This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. The voting period starts on Thursday, 28 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 11 June.

Interview with Petr Šabata

  • Fedora account: psabata
  • IRC nick: contyk (found in too many to list; the safest bet is #fedora-devel or #fedora-council)
  • 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’ve been a FESCo representative for the past four releases and I would like to continue serving in this role.

One of our project goals is to create a generic building block of an operating system that can be then bent to fulfill various roles and implement solutions for our users’ needs. I would like Fedora to become more flexible and ultimately better at pursuing this vision. One of the ways to achieve it is to define and provide buildroot-defined feature options that would allow for trivial downstream rebuilds of our content. Fedora itself would benefit from it as well, as it encourages more robust packaging with well-defined dependencies and testing. Furthermore, we could easilly provide multiple build variants with modularity. I would like us to focus on this, as well as polishing the modularity and CI features. Yes, it feels like we’ve been working on those for an eternity and they’re still not perfectly usable, however, I do think they’re both important and beneficial and we should not give up on them.

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

I’m a provenpackager and a packaging sponsor who spent the past few years working on the Modularity objective. Currently I’m looking for solutions to the aforementioned issues and contributing to the ELN efforts.

Being a full-time Fedora contributor for about a decade, I like to believe I’ve amassed enough experience and insight to guide our development and steer our focus it in the right direction to follow our strategy and achieve our goals.

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

Frankly, I don’t think that ever happens. Both distributions aim to create a feature-rich and stable operating system with focus on their users. Fedora is fast moving with the latest software and developer tools, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a long support life cycle and is more conservative. However, they exist in a symbiosis and both drive feature development and enrich the other one.

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

In addition to the roles mentioned above, I also serve as the engineering representative to Fedora Council. Like many other candidates, I’m a Red Hatter.

I’m Czech, reside in Brno, live with an old cat, and still find all of this fun.