This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 8 December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 21 December.

Interview with David Cantrell

  • Fedora Account: dcantrell
  • IRC/Nick: dcantrell
  • Matrix Channels typically found in: fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-ci, #fedora-devel, #fedora-qa, #rpm, and #rpm-ecosystem & you can also ping me directly
  • Fedora User Wiki Page

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

Fedora is important to me as both a project and a community. I want to continue to help steer Fedora’s engineering direction and ensuring that the project succeeds and grows. Specifically I want to see it continue to embrace more container-based delivery alongside the traditional RPM model. Making Fedora even easier to work with in a container: to maintain, to update, and to deploy. We also have a lot of hardware opportunities and seeing the Asahi Project move to using Fedora as their base was great. On FESCo we discuss all of these sorts of things and more and I want to continue to hear from the users and developers and help guide the project.

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

Aside from FESCo, I also serve as the engineering representative on the Fedora Council. I am a Fedora Ambassador and a sponsor for new contributors. I maintain a range of packages and am the upstream developer for a number of projects. My recent large project has been the rpminspect program which is used in a handful of CI environments to validate builds and check policy compliance.

I run both the latest stable release of Fedora and rawhide and report bugs when I encounter them and submit patches when possible.

I try to answer questions for as many people as I can and when I can’t, I try to help find someone who can.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

In my experience, disagreements come up because everyone is very passionate about the task or topic at hand. It’s important to remember that most of these should end in compromise. I do my best to make my points clear and understood while at the same time listening to everyone else. Sometimes the conversation itself is enough to clear up disagreements. Maybe I didn’t have the full story or maybe someone else didn’t. As long as we are willing to have these conversations and reach a compromise, things go well.

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

My day job is working at Red Hat, where I have been working on RHEL and Fedora full time for 18 years. Prior to that I worked at a number of companies doing Linux development or admin work and even before that I worked on the Slackware Linux distribution.

Outside of work I enjoy restoring old and obsolete computers, making contacts (or actively pretending to make contacts) via amateur radio, and boating in and around Boston Harbor and New England.

I live in Medford, Massachusetts.