Interview with Parag Nemade (Pnemade)

• Fedora Account: Pnemade
• IRC: paragan (usually in #fedora-admin, #fedora-devel, #fedora-i18n, #fedora-qa)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

I started using Linux since RHL 7 release. I am contributing to Fedora since last ten years now. I got mostly involved with Fedora by doing packaging and package reviews. Being provenpackager, I have helped in fixing packages for some mass rebuilds in the past. Being Sponsor for packager group, I have helped few people by sponsoring them into packager group. I work in Fedora Globalization team and takes care of few packages related to Globalization. I also like to test packages in updates-testing and new updates to Fedora Apps.

Do you think Fedora should be time based or more feature driven distribution? Or compromise?

I still think Fedora should be based on compromise. Some selected features and a six months of development cycle which we are following currently looks good to me. This is good where we get new releases of Gnome, KDE Plasma, Libre Office in every release of Fedora.

What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today (from engineering POV)? What should we do about them?

Translations are important to Fedora. Every release we see some translations missed by some packages in Fedora. We need developers to make sure that they will check translation coverage to be 100% for the packages getting tagged into the final releases.
Then, implementing the Changes in our time based release has becoming tough task. We try to add many things in every release but I am not sure if we are getting enough testing for that. Sometimes Changes need to be postponed due to their incompleteness. We also need more test cases to be submitted with each Change proposal that people can test on test days. We have seen alpha/beta/final releases slipping due to this. We have new bodhi which gives some options while providing karma but most people testing packages just test for general functionality and not for what the update has been built. Thus sometimes package gets pushed to stable without testing the real fix.

What are your interests and experience outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?

I don’t think my interests and experience outside of Fedora will help me in my FESCo role.

Anything else voters should know?

I work for Red Hat. Voters can check my Fedora Wiki User Page for more information about my work.

How can FESCo do a better job communicating with the rest of the Fedora community? Or do you feel that FESCo is already doing well here?

All FESCo members watch devel list discussions, some who find interest provide their views on the devel list itself. I think FESCo mostly rely on devel list discussions and their own development experience while making the decisions. I think FESCo is doing good but can do better with the help of the community people.
After being on FESCo for last 10 months, I think it will be good to see actually community members participating these discussions and providing any missing information on the current ongoing topics. It is not possible for FESCo members to evaluate all the angles of the problem. I have seen while making decisions, sometimes people related to topic are needed in the meeting to get more understanding of the problem which sometimes did not happen.

What can you accomplish as part of FESCo that you couldn’t accomplish as a regular contributor to Fedora?

As a Fedora contributor I am always keep working in Fedora but being on FESCo, I can use my experience and help to resolve the technical issues reported to FESCo.

With the advent of the Fedora Council, what do you see as the significance of FESCo in the Fedora Project?

FESCo works on the technical, implementation issues in Fedora. FESCo has been looking into the Change discussions, package development problems, non-responsive maintainers and provenpackager requests. The Fedora Council is not supposed to work on these issues and is a high level decision making governance body. They are also mostly into resolving budget issues, sponsoring events, branding and marketing help for Fedora.

Do you think FESCo can help with the reduction of the backlog of >400 packages awaiting review?

I think its not the FESCo members who can help with package reviews, its the packager group Sponsors who should encourage new contributors to do package reviews which can benefit package submitter as well to know if they got any issues in their package. It is sad that we have no strict policy to ask new contributors to do some peer package reviews and then get sponsorship. I saw recently Sponsors started sponsoring new contributors without asking them enough peer package reviews which results increase in new package review queue. Other way is to have active SIG members to take initiative to track package reviews related to their work and have them reviewed soon.

What is your point of view about library bundling in packages?

As already stated in the packaging guidelines, I will always try to contact upstream and unbundle any libraries in my packages. But sometimes upstream write their code in such way that we need to use bundled code otherwise package will not build, so in this case it makes sense to bundle the libraries