Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. Fedora 29 elections voting is underway.

I’ve set up weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections or anything else.

Announcements

• bugzilla.redhat.com will be offline for an upgrade to Bugzilla 5 from 0000-1200 UTC on 9 December. See the changes page or release notes for more information. Note that this is a change from the originally-announced date.
  

Help wanted

• Maintainers of the cassandra package are looking for human power

Upcoming meetings

• FPgM office hours: 1400 UTC on Wednesday in #fedora-meeting-1
  
• Council (subproject report): 1500 UTC on Wednesday in #fedora-meeting-1
  

Fedora 29 Status

• Fedora 29 elections voting is underway.
  

Fedora 30 Status

Fedora 30 includes a Change that will cause ambiguous python shebangs to error.  A list of failing builds is available on Taskotron.

Fedora 30 includes a Change that will remove glibc langpacks from the buildroot. See the devel mailing list for more information and impacted packages.

Changes

Announced

• Boost 1.69 Upgrade
• Erlang 21

Submitted to FESCo

• Ruby 2.6
• Migrate Python-based Nautilus extensions to Python 3

Approved by FESCo

• GNU C Library version 2.29
• GnuPG 2 as default GPG implementation

The post FPgM report: 2018-49 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Jared Smith (jsmith)

• Fedora Account: jsmith
• IRC: jsmith (found in #fedora-devel, #fedora-arm, #fedora-iot, #fedora-docs, #fedora-mindshare)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Is there a specific task or issue you think that Mindshare should address this term?

My number one goal for this term in Mindshare is to finish documenting and socializing the new plans for low-friction release parties, low-friction swag requests, and Emeritus ambassadors. While the last term was important in terms of planning changes, I think the focus of this next term should be communicating those changes to the community at large.

Please elaborate on the personal “Why” which motivates you to be a candidate for Mindshare.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Fedora community, and the number one complaint I hear at Fedora Events is the ambassadors program. Even though it’s been a great program, it also causes an undue amount of stress and friction. I’d like to do my part to help reduce that, and help work some of the “wrinkles” out of the system.

What are your thoughts on the impact (as an individual and then as a Mindshare group) that the group will have?

Let me speak to the group as a whole, first. As a group, the Mindshare team will be successful if they can communicate clearly with the community, and show the results of their work. Individually, I hope to be able to dedicate more of my personal time to pushing those efforts, especially with regards to communications with the broader Fedora community.

The post Mindshare Election: Interview with Jared Smith (jsmith) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Luis Bazan (lbazan)

• Fedora Account: lbazan
  
• IRC: LoKoMurdoK (found in #fedora-fedora-latam #fedora #fedora-pa)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Is there a specific task or issue you think that Mindshare should address this term?

Keep working hard in the regions maintaining a constant communication with the active ambassadors, in order to receive comments from each region.

Please elaborate on the personal “Why” which motivates you to be a candidate for Mindshare.

• My motivation is all the team, the community, work as a team!
• I have worked closely with the ambassadors and I like to listen to their ideas.
• I’m very excited about this opportunity because I feel that my skills and knowledge are very well lit to be candidate for Mindshare.

We could motivate and help more people in and out of the Fedora community to contribute as a team.

What are your thoughts on the impact (as an individual and then as a Mindshare group) that the group will have?

As individual, I think that I can share my ideas, experience and knowledge to contribute that the council makes good decisions in the different aspects of the community.

As Mindshare group, we must encourage more the community members to share their ideas with the Mindshare group and/or their ambassadors.

The post Mindshare Election: Interview with Luis Bazan (lbazan) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Ricardo Martinelli de Oliveira (rimolive)

• Fedora Account: rimolive
  
• IRC: rimolive
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Is there a specific task or issue you think that Mindshare should address this term?

Nothing so far.

Please elaborate on the personal “Why” which motivates you to be a candidate for Mindshare.

I’d like to do more for the Fedora project and I want to see more participation of Latin American contributors for the project.

What are your thoughts on the impact (as an individual and then as a Mindshare group) that the group will have?

Nothing comes to my mind at this moment, but if elected you will see a very motivated person with a lot to contribute.

