ankursinha, Author at Fedora Community Blog

Author: ankursinha

Fedora Join is trying a new people focused workflow for newcomers

October 1, 2019 / ankursinha / Comments Off

When a newcomer, let’s call her “Jen”, comes to Fedora and looks for where to begin, the general workflow she is introduced to is quite task-oriented. “Find something to do, get started, learn along the way, ask if you have a question” we say. We have easyfix and What Can I do for Fedora (wcidff) designed to quickly help Jen find something to do, for example. The idea, of course, is that Jen will familiarise herself with the tools, the processes, and the people while she works on this task. This works sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on what Jen has picked to do. Sometimes the learning curve is too steep—there are too many tools and processes to learn. Sometimes Jen works on her task in isolation and is too scared to ask questions they think are “silly”. Sometimes Jen just gets too busy to keep working on it.

A banner image with a black background, dotted with various stars, much like a galaxy system. Four rockets with colors of the Fedora Four Foundations leave a colored trail behind them that overlaps, as the rockets propel toward the right-side of the image in lockstep. White text is overlaid on the image, reading "The Fedora Project community." This image is often used with Fedora elections.

Image by Ryan Lerch. CC BY-SA 4.0

Moving Ask Fedora to Discourse phase 2: request for beta testing

April 25, 2019 / ankursinha / 3 Comments

As we’d documented in our previous post, we’ve been working on moving Ask Fedora from our current Askbot setup to a Discourse instance. In this post, we document what has changed since the previous post, and the plans for the near and long term future.

AskFedora refresh: we’ve moved to Discourse!

March 21, 2019 / ankursinha / 2 Comments

We have been working on moving AskFedora to a Discourse instance after seeing how well the community took to discussion.fedoraproject.org. After working on it for a few weeks now, we’re happy to report that the new AskFedora is now ready for use at https://askbeta.fedoraproject.org.

Contribution opportunity! Quick docs!

March 19, 2019 / ankursinha / Comments Off

Quick docs are meant to be short articles on the official Fedora documentation site that cover commonly used workflows/tools.

Unlike wiki pages which are generally unreviewed, information on quick-docs follows the PR (peer-review + pull request) process. So the new information that is added there is more trustworthy and should be too, given that quick docs is listed on the official Fedora documentation website.

NeuroFedora SIG: Call For Participation

October 9, 2018 / ankursinha / 3 Comments

I’ve recently resurrected the NeuroFedora SIG. Many thanks to Igor and
the others who’d worked on it in the past and have given us a firm base.

NeuroFedora: The goal

The (current) goal of the NeuroFedora SIG is to make Fedora an easy to
use platform for neuroscientists.

IRC classroom instructors wanted

March 20, 2017 / ankursinha / Comments Off

We’ve been working to restart the classroom sessions that we hosted regularly until a few years ago. We had a few discussions at the Fedora Join SIG meeting recently and realized that there’s so much that can be done. Among the ideas were using video communication platforms, setting up a moodle instance, and linking up with the campus programmes. Setting up a complete classroom programme requires a lot more homework before we can come up with a system and put the infrastructure in place. So, while this is being worked on, we thought it may be a good idea to resurrect the classic IRC classroom sessions to get the ball rolling in the meantime.

Instructors needed for classroom sessions

Before we can announce the classroom sessions, we want to line a few up. This is where we need help – we’re looking for instructors that want to take up these sessions. The sessions can be about anything – tools (Vim, Git, Emacs, Inkscape, Gimp, etc.), workflows (using updates-testing to help QA, contributing to the Magazine or Community Blog, etc.), development (Flask, kernel hacking, debugging, etc.) or even educational sessions such as the free software philosophy. Really, anything at all.

If you’d like to take up an IRC classroom session, please get in touch with us on the classroom mailing list. We’re also looking for recruiters, emcees and anything else you want to help with!

Where to point newcomers to Fedora

November 10, 2016 / ankursinha / 2 Comments

Like any FOSS community project, Fedora relies heavily on volunteers. It is, therefore, no surprise that we’re always looking to increase our contributor base. There is always so much to be done. Of course, many teams work in harmony to keep Fedora ticking. Each team tends to have its own “on-boarding process” for newcomers, which if you’ve been around recently, you’ll have noticed CommOps has been working on improving one by one.

Source: http://cdn.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/contribute-open-source-community.png

AppData content ratings for games shipped in Fedora

October 4, 2016 / ankursinha / 1 Comment

GNOME Software developer Richard Hughes recently e-mailed the Fedora developers mailing requesting Fedora package maintainers to update their AppData files to include age ratings using OARS.

“The latest feature we want to support upstream is age classifications
for games. I’ve asked all the maintainers listed in the various
upstream AppData files (using the update contact email address) to
generate some OARS metadata and add it to the .appdata.xml file, but
of course some AppData files do not have any contact details and so
they got missed. I’m including this email here as I know some AppData
files are included in the various downstream spec files by Fedora
packagers. Generating metadata is really as simple as visiting
https://odrs.gnome.org/oars then answering about 20 questions with
multiple choice answers, then pasting the output inside the
<component> tag.

Using the <content_rating> tag means we can show games with an
appropriate age rating depending on the country of the end user. If
you have any comments about the questions on the OARS page please do
let me know. Before the pitchforks start being sharpened it’s an
anti-goal of the whole system to in any way filter the output of
search results dependent on age. The provided metadata is only used in
an informational way.”

If your package ships an AppData file, please consider updating it. If you have any queries about the addition or OARS, please discuss it on the Fedora developers mailing list.