This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, June 7th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, June 13th, 2018.

Interview with Justin Forbes (jforbes)

  • Fedora Account: jforbes
  • IRC: jforbes (found in #fedora-kernel #fedora-devel #fedora-cloud #fedora-ci #fedora-admin)
  • 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 in the process of making some key steps forward for the distribution. As we embrace modularity, container, and a strong CI implementation, we come across a lot of technical new territory. While these intiatives are worthwhile, we need to make sure they we implement them in a way that coincides with the Fedora principals.

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

Modularity is important, and probably the next big step forward for Fedora, but we need to approach it in such a way as to not alienate our existing user base. We need to make things better for containers and cloud and devops while continuing to improve the desktop and bare metal user experience as well.

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”?

There are a few key areas that I believe are important avenues for improvement. One is community involvement. We have a great community, and Fedora could not exist without it. I do feel that we could do more outreach to get the community active areas where help is needed. QA is a big one, and the initiatives around CI are great, but a lot of work still needs to be done, and the community can help in contributing tests, or running tests. A lot of times people just don’t know where to contribute or how to get involved. With a little bit of push, people step up and do a great job. I think the i686 SIG is a good example of this in action recently.