This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, January 10th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, January 16th. Please read the responses from candidates and make your choices carefully. Feel free to ask questions to the candidates here (preferred) or elsewhere!

Interview with Kevin Fenzi (kevin)

• Fedora Account: kevin
• IRC: nirik (found in #fedora* (most of them) )
• Fedora User Wiki Page

What is your background in engineering?

I’ve been around almost forever now in Fedora. Started out packging Xfce back in the old fedora-extras days, was on the extras steering then FESCo once it existed. I’ve been active for many years in Fedora Infrastructure and Release Engineering, and for the last 5 or so years have been employed by Red Hat to lead Fedora Infrastucture full time. It’s a dream job!

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

Upcoming in the next year we have a ton of technical issues:

• rpm-ostree/atomic and how best to create, maintain and popularize it
• modularization efforts and how to take advantage of them for all the things we do
• using containers in places where they make sense and leveraging their popularity
• using flatpaks for things that make sense outside our regular repos
• making sure our users have the information and ability to make choices on non free software

What are three personal qualities that you feel would benefit FESCo if you are elected?

• I know the history of a lot of decisions
• I can help get things done from an infrastructure or releng perspective
• I’m pretty good at making sure things keep flowing day to day

What is your strongest point as a candidate? What is your weakest point?

I’ve been around and know things, but I suppose if folks do not like where things are going they might vote for others.

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo?

So I can use my understanding and ideas to better Fedora.

Currently, how do you contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

Currently I’m leading Fedora Infrastucture, so I do lots of work for the community setting up and maintaining services, answering questions and so forth.

In your own words, how is pursuing the modularity objective important to Fedora’s success? Is there anything in this area you wish to bring?

I think modularity is very important. It’s going to give us a lot more flexability to produce things without burning our community out. I do think it’s going to take a lot of work to get it to where we might want it, but I am pretty excited by the possibilities.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

All the items mentioned above in the technical issues. flatpaks, containers, modularization, rpm-ostree, and more.

If a past member of FESCo, identify a negative factor you noticed while serving in FESCo. How would you propose to improve on that for the next cycle?

I think the non responsive maintainer process could really use a re-work, and I have had that on my list to do for a long while, but I would hope we can address it soon. The current process is very manual and ony happens when someone deliberately pushes it. Automation needs to weigh here against maintainers priorites, but I think we can come up with something better.

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

According to google: 11 meters per second. 🙂

Closing words

I think it’s an exciting time in Fedora, but then I think it’s always an exciting time in Fedora. New and exciting ways to do things and new community members coming along to work on them and join forces with all the community thats been here a while.

If you want to know my thoughts on anything I am almost always around on IRC or on the devel or infrastructure lists as well as via email. Happy holidays to all the Fedora community and do remember to educate yourself and then VOTE!