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 Frantisek Zatloukal

• Fedora account: frantisekz
• IRC nick: frantisekz (found in fedora-qa, fedora-devel, fedora-admin)
• 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’d like to steer Fedora to a lower barrier of entry for new contributors, especially packagers. I’d love to see COPR and FedoraCI integrated, so new packagers could easily build something in COPR, see CI results and once they resolve issues, asking to become a packager should be a matter of a single mouse click. This is definitely something that would require collaboration of multiple teams working on Fedora.

To ease life for existing packagers, I’d love to work with release-monitoring developers to create an opt-in opportunity for packagers to have their packages updated in Rawhide automatically if new upstream releases pass build and CI tests. I understand this can be very hard to get done right, but I believe time spent on this will save a huge amount of time of current Fedora packages and allow them to spend it on things that cannot be automated at all.

The other area I’d like to try and steer Fedora to is a concept of secondary architectures. Do you have a modern x86 CPU with all those fancy AVX/AVX2 instructions? Fedora, as it is, without any changes to configurations, repositories or anything else should leverage full potential of your hardware. This is not only about good looking numbers in benchmarks but also about allowing users to complete tasks more quickly and more power-efficiently.

I believe that this is a solvable problem, without cutting out users with older hardware, by leveraging secondary architectures, a concept I’d like to discuss with other stakeholders (mainly developers of package managers, infra and releng) and help catalyze its push into Fedora.

Apart from that, I’d like to take a look and brainstorm/add some items into dnf better counting (sending anonymized data about Fedora Version being used, Spin… more details are in Fedora Change Page). Having more anonymized data about our users (be it their hardware, software, usage patterns,…) could help steer the direction of many teams and developers working on Fedora in a way most users would benefit from.

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

As a member of Fedora QA, I am making sure new Fedora releases don’t eat your kittens 🙂 .

Apart from my daily job as Quality Engineer, one of my more significant contributions to Fedora from which users and developers alike benefit are some improvements to Fedora Easy Karma (with much more planned in near future) and most recently work to help Fedora Packagers (via soon to be announced Packager Dashboard which shows all relevant information about all your packages at one place, easily and quickly accessible). Also, I am maintaining a few Fedora packages in different areas – from a few Python libraries to prepackaged dxvk for those who play games on Fedora.

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

I believe it is always possible to solve conflicts between RHEL and Fedora in a way that both distributions benefit from. We saw that with the ELN proposal and its implementation, what initially looked like conflicting needs resulted in a solution that both Fedora and RHEL can and hopefully will benefit from.

However, if there really happens to be a case where the resolution would hurt either Fedora or RHEL, a solution not hurting Fedora should be preferred and that is what I’d vote for.

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

I would love to see Fedora with easier access to popular and not necessarily free software. I am mainly talking about binary drivers which should get more spotlight in Fedora instead of hiding them behind third party repositories.

I believe I can make Fedora an easier place a tiny bit for current contributors, developers and users if I am elected to become a member of FESCO.