Author: Matthew Miller (page 1 of 5)

Proposed change to the Fedora Council policy for Edition promotion

The Fedora Council is considering a change to our policy for promotion of a Fedora deliverable to “Edition” status. Please read that entire document for context before commenting.

This change is being made to reflect actual practice. For example, there is clear overlap between the use-cases and potential user-bases for the current Server, Cloud, and CoreOS Editions, but each takes a different approach. We are currently considering adding an exception for a KDE Desktop Edition, which would overlap with Fedora Workstation.

Currently part of the policy currently reads in a way that prevents this exception from being possible:

A Fedora Edition:

addresses a distinct, relevant, and broad use-case or user-base that a Fedora Edition is not currently serving;

is a long term investment for the Fedora Project; and

is consistent with all of Fedora’s Four Foundations.

We propose an additional line:

The Council may make exceptions to the “distinct” rule when we determine that doing so best fits the Project’s Mission and Vision.

This topic is open for community discussion, following our Policy Change Policy. After two weeks, the Council will vote in a new ticket, and if approved, the policy will be updated.

Approval of this change would not automatically mean the approval of a KDE Desktop Edition, but would allow that possibility.

Fedora Strategy 2028: High-Level View

May 8, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

As described in Fedora Strategy 2028: April 2024 Update, we came out of our annual face-to-face meeting with a new presentation for our strategy for the next five years. That article gave the background — this is the high-level strategy itself.

Our Guiding Star

We’re going to double the number of contributors who are active every week.

What we’re measuring — and why

Our goal is to ensure that Fedora is healthy and sustainable. As a project, we’re generally in great shape. However: there are many areas where everyone feels under-resourced, and we have too many places where we have a very poor “yak farm factor” — if one or two people are ready for a change and go off to start new lives, will the areas they’re working in collapse? Plus, there’s always so much more exciting new stuff that we could be doing, and maybe need to do to remain relevant as the computing landscape changes.

We can measure aspects of this in many different ways: interconnectedness, onboarding, burnout, team resilience, and so many more. But, the weekly-active-contributor number gives us a simple, basic check. If that number is going up, we must be doing something right.

The metric itself isn’t the goal in itself.. We don’t want to merely inflate a number, after all. So, we also plan to watch those other community health metrics, and we’ll adjust as needed to make sure that the Guiding Star is really leading us to the right path.

What is a contributor?

This means different things to different people and is often different across projects. However, for this purpose, we’re using a broad definition.

A Fedora Project contributor is anyone who:

Undertakes activities
which sustain or advance the project towards our mission and vision
intentionally as part of the Project,
and as part of our community in line with our shared values.

Fedora has numerous already-public data sources for activity, and we plan to use those as widely as possible. Unlike smaller projects, we can’t simply count commits in a git repo — and, I think that’s a good thing, because in order to get a meaningful number, we need to count more than just code and other technical contributions.

Next: Foundations and Focus Areas

Upcoming posts:

Freedom Foundation: Accessibility; Cross-Community Collaboration
Friends Foundation: Mentorship; Local Communities; Collaboration Tooling
Features Foundation: Preinstalled Systems; SIG Revamp; AI; Marketing
First Foundation: Atomic (“Immutable”); Language Stacks; Spins & Rebuilds

Fedora Strategy 2028: April 2024 Update

April 10, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

from Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, on behalf of the Fedora Council

First, a personal note! As you may have seen, I was out sick with Covid for a month after getting home from our annual Council face-to-face meeting. It’s not been fun — some respiratory symptoms, but primarily, overwhelming fatigue. Somewhat ironically, the timing suggests that I managed to avoid catching anything at FOSDEM itself (where I wore a mask most of the time), or at the Council meeting, but rather on the plane or in the airport on the way back. Although emergency measures have been lifted, there really is still a pandemic going on. Be careful, everyone, especially when traveling! In any case, I’m back to myself now, and am excited for Fedora’s next big steps.

The Story so Far

So! I’ve been talking about “Strategy 2028” for a while — we started this effort seriously about a year ago. If you’re just joining in, or want a refresher, Fedora Strategy 2028: a topic index for our planning process is a great place to start. I won’t rehash all of that here.

