This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 3 June and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 16 June.

Interview with Tom Stellard

  • Fedora Account: tstellar
  • IRC:  tstellar (found in #fedora-devel, #fedora-buildsys, fedora-ci)
  • 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 a background in compilers and toolchains, and I would like to use some of the knowledge I’ve gained over the years of building and troubleshooting applications to help make Fedora better. Specifically, I’m interested in helping packagers avoid common mistakes through standardized macros and packaging practices and also by increasing the reliance on CI.

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

I’m currently one of the maintainers of the LLVM packages in Fedora which are a set of 14 packages that provide C/C++/Fortran compilers as well as a set of reusable compiler libraries that are used for developing other languages and for developer tools like IDEs.

I’ve also worked on system-wide changes to help standardize the use of make within Fedora packages. These changes helped to make spec files more consistent across all of Fedora and also made it possible to remove make from the default buildroot.

With the advent of CentOS Stream, where do you think Fedora stands now and what should be the plans for the future?

I think Fedora remains an inovative distro that is able get the latest and greatest software out to users. In some ways, CentOS Stream 9 is almost like longer-life Fedora variant, because it branched off from a Fedora release. I think overall it will be a benefit to the Fedora community and help make our distro more attractive to users.

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

I work for Red Hat on the Platform Tools team. I am the technical lead for our LLVM team and the overall technical lead for the Go/Rust/LLVM compiler group. This means that I work on packaging, bug fixing and upstream feature development for LLVM and work on high-level technical issues common across all 3 compilers.