This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, 6 June and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 20 June 2019.

Interview with Stephen Gallagher

• Fedora Account: sgallagh
• IRC: sgallagh (found in #fedora-devel #fedora-modularity #fedora-server)
• 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 issue I see in the immediate future is the need for improving the packager experience for Modularity. It’s a powerful tool for enabling user choice, but it needs some work to get it into shape to make it easier on packagers to generate modules.

The other issue I see is also Modularity-related: what is Fedora’s position in the ecosystem relative to CentOS once CentOS 8 is released with module support? We need to ensure that Fedora doesn’t lose its position as the development upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.

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

FESCo needs to focus on knocking down barriers to entry in Fedora. The harder it is, the more likely that a willing contributor will turn around and abandon their attempt.

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”?

As I noted above, I think the biggest trouble point right now is the Modularity packaging experience. FESCo can help by coordinating the deployment of new tools and helping communicate how to use them to our developer community.