The important thing is: 2023 was kind of a hard year, and although we made some progress, we lost momentum. The Council hackfest helped get things back on track, and we’re moving forward now. We’re not making any fundamental changes, but we are restructuring how we present things — and we’re moving on from theory to practical work.

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

2024 Git Forge Evaluation

April 5, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

Vol. I – Fedora Council 2024 Hackfest

During the Council’s February 2024 hackfest, we discussed the future of Fedora’s git forge – that is, the platform Fedora uses for version control and tracking for packages, source code, documentation, and more. This topic has been around for quite some time. If you are just coming into this conversation, or would like a refresher, #git-forge-future is a good place to start.

Instead of one huge post, the Fedora Council divided the follow-ups from our hack-fest into a mini-series of posts throughout April that will cover all the topics we discussed and made decisions on. In each post, we will walk through one core topic, and share our discussion and thought process on how we reached our outcomes. The first in this series, because why not start strong 🙂 , is an update on our git forge evaluation. Read on for important information.

Created by Justin W. Flory. CC BY-SA 4.0. LWN logo copyright by Eklektix, Inc. used under fair use.

LWN subscription slots available for Fedora contributors

April 3, 2024 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

Linux Weekly News — or “LWN” — is a small, independent website dedicated to covering Linux and open source topics. There’s really nothing like it — from daily updates from different communities (including, of course, Fedora) to deep-dives into technical topics to reporting from various conferences and invents. Red Hat funds a subscription for Fedora community members, of which we currently have two open slots. There are also about a number of people who haven’t logged in for several years… I intend to remove these to make room if there is enough interest to warrant that.

Clipboard with a paper titled "open projects" and an empty unordered list

Photo by Markus Winkler. Modified by Justin W. Flory. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Job Posting: Fedora Operations Architect

August 10, 2023 / Matthew Miller / 7 Comments

Red Hat is hiring for a new Fedora role

Red Hat is hiring for a new full-time role supporting the Fedora Project. The job listing (replicated below) is open now, and if you are interested, you can apply online.

A small package wrapped in brown paper and string with the text "Fedora Packaging"

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

A new way to find a package reviewer

July 25, 2023 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

Package reviews are an important part of how Fedora delivers well-built RPMs. When one contributor wants to add a new package, another packager has to check it first. It’s how we all hold each other to the high standard we’ve set for ourselves. Of course, that means to add a new package to the repos, you first have to find someone to do the review. Last week, I added a new way to do that: the Package Review Swaps category on Fedora Discussion. Huge thanks to Felix Kaechele for the idea and initial process design.

Council policy proposal: equalize “auxiliary” positions

April 6, 2023 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

At our hackfest earlier this year, the Council agreed that we want to drop the distinction between full and auxiliary positions on the Council. Instead, we should have all members on an equal footing. The concerns expressed by some on the former Fedora Board (the predecessor to the Council) haven’t come to pass. But we have seen a negative impact: people in these roles feel less empowered to act, and unsure about their standing as a “real” member of the Council.

I propose to remove this distinction. Please discuss this in the Fedora Discussion topic. The Council will begin voting on this proposal on 21 April.

Photo of the city of Cork with the text "Flock 2023"

Cork photograph by chumlee10 on Flickr. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

Save the date: Flock to Fedora 2023

March 21, 2023 / Matthew Miller / 3 Comments

Good news! I’m excited to announce the return of Flock to Fedora, our annual contributor conference. Save the date so you can plan to join us 1–5 August 2023 in Cork, Ireland. After three years, we’re ready to get together in person to make plans and share ideas.

February 2023 Council hackfest summary

March 9, 2023 / Matthew Miller / Comments Off

Last month, the Fedora Council gathered in Frankfurt, Germany for our first in-person meeting since January 2020. It felt great to see folks again, but it wasn’t all fun and games (actually, we didn’t even play games until after we’d wrapped up on the last night). With three years of work to catch up on and a five year strategy to develop, there was a lot to do. If you want the Zodbot form, we logged the minutes. For more detail, read on.