The post Mindshare Election: Interview with Ricardo Martinelli de Oliveira (rimolive) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Owen Taylor (otaylor)

• Fedora Account: otaylor
  
• IRC: otaylor (owen on GIMPNet) (found in #fedora-workstation #fedora-admin #fedora-devel #flatpak)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

The Fedora project has been moving decisively in the direction of increased flexibility and diversity – with Modularity, with new distribution mechanisms and formats like ostree and containers. One of our big challenges is to able to take advantage of all this flexibility and still provide a stable, easy to understand experience to our users. I’ve been involved in desktop Linux from the days of editing your window manager and XFree86 configuration manually to the current point where have slick desktop environments that just work. I’m familiar not just with the technology, but also the design processes we’ve developed, and the tricky balancing act between keeping things streamlined and accommodating the needs of advanced users.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

There is a lot of work currently going on in Fedora to separate out the operating system layer from the application layer – Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Silverblue, and our container and Flatpaks efforts all represent aspecs of this. FESCo should be continually keeping these ways of consuming Fedora in mind.

A personal interest of mine is how developers work in these new models – how do Fedora users develop their applications, and how do Fedora developers develop Fedora. Our traditional model, where the operating system and applications emerge from a great big sea of packages gives a ton of flexibility, and once you move away from it, it feels a bit like putting handcuffs on, but I think there’s a lot of value to be found for developers as well – to be able to have different development setups for different applications, and to be able to try out operating system changes in ways that are well contained and easily reverted.

At times, it seems like FESCo can get a bit bogged down in the nuts-and-bolts of fixing the operating system – and while that’s essential work, I’d hope that some of that work can be delegated and FESCo can concentrate a bit more on high-level issues and what Fedora needs to do as a project to enable a better operating-system / application split.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

I think it’s generally agreed that the weakest part of our process is the “compose” step – taking the bits we create and making an operating system image out of them, reliably and quickly. Not only does this hamper our ability to fix bugs, it is a huge limitation in our ability to do integration testing – any packager who wants to update a system image or component should be able to get tests run on the entire operating system with their component included. In fact they should be required to get such tests run. I think there are some good efforts out their to improve things – FESCO can help out by directing focus towards those efforts and by continually pushing back when a “broken operating system” problem comes up – not just helping out with an immediate fix but figuring out why it wasn’t caught by automated testing.

The post FESCo Election: Interview with Owen Taylor (otaylor) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Kevin Fenzi (kevin)

• Fedora Account: kevin
  
• IRC: nirik (found in #fedora, #fedora-admin #fedora-apps #fedora-noc #fedora-devel #fedora-releng)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

Moving faster, adding CI and testing, LTS support will all be big issues in Fedora in the upcoming year or two (at least). We really need to automate as much as we can so we can support new ideas while not overworking all our maintainers and community. I have a lot of the historical background on why things were the way they were, but I am also pretty open to change and moving forward when it makes sense to do so.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

Automation and CI. The only way we will keep up with all the software our there is if we automate things and get robots to do testing all the time. Otherwise we just won’t scale.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

We definitely need to still work on maintainer workflows. Many of these were disrupted to bring in arbitrary branches and modularity, and I think we can smooth things out a good deal. We need to make it easier to maintain things.

The post FESCo Election: Interview with Kevin Fenzi (kevin) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar)

• Fedora Account: bookwar
  
• IRC: bookwar (found in #fedora-ci)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

We are moving towards more flexible and varied ways of delivering the software. And this flexibility is going to become an issue on its own.

On a technical side, extended list of deliverables requires extended testing effort which is hard to achieve via semi-manual workflows. As a CI Engineer and member of Fedora CI Working Group I want to make sure that CI effort is aligned with current engineering goals. And while we work on improving the CI infrastructure and user experience we also find the ways to incorporate CI in the development process.

Now from the process and policy point of view, as a former DevOps Engineer, I have worked on the “other” side – in cloudy environments flexible to the point of becoming chaotic. And while I believe that there are things Fedora needs to catch up with in terms of modern development practices, there are a lot of things “modern practices” need to catch up with in terms of processes and workflows, which are widely known and established in the Linux distributions world.

I hope that bringing this perspective to FESCo would help us find the right balance between providing the flexible tooling and keeping the solid foundation for it to be usable

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

It may sound odd, but I would say that one of the big goals of FESCo and Fedora community in general is to prevent Fedora from becoming stable. In this case by stable I mean “freezed” not “free of bugs”.

