This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. The voting period starts on Thursday, 28 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 11 June.

Interview with Clément Verna

  • Fedora account: cverna
  • IRC nick: cverna (found in #bodhi, #fedora-admin, #fedora-apps, #fedora-coreos, #fedora-devel, #fedora-noc, #fedora-releng, #fedora-magazine, #fedora-containers)
  • Fedora user wiki page

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I personally think that becoming and being a packager in Fedora should be much easier. I find that the learning curve is really steep and that it slows down our community growth. So as a FESCo member I would generally be in favour of :

  • Changing and improving current packager workflow policies
  • Any effort to improve the tooling to make the packager workflow simpler

I would like to emphasise the need to review the current packager workflow and policies we have in place. As someone who is contributing to a lot of the tooling involved in the packager workflow I often find that any attempt to improve the tooling is made really difficult because of these policies.

I generally think that it would be beneficial to have an open minded conversation on how to make that workflow mostly transparent for newcomers and old-timers.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I have started contributing to the Fedora Community by sending PRs to Pagure, that lead me to be more involved in the Infrastructure team. I am now lucky to be part of the CPE team at Red Hat so I can work full time on Fedora infrastructure and Release Engineering. Couple years ago I have started the Container SIG which is has not been very active recently unfortunately.

I am also an editor and contributor of the Fedora Magazine.

How should we handle cases where Fedora’s and Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s needs conflict in an incompatible way?

If there is a real conflict and no solution then what makes senses to Fedora should be the priority since this is the Fedora Project. But I don’t think these type of conflicts happens very often. What I think is much more common are controversial changes within the Fedora community itself some might be pushed by Red Hatters but not necessarily by Red Hat. My opinion is that quite often these problem are a communication problems before being technical problems.

So as a FESCo member I would try to help driving the conversation for such issues so that everyone can have a better understanding of each sides arguments.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

I would like for Fedora to continue to be a welcoming place for innovation and creativity. I am really convince that being able to experiment and try new things is critical for the project long term success. So I would always try to find a right balance between keeping our stability and allowing disruptive and innovative changes.