This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 9 December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 22 December.

Interview with Kalev Lember

  • Fedora Account: kalev
  • IRC: kalev in #fedora-devel, #fedora-workstation, #fedora-releng, #fedora-admin, #fedora-qa, #fedora-riscv, #fedora-rust, and a bunch of upstream GNOME channels.
  • 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 want to be a voice there that helps build consensus. I want to help make it so that people who want to contribute to Fedora can do so without too many obstacles. I want to help resolve conflicts, as I think I have enough experience to understand different people’s different viewpoints and help them understand each other.

In my opinion, every contributor to Fedora is important and we should strive to make it so that they can drive the part that they are interested in forward.

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

I maintain a large number of packages, mostly related to the graphical desktop. I work on GNOME packaging and build GNOME mass updates. I am part of the Workstation Working Group.

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

I try to build consensus. I think it’s very important to really try to understand where the disagreements come from, and only then can we strive to solve the disagreements.

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

I recently started contributing the Fedora’s rust packaging. My goal with this is to try to make it easier to build Rust desktop apps, but I am a bit undecided on what is the best way forward. Right now I’m experimenting with trying to get all the rust crate dependencies packaged for a number of GNOME rust apps, and bring them to Fedora. However this is just an experiment on my part; I’d like to see if this can work. If not, I’ll instead see if I can help improve the story with bundling/vendoring rust crates, and also see if we can amend packaging guidelines to make it all accepted and official.

There’s been a few threads on the devel mailing list recently around this and I am not really set on one particular way, just want to make sure we find some way to make it easier to package rust desktop apps.