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 Jeremy Cline (jcline)

Questions

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

The lifecycle discussion and subsequent proposal to skip the Fedora 31 release cycle on the development list touches on many of the issues I see affecting the Fedora community right now. These include slow composes, disparate tools, and the lack of good automated testing. At the core, though, it’s about making the maintainer experience as painless as possible.

I think all of these things are in desperate need of improvement. However, it is important to make sure that as we work to improve them, we do not negatively impact the user experience of the Fedora community. The last thing we want is to take one step forward and two steps back. Although it’s tempting to roll out a new feature as soon as possible, doing so can damage the reputation of the effort if the experience is unpleasant for maintainers.

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. Putting these ever-burning fires out will give us time to do all the “nice-to-have” work that’s critical to make the life of maintainers easier.

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.

I think FESCo has done a good job striking a balance between ensuring enhancements to our processes are rolled out in a timely manner and ensuring those enhancements are truly ready for deployment, and I’d like to see that continue.