This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with František Zatloukal (frantisekz)

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

I believe Fedora is going to have to face issues in areas like Silverblue, Modularity, wider Flatpak adoption and so on. All this is it’s kind of “reinventing” some core concepts of traditional Linux Distribution. However, I see this as an amazing opportunity for Fedora … to distinguish itself more from others.

The Idea behind Silverblue is a true revolutionary concept in Linux Desktop area and Fedora is leading the way while leaving other Distributions far behind. Light core systems, applications contained in flatpaks, “de-facto” instant upgrades and updates, being able to boot an older tree if something goes south… I am really excited for this.

Not to speak just about Silverblue, one more area that we should pay attention is proposed Fedora LTS. This, if done correctly, could bring Fedora to many more people as pre-installed OS. I see this as a huge challenge, not to overwhelm package maintainers and not to slow Fedora’s leading edge pace.

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

I see some areas which FESCO should focus on in following months. Recently opened up discussions around delaying Fedora 31 in order to refine and improve the way we release Fedora is definitely one of them. The vision of fast composing, decoupled spins so anything new can be tested right away instead of waiting 8 hours or more sounds great to my Fedora QE ears 🙂 .

Apart from Silverblue, I believe Modularity is also a way forward. Something that, if spread across more packages, could make Fedora an obvious choice for Server deployment.

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”?

I’ve mentioned one of these in previous answer. How could FESCO help here? One of the ways is to improve and accelerate the communication between teams. From top of my head, i see some opportunities in tighter collaboration between QE and Marketing/Websites. I believe there are many more areas which Fedora could do better and it might make sense to invest some time and investigate it more.