This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.

Interview with Jeremy Cline

  • FAS ID: jcline
  • Matrix Rooms: fedora Devel, Fedora Cloud, Fedora Infrastructure Team, Fedora Release Engineering

I also keep an eye on, but rarely actively participate in, the Kernel, Rust, Python, EPEL, and ELN channels.

Questions

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

During my time in the Fedora community, I’ve worked on infrastructure and tools, maintained a variety of packages, submitted change proposals, and generally seen how things work together. I believe I can provide useful insights and guidance to others who wish to improve Fedora.

I expect to, as part of FESCo, help community members succeed in their work to improve Fedora, and to ensure that the work done aligns with Fedora’s goals and values. For example, it is often the case that change proposals miss a particular corner case, or fail to provide the context necessary for other contributors, or have some other small defect. FESCo helps ensure that these change proposals are in great shape so that they go smoothly for everyone involved. FESCo’s job isn’t to do work on Fedora, but to ensure those that are doing the work are set up for success.

All that to say, I think Fedora has done a great job building its reputation as a reliable, leading edge distribution and I would like to do my part in continuing that tradition.

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

I currently contribute to a few different areas of Fedora.

In the Cloud SIG, I’ve worked over the past year to ensure the Cloud images we build are available in public clouds like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. I maintain and administrate the service that uploads these images to those clouds nightly, as well as pushes container images to registry.fedoraproject.org and quay.io (thanks to Adam Williamson’s work).

I’ve also been working on Fedora’s signing infrastructure. Initially with an eye towards closing out Fedora Infrastructure’s oldest open ticket, I’ve begun the work of ensuring the signing service is capable of running on newer versions of Fedora and RHEL, and to improve the reliability of the service.

I believe making Fedora more widely available in public clouds benefits the community of Fedora users as the barrier to selecting Fedora is lowered. Improving our signing infrastructure helps contributors and users alike, as we rely on signatures to ensure the software we build is the software users run.

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

With great care. It’s reasonable to assume everyone on the team wants the best outcome. However, what is “best” is entirely dependent on the person or people deciding what they value most. It’s important to understand what the disagreeing parties are valuing differently, and why they hold those values. Sometimes there are ways to resolve the disagreement in a way that satisfies everyone’s values, and sometimes there isn’t. Whatever the resolution is, though, it’s critical to be respectful of the people involved and to not turn the disagreement into “us versus them”. It’s “us versus a complicated problem”.

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

I really appreciate Fedora’s willingness to experiment and I hope to continue to see new and exciting things happen in the distribution. At the same time, I appreciate that the purpose of Fedora is to be useful to people, not all of whom are interested in building Fedora. While innovation and backwards-compatibility don’t always go together, I really value having a smooth, clear path from the old to the new.