Today, we are celebrating International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia around the world , an event that has been observed every 17 May for over twenty years. While progress has been made in some parts of the world, others have experienced a visible regression of queer and especially trans rights, and transgender folks are still facing difficulties in their day-to-day lives.

In the Fedora project, we strive to be welcoming of people in all their diversity, even if we still have a long way to go. Some of us also feel that just saying “you’re welcome” is not enough, however, and that we need to be actively working to remove barriers and work on specific problems.

This is why the Fedora Pride group is launching a year-long project aiming to collaboratively solve an often reported issue: The difficulties around changing usernames in the distribution and within the project infrastructure.

While we are working on this from the perspective of someone transitioning and changing their given name, our work can not be limited to that case. There are several reasons to change one’s username. Some people—mostly women but not only women—change their name once they are married (or once they are separated). Some people change their name because they were adopted as adult, or because they want nothing to do with their biological family. Some people have a name that is causing problems, and people just regret being called darkwarlord69 because it looked cool when they were younger and had to create a Fedora account to report a bug. Or maybe they just want to exercise their right under the GDPR articles.

Right now, we do not yet have a firm plan. However, in the spirit of openness, we want to begin with a call for volunteers.

For the infrastructure part of the project, our idea is very basic and will require plenty of testers. Fedora Infrastructure has a set of staging services used for testing upgrades, new versions, etc. We can use these services to test what happens when Fedora users change their own usernames without breaking the regular production infrastructure. So the plan is to take one service, use it for a bit, rename a volunteer, and see what happens. If something breaks, we fix it with a patch or open a bug report. And then we do it again on a new service, and again, and again… until we can safely close this bug on Noggin.

As for the distribution part, the initial idea is more or less the same, except we plan to ask people to do that on their own systems. This could be in a test VM, on a test computer, or just a new user on their current system (or, for the more adventurous, with their own username). We have plenty of time to give feedback for Fedora 43, and plenty of software that needs to be tested.

We have no idea how long it will take, and we haven’t yet looked beyond the initial proposal. We haven’t even opened a bug or decided how we will coordinate. In the meantime, we want to invite all people interested in helping to join us on the #pride:fedoraproject.org Matrix channel. Depending on how things go, we will decide if we conduct regular meetings, use our ticketing system, or something else. We are open to any type of help, whether it be for coding, testing, coordinating, writing documentation or reports.

Thank you.

Caption picture: Flowers and rainbow flags outside Herr Nilsen.jpg , CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Premeditated