We need it to be easy to change things, even most core features. We need certain loose ends hanging for everyone to come and take care of.

One of the objectives to achieve that big goal is to provide people with the toolchain and services to make their own unique flavors of Fedora or on top of Fedora. Custom repositories, modules, images, flatpaks… you name it. And we need it to be a self-service available for any contributor to use. We should provide pieces for community to play, build and create.

The other complementary thing is actually CI. While many believe that Continuous Integration is there to prevent people from changing things (it does prevent you from merging changes sometimes), the actual reason why we need CI is to allow more changes coming in. CI (and test automation) gives you the freedom to take in changes which otherwise look unusual, or risky. It allows you to focus on whether or not the change is reasonable and brings any value, rather than worry if it might break something.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

Additionally to the topics above one of the troubling issues in Fedora is the lack of open collaboration on the package maintenance side. Traditionally, changes in package specs happen locally in a private environment, and community can only interact with the outcome of the change via karma or bug reports. It is very hard for people to contribute and actively help the maintainer especially when they don’t have the packager status themselves.

We have already done a lot to improve this situation. The open pull-requests workflow, which is available on Pagure already, being one of those big steps. But there is more to it. CI, again, could help here as via early integration we encourage maintainers of dependent packages to work closely and discuss the changes happening in interacting packages early in the development phase, and to actually contribute into each other’s test suites.

The post FESCo Election: Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova (bookwar) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Fabio Valentini (decathorpe)

• Fedora Account: decathorpe
  
• IRC: decathorpe (found in #fedora-meeting*)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

There’s been a lot of discussion about the compose (and release) process recently. While I don’t necessarily always agree with the motivation, I think improving the compose process would be crucial for the future. Speed is one measure, but it’s not the most important one in my opinion. I’d rather focus on making the process more reliable (and possibly even reproducible) to avoid issues like deliverables (possibly randomly) missing from composes (even the GOLD one, like what happened for fedora 29). I’d push for making the processes more reliable first, and optimize later (“premature optimization is the root of all evil”).

Another focus should be placed on how the Modularity effort is moving forward. While I see big benefits in some areas, especially server environments (I’ve read about efforts to make the different NodeJS versions supported by upstream concurrently available as modules), I don’t think it is suited for solving problems in the “desktop” use case, since there are a lot more (indepentently) moving parts involved.

With respect to the “release cadence” discussion that has erupted recently, I’d rather support a tick-tock cycle with annual “major” releases (e.g. fedora 2019.0) and a “minor” release (e.g. fedora 2019.1), where effort for “major” changes isn’t constrained to 5 months, but rather 11. Another possibility would be to just treat GNOME like other packages and do updates during releases (like KDE), which would make the “tock” minor releases unnecessary (many packagers already do updates like this, GNOME is rather an exception here).

By extension, a modified release cadence like this would result in a almost double the support period for major fedora releases (if we keep 2 major supported releases around, just like now), or reduce the number of supported fedora releases by one (if we keep the support period the same) – which other, recent discussions about the fedora release cadence have mentioned.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

Since I don’t think that we can (or should!) “grow” fedora by fundamentally changing what it means to be the linux distribution “fedora”, I’d rather focus on improving upon the strengths fedora already has:

• Continue to be a great platform to develop software on: Since “developers and makers of any kind” are the core audience of fedora Workstation, focusing on this area could make fedora not only a good, but a better, or even an excellent choice for software developers.
• Continue delivering updated software stacks in a stable manner: GCC, python, ruby, golang, etc. all make up a compelling development environment. This probably means that a “development base” containing the latest stable versions of these components would have to be released at least anually – which is why I think the idea of a true “fedora LTS” is a contradiction in terms. Fedora is supposed to be first, after all. However, an argument for moving “major” (development) platform updates to an annual cycle could be the possibly longer support window for major releases, since “minor” updates wouldn’t obsolete the “core development platform”. This would also benefit server deliverables due to the possibly longer support window for the stable “core”.
• Continue making upgrades to new fedora releases as painless as they are now: Maybe “upgrades” can even be treated as “big updates” one day, bringing even more people up-to-date, and delivering more features first faster.

