This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 8 December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 21 December.

Interview with Michel Lind

  • Fedora Account: Michel Lind (you might know me as Michel Salim previously, I changed my legal name recently)
  • IRC/Nick: michel-slm(libera), salimma (matrix)
  • Matrix Channels typically found in: I’m in many Fedora channels – including devel, epel, infra, releng, and social
  • Fedora User Wiki Page

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I have been active in the Fedora community since almost the very beginning (see also the next question), and have participated in FESCo meetings from the perspective of a Change Proposal owner as well as just an observer for a few years. Given my personal and work interest in Fedora and CentOS Stream, I see being part of FESCo as the next step, and hope to add my unique perspective to the decision making process.

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

I’ve been doing packaging for RPM based distros since the Red Hat Linux days, and joined Fedora early on during the Fedora Core days. I’m a proven packager and a packager sponsor, and am currently actively maintaining packages both personally and in the Rust, EPEL, Python, Lua, and (to a certain extent) Golang SIGs.

My $dayjob at Meta pays me to contribute to Linux Userspace projects, of which Fedora is currently the main focus as the upstream to CentOS Stream and other Enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL etc.); my focus has been on automation to make bootstrapping EPEL for new Stream releases easier with tools such as ebranch and an upcoming Package of Interest tracker.

I have landed change proposals in the past – most notably around Btrfs and systemd-oomd – and have several more in the pipeline for Fedora 40; I also suggested allowing DNF repository configuration to be overriden (added to dnf5-5.1.3)

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

In my experience, disagreements are often caused by misunderstandings, and I would try to clear them in one-to-one interactions whenever possible rather than having a public spat; in open source work in particular, given that the participants are often either volunteers or people working for other companies, it’s better to go slower and accommodate the concern of others rather than trying to push my ideas through before gaining consensus.

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

I work for Meta – which runs CentOS Stream on millions of bare metal servers and in containers. That being said, if I were to be elected I would not be representing Meta in FESCo, and instead would cast my vote with the best interest of the Fedora project itself.

I am a parent to two cats and a toddler, and love cats and dogs equally.