This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 21 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 3 June 2021.

Interview with Mohan Boddu

  • Fedora Account: mohanboddu
  • IRC: mboddu, bhujji (found in #bodhi, #centos, #centos-devel, #centos-meeting, #centos-stream, #coreos, #epel, #fedora, #fedora-aaa, #fedora-admin, #fedora-apps, #fedora-arm, #fedora-blocker-review, #fedora-buildsys, #fedora-ci, #fedora-containers, #fedora-coreos, #fedora-design, #fedora-desktop, #fedora-devel, #fedora-iot, #fedora-kde, #fedora-kernel, #fedora-magazine, #fedora-meeting, #fedora-meeting-1, #fedora-meeting-2, #fedora-meeting-3, #fedora-mktg, #fedora-modularity, #fedora-noc, #fedora-python, #fedora-qa, #fedora-releng, #fedora-respins, #fedora-rust, #fedora-websites, #fedora-workstation, #koji, #pagure, #redhat-cpe, #rpm.org, #silverblue)
  • 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 have been working as a Release Engineer for Fedora for a long time. To make a release out of the door I have to work with various groups within the Fedora community. I want to take that expertise and help the Fedora project in identifying, analyzing and finding the best solution for the issues that may arise, making the project even more successful.

Also, in my experience I have seen gaps in our policies, I would like to fix them as well. With my Release Engineer hat on, I can only fix some of them, but with being part of FESCo, I am positive I can fix many of them.

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

I work as Fedora’s Release Engineer, I am responsible for creating and shipping different artifacts to the users to consume. I also maintain some of the Fedora’s core packages and then some python packages. I work with different teams on a daily basis to keep our tooling up to date so that we keep pushing the bits to Fedora users in a secure way. I also dabble a bit in Fedora Infra as well, I maintain few of the tools and services that are used in Fedora infrastructure that are essential for Release Engineering and community.

I would say my major contribution that would benefit the community is handling the compose process, it is what creates the repos from which any Fedora user can install and/or update their systems.

I also help the community by answering their questions about Release Engineering and Infrastructure and also help them by creating new repos on dist-git. I also help in updating the documentation and review the change proposals from Release Engineering point of view.

Apart from release engineering work, I help the Fedora community wherever I am needed.

How should we handle cases where Fedora’s and Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s needs conflict in an incompatible way?

I consider the relationship between Fedora and RHEL is a symbiotic relationship, even though both are targeted for different user bases with different missions driving them, one helps the other to succeed as well.

With my experience working as Fedora Release Engineer for a few years now, I have seen a few cases where there is a conflict between Fedora and RHEL’s requirements. My perspective would be that we should avoid conflicts however, if a conflict arises, I think the best way to solve any conflict is to sit and discuss with both the parties involved and find the best possible solutions which works for both the parties. These solutions can be presented to the Fedora community to get their inputs along with votes to select the best solution.

Basically, my take on those conflicts would be to find the best possible middle ground and find the right path for Fedora with zero to minimal effect on its users still satisfying the RHEL needs. This helps in reducing the friction between the Fedora community and RHEL during the times of conflict, and also helps to find the solution by taking community input as well.

Fedora is the foundation of RHEL and it can be considered as a stakeholder of Fedora and we want RHEL to use Fedora’s technology and services to build upon Fedora rather than sandboxing themselves which will hurt both of them in many ways.

Quoting my initial statement, Fedora has a symbiotic relationship with RHEL, which means I see Fedora’s success in RHEL’s success and vice versa.

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

I am an open source enthusiast and from the time I got introduced to Fedora, I fell in love with it. I have a bunch of hardware running on Fedora. I like to test Fedora releases on different arm devices. I automate as much as possible in Fedora Release Engineering space. I am also involved in EPEL and CentOS Stream.

One more interesting fact about me is, if you ever find a car with a “Fedora” license plate on it, that would be me driving it.

I would be very pleased to answer any questions you may have about me or my work in Fedora.