We all know that the development and release model of fedora has its drawbacks, too. Improving upon the “pain points” would be my preferred way forward, instead of throwing everything that alread works out the window. After all, the current model has served us well for many ears.

• Reduce likelihood of compose and release issues: (Automated) update gating for rawhide; improved enforcement (and/or automation) of rules around SONAME bumps/API and ABI breaks/mass rebuilds.
• Possibly adapt the release schedule: Development and release engineering resources could be allocated more efficiently to the areas that really need attention, instead of just putting out the latest fire (again).

This could possibly mean moving to ONE annual release (I’d only agree with this if more components would be updated mid-release, for example GNOME), or moving to a tick-tock “major”-“minor” release cycle with one annual “major” release – to pick up updated language toolchains and make infrastructure changes – and one (or more?) “minor” release(s) to update things atop this stable “core”. I don’t think we need modularity for this, since only one set of packages would be supported to run on a “major release” at a time.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

I think an area that could really be improved is the way some changes (be it “Changes” or major package updates being pushed) are introduced to fedora. For example, I find it hilarous that every release there’s a need for a GNOME mega-update and a corresponding freeze exception, just because the release schedules don’t match up. Moving the target date for a fedora release to avoid situations like this could even reduce release date postponements (which has improved over the years, but it’s still kind of a meme that fedora never releases on time).

I’d also suggest being more conservative with accepting changes – I’d like to see more testing before something big lands in rawhide (e.g. dbus-broker transition, redhat-rpm-macros changes for build flags, macros, etc.). Update gating can help with that, doing test rebuilds in koji side tags (and maybe even test composes for the biggest changes) could help too. Related to this, I’d also promote the usage of koschei, and just add all existing packages to be tracked automatically. I’ve already caught multiple issues by relying on koschei for my packages, and I’m always surprised by how small the number of tracked “core” packages is.

I also increasingly see some packages (mostly podman/buildah/runc/etc.) basically using fedora rawhide as their CI system with bot-created snapshot builds being submitted to koji. While I didn’t find a policy that explicitly disallows this, I think it’s against the spirit of the Updates Policy, even for rawhide – since there’s no way that automatically submitted builds can be verified to conform the Updates Policy criteria. For example, “don’t push clearly broken builds”, or “announce API/ABI changes a week in advance” just isn’t satisfiable with bot-submitted snapshot builds. To reduce the likelihood of broken packages in fedora, I’d amend the Updates Policy to explicitly state that – basically – “rawhide isn’t a CI system”. (This point doesn’t apply to GCC, glibc, and kernel snapshots though – they are already explicitly allowed, and they are submitted by a human who knows very well what they are doing.)

The post FESCo Election: Interview with Fabio Valentini (decathorpe) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with František Zatloukal (frantisekz)

• Fedora Account: frantisekz
  
• IRC: frantisekz (found in #fedora-qa , #fedora-devel, #fedora-noc, #fedora-releng )
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

I believe Fedora is going to have to face issues in areas like Silverblue, Modularity, wider Flatpak adoption and so on. All this is it’s kind of “reinventing” some core concepts of traditional Linux Distribution. However, I see this as an amazing opportunity for Fedora … to distinguish itself more from others.

The Idea behind Silverblue is a true revolutionary concept in Linux Desktop area and Fedora is leading the way while leaving other Distributions far behind. Light core systems, applications contained in flatpaks, “de-facto” instant upgrades and updates, being able to boot an older tree if something goes south… I am really excited for this.

Not to speak just about Silverblue, one more area that we should pay attention is proposed Fedora LTS. This, if done correctly, could bring Fedora to many more people as pre-installed OS. I see this as a huge challenge, not to overwhelm package maintainers and not to slow Fedora’s leading edge pace.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

I see some areas which FESCO should focus on in following months. Recently opened up discussions around delaying Fedora 31 in order to refine and improve the way we release Fedora is definitely one of them. The vision of fast composing, decoupled spins so anything new can be tested right away instead of waiting 8 hours or more sounds great to my Fedora QE ears .

Apart from Silverblue, I believe Modularity is also a way forward. Something that, if spread across more packages, could make Fedora an obvious choice for Server deployment.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

I’ve mentioned one of these in previous answer. How could FESCO help here? One of the ways is to improve and accelerate the communication between teams. From top of my head, i see some opportunities in tighter collaboration between QE and Marketing/Websites. I believe there are many more areas which Fedora could do better and it might make sense to invest some time and investigate it more.

