Interview with Kevin Fenzi (kevin)

• Fedora Account: kevin
• IRC: nirik (most any #fedora-* channel)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

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

I’ve been involved in Fedora for over ten years now. At first with Fedora Extras and the Fedora Extras Steering Committee, then package maintaining in Fedora, and later involvement with Rel-Eng and Infrastructure. Four years ago, I was fortunate enough to be hired by Red Hat, working full time on maintaining Fedora Infrastructure. I’m happy to help everyone in the Fedora community get to their goals where I can.

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

I think the current compromise setup (perhaps a bit weighted toward time) is doing pretty well.

We are also doing some experimentation on other cycles like the recent ‘two week Atomic’. I am sure we are going to see more updated images and such moving forward.

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

I’m worried at the number of things we are producing. There’s so many, it’s hard to test everything and it’s not clear how many people are actually using them. It would be great to try and gather some feedback and stop making things that aren’t as useful to our users.

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

I’ve got most of the typical geek interests: sci-fi / fantasy books, games, and movies. Tinkering with most anything computer related, and at least one somewhat non-geeky one: working with Greyhound rescue. I think everything helps understand and connect with others.

Anything else voters should know about you?

I also brew beer and mead. 🙂

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?

I think things are pretty reasonable here. Meetings are open on IRC, minutes are sent to the meetingminutes list and available online for searching. We try and send anything that makes an impact to devel-announce as well (you should really be on devel-announce and meeting-minutes if you are involved in Fedora).

What can you accomplish as part of FESCo that you couldn’t accomplish as a contributor to Fedora without sitting on FESCo?

I think I can help provide some history for why things are the way they are, as well as help steer things a good direction.

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

I don’t think much has changed. FESCo handles the technical side of things, and the Council is more high level.

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

I’m not sure when this question was asked, but there has been a backlog for a long time. There are plans to move review out of Bugzilla to a dedicated application for reviews. I think that would go a long way to helping, as the app can do automated checks and make it very clear what state the review is in and what next steps are.

At this point, I think becoming a co-maintainer of existing packages may be a better way to become a maintainer if there are packages you are already involved with, and you can help existing maintainers out with them.

What’s your point of view about library bundling in packages?

I find it technically poor, but I understand why some upstreams bundle things. There are cases where we simply have to go along with the engineering practices of upstreams if we want our users to be able to use that software. The recent relaxing of guidelines around bundling seems reasonable to me.

Closing words

I’ll add that as always I am happy to talk with anyone on Fedora matters – as noted, you can find me in most #fedora IRC channels or email me at kevin@scrye.com.