,

Before we take time to start looking at the packages (I did already looked at those I know that require a lot of attention, for example mate-conf, which is a fork of gconf2) it would be my suggestion that you do the following:

 1) install rpmlint (# yum install rpmlint);
 2) pass rpmlint on all .spec files, for example:

     for i in *.spec; do rpmlint -i $i > $i.log ; done

 3) If you install your packages, MATE won't work (I haven't installed them personally, but I'm pretty sure it won't just from looking at mate-conf).
 4) Just like in GNOME2, MATE depends heavily on it's schemas; the upstream resolution adviced to handle them (as they in debian or arch) is poor, unreliable and chaotic. RPM based distribution can do a lot better.

Generally speaking about the majority of spec I've seen:

 1) poor and innacurate descriptions (this doesn't require technical knowledge to fix)
 2) some mandatory splitting is required (ex: development packages);
 3) many of your packages are owning system directories; this can't happen. A quick example would be:
    %files
    %defattr(-,root,root,-)
    %{_bindir}
    (...)

    this should be replaced for:
    %files
    %defattr(-,root,root,-)
    %{_bindir}/*
 4) Changelog entries are not correctly generated;
 5) Packages installing public shared objected (libs) are missing the linker entries, example:
    %post FOOLIB -p /sbin/ldconfig
    %postun FOOLIB -p /sbin/ldconfig
 6) Packages with MATE schemas are not properly installing the MATE schemas (which will prevent MATE from strating up). You should consider studying the old GNOME2 packages with gconf2 schemas and see how they are implemented. In fact you should see gconf2 package from GNOME2 and build mate-conf based on the existing work of that package, since it's the most special package from a packaging point of view; while that package isn't properly fixed none of the others will work, or MATE itself.
 7) There far many more issues.

Like I said yesterday on the IRC, you should look at the work that has been previously done; I have the base from MATE all building for openSUSE[1]; take a look at my packages and you can port them all with not much trouble to Fedora (as there are tiny things that are different between SUSE and Fedora, like the shlibs/multilib policies and how they are implemented, this mainly affects package naming).

If you want an advice:

 1) Use the packages up to mate-conf to learn and to improve yourself; mate-conf is a very demanding package, so I will help you out on that one with more attention, but you will be on your own for fixing the most common issues.

 2) Take your time; the number of packages and how they are currently will make this a very long review and it might take months given the ammount of work that needs to be done. Make you understand the process.

 3) Ask for help when you need help. Even from a 'Portuguese n00b' like myself.

 4) See my packages on [1]; They will help you, and I can explain anything you don't understand. This will most likely make jump in faster.

 5) Release sources require you to run autogen.sh (to change in the future); this means you will require for most packages this:
    a) automake and autoconf
    b) libtool
    c) pkgconfig
    d) mate-common.
    I advice you to add as 'Requires' to mate-common the required packages to be able to bootstrap autogen.sh; so that in real packages when you build require mate-common it will already pulls all the stuff for ya, so you don't have to 'polute' the other spec files with it (as currently they are always required). This will be changed in 1.5.0.


There's a lot to do... just start with rpmlint on .spec's and rpm/srpm packages and start fixing things. And keep asking here what you don't understand.

I'm available to co-maintain only the packages wich involve schemas; I don't have much free and the one I have I want to have it available for my own packages on Fedora, but I'll make an effort to help you with them since errors on those packages will create huge negative impact.

[1] - https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=GNOME%3ACinnamon%3AMATE

PS: You can't use most of the macros I use on SUSE because they don't exist in Fedora, and even those packages provide a working MATE install on openSUSE, it needs still a few more tens of ours of work.

As additional information, I've spoken to Stefano a few days ago, and from 1.5.0 onwards we will provide source releases already with 'make dist'; We are introducing this to help you ;)