The post FESCo Election: Interview with František Zatloukal (frantisekz) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek)

• Fedora Account: zbyszek
  
• IRC: zbyszek (found in #fedora-devel, #systemd, #fedora-python)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

The biggest problem I see currently is the introduction of Modularity and the related changes causing a slowdown of development in other areas. There are three important aspects: first, it is a complicated topic that brings a whole set of new concepts, tools, techniques, and bugs, and packagers and users both have to get acquainted with modules, which takes time and effort. Second, the roll-out of modularity, e.g. integration in dnf and other package managers, is still far from great. Third, many smart people at the core of the distribution are diverting from other activities to work on this. I hope that with F30 most of those issues will be figured out and we can reap the benefits.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

The way we do packaging is evolving all the time. We have Modularity, and we are right now facing questions how to make it generally usable, without abandoning external users and redistributors of our packages. There are various proposals how to evolve packaging to cater to go and rust and modern python packaging, to allow maintainers to manage packages semi-automatically, more in line with native package management in those languages. I hope FESCo can coordinate these efforts to allow things to “happen”, but in a way that the needs of all stakeholders are taken into account.

I’m not convinced by the recent proposals to delay F31 to work out the releng and pipeline and tooling challenges. I do see many things that need to be improved, but most of them are independent of the release cycle, and can be worked at any time. It seems that currently too much depends on the core releng team, and I hope we some of those responsibilities can be devolved, and others automatized. In this and other areas, I would love to see more freedom for “fly-by” contributions, like proven packagers do for spec file maintenance and anyone can get involved in the freeze testing and bug zapping process.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

Communication between different teams is, as always, an issue. I think all our teams are doing an excellent job, but there’s always more need for transparency and exchange of information. I hope FESCo can improve it’s procedures to invite stakeholders earlier and more consistently.

There’s a number of processes that don’t seem to be happening or are only happening through manual efforts, without automatization. Cleanup of FTBFS, orphaned, and insecure packages, package ownership reassignments, notifications about missing dependencies. We are still recovering from pkgdb removal. We need to automatize those things again to make everything run a little smoother, and to avoid burnout from releng members.

The post FESCo Election: Interview with Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Justin Forbes (jforbes)

• Fedora Account: jforbes
  
• IRC: jforbes (found in #fedora-kernel #fedora-devel #fedora-qa #fedora-arm)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

Fedora is a constantly evolving distribution. Fedora 29 is not just Fedora Core 1, or even Fedora 20 with newer package versions. Big changes happen, and they are typically for the better, but how they are introduced has to be mindful of existing contributors, users, and use cases. Modularity continues to be a major initiative, with a lot of benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls to avoid. We also have the ideas around release cycle, and how Fedora can improve the release process to keep managing things going forward without constant duct tape and string holding it all together. It is often heroic efforts that make a release come together, but that can be improved upon.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

There is really a long list of details, but it can be all be summarized with “ensure our processes for introducing new technologies are managed in such a way as to not alienate existing contributors, users, and use cases, while publishing stable releases with useful new features”

This includes things like:
Improving our QA processes
Taking the time improve our release process
Ensuring new changes are ready before wedging them into a release
Making sure changes are not too disruptive to existing workflows.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

I am afraid Rel-eng is going to crack at some point. The load they have taken on is massive. It has come in the form of little things here and there that have mounded up to a difficult workload to manage. FESCo needs to both come up with a way to help make it more manageable (the idea has been floated of extending a release cycle), and ensuring we don’t get back into the situation. QA is hitting similar issues, we keep adding releases. This one is a bit more difficult to “fix”

Modularity continues to be a trouble spot. It is a great feature in theory, adding capabilities to the distro as shipped, but even more so to people who are using or deploying the distro in their own environments. In practice, it has not been managed as well as it could be. There was always some backlash from the community members who just don’t care about modularity, or understand what it brings, but now there is also justified backlash in how things are being currently deployed. FESCo can help to ensure that further features around modularity are planned and executed, though there are a few fires to be put out first.

The post FESCo Election: Interview with Justin Forbes (jforbes) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.