This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, 6 June and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 20 June 2019.

Interview with Jeremy Cline

Questions

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

I think the largest technical issue the Fedora community currently faces is testing. The continuous integration effort was a good start, but there are many challenges that remain unsolved at this juncture. These include (but are not limited to) easy-to-produce-on-your-development-machine artifacts so testing locally is the same as testing in CI, the fast production of those artifacts so CI can report problems in a timely manner, and a great user experience around the testing infrastructure and test results.

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

Fedora needs to ensure it’s the easiest distribution to get involved in. All distributions have problems and there’s a limited number of people interested enough to try to fix those problems. We need to ensure we create as few barriers as we possibly can every step of the way.

The work around CI/CD, reducing compose time, and gating Rawhide on automated tests are all steps in the right direction. It’s critically important that we focus on the user experience when introducing these new tools and that we not regress in terms of ease of use.

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”?

More than anything, I’d love to see the CI/CD experience become smooth enough and offer enough obvious benefits that it’s more common to find packages with a solid set of tests than a package with no tests. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case yet.

I do think FESCo needs to be more cautious about allowing changes that negatively impact the Fedora contributor’s user experience, although I do think the choices that have be made recently were reasonable choices at the time and there wasn’t a great way to know how much trouble they would cause. This is, of course, easy to say with the gift of hindsight.