The Fedora 29 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all
candidates for running in this election!
The Fedora 29 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all
candidates for running in this election!
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. Fedora 29 elections voting is underway.
I’ve set up weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections or anything else.
Fedora 30 Change Proposal deadlines are approaching.
Fedora 30 includes a Change that will cause ambiguous python shebangs to error. A list of failing builds is available on Taskotron.
Fedora 30 includes a Change that will remove glibc langpacks from the buildroot. See the devel mailing list for more information and impacted packages.
The Fedora Council met last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a lovely city, but rather cold, so we largely stayed within the interconnected network of enclosed bridges known as the Skyway — and in our conference room working. One of our main projects was the draft below. This is a follow-on from our update to the mission statement last year. It represents the way the Fedora Council would like the Project to make that mission a reality — a guiding policy. We’d like wider community feedback on this approach (and the write-up of it), after which we plan to include the final version in the project documentation.
— Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader
“Fedora creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users.”
We do this within the context of the four foundations: freedom, friends, features, and first.
Continue readingHere’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. Fedora 29 elections voting is underway.
I’ve set up weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections or anything else.
Continue readingThis is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.
The Fedora project has been moving decisively in the direction of increased flexibility and diversity – with Modularity, with new distribution mechanisms and formats like ostree and containers. One of our big challenges is to able to take advantage of all this flexibility and still provide a stable, easy to understand experience to our users. I’ve been involved in desktop Linux from the days of editing your window manager and XFree86 configuration manually to the current point where have slick desktop environments that just work. I’m familiar not just with the technology, but also the design processes we’ve developed, and the tricky balancing act between keeping things streamlined and accommodating the needs of advanced users.
There is a lot of work currently going on in Fedora to separate out the operating system layer from the application layer – Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Silverblue, and our container and Flatpaks efforts all represent aspecs of this. FESCo should be continually keeping these ways of consuming Fedora in mind.
A personal interest of mine is how developers work in these new models – how do Fedora users develop their applications, and how do Fedora developers develop Fedora. Our traditional model, where the operating system and applications emerge from a great big sea of packages gives a ton of flexibility, and once you move away from it, it feels a bit like putting handcuffs on, but I think there’s a lot of value to be found for developers as well – to be able to have different development setups for different applications, and to be able to try out operating system changes in ways that are well contained and easily reverted.
At times, it seems like FESCo can get a bit bogged down in the nuts-and-bolts of fixing the operating system – and while that’s essential work, I’d hope that some of that work can be delegated and FESCo can concentrate a bit more on high-level issues and what Fedora needs to do as a project to enable a better operating-system / application split.
I think it’s generally agreed that the weakest part of our process is the “compose” step – taking the bits we create and making an operating system image out of them, reliably and quickly. Not only does this hamper our ability to fix bugs, it is a huge limitation in our ability to do integration testing – any packager who wants to update a system image or component should be able to get tests run on the entire operating system with their component included. In fact they should be required to get such tests run. I think there are some good efforts out their to improve things – FESCO can help out by directing focus towards those efforts and by continually pushing back when a “broken operating system” problem comes up – not just helping out with an immediate fix but figuring out why it wasn’t caught by automated testing.
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.
We are moving towards more flexible and varied ways of delivering the software. And this flexibility is going to become an issue on its own.
On a technical side, extended list of deliverables requires extended testing effort which is hard to achieve via semi-manual workflows. As a CI Engineer and member of Fedora CI Working Group I want to make sure that CI effort is aligned with current engineering goals. And while we work on improving the CI infrastructure and user experience we also find the ways to incorporate CI in the development process.
Now from the process and policy point of view, as a former DevOps Engineer, I have worked on the “other” side – in cloudy environments flexible to the point of becoming chaotic. And while I believe that there are things Fedora needs to catch up with in terms of modern development practices, there are a lot of things “modern practices” need to catch up with in terms of processes and workflows, which are widely known and established in the Linux distributions world.
I hope that bringing this perspective to FESCo would help us find the right balance between providing the flexible tooling and keeping the solid foundation for it to be usable
It may sound odd, but I would say that one of the big goals of FESCo and Fedora community in general is to prevent Fedora from becoming stable. In this case by stable I mean “freezed” not “free of bugs”.
We need it to be easy to change things, even most core features. We need certain loose ends hanging for everyone to come and take care of.
One of the objectives to achieve that big goal is to provide people with the toolchain and services to make their own unique flavors of Fedora or on top of Fedora. Custom repositories, modules, images, flatpaks… you name it. And we need it to be a self-service available for any contributor to use. We should provide pieces for community to play, build and create.
The other complementary thing is actually CI. While many believe that Continuous Integration is there to prevent people from changing things (it does prevent you from merging changes sometimes), the actual reason why we need CI is to allow more changes coming in. CI (and test automation) gives you the freedom to take in changes which otherwise look unusual, or risky. It allows you to focus on whether or not the change is reasonable and brings any value, rather than worry if it might break something.
Additionally to the topics above one of the troubling issues in Fedora is the lack of open collaboration on the package maintenance side. Traditionally, changes in package specs happen locally in a private environment, and community can only interact with the outcome of the change via karma or bug reports. It is very hard for people to contribute and actively help the maintainer especially when they don’t have the packager status themselves.
We have already done a lot to improve this situation. The open pull-requests workflow, which is available on Pagure already, being one of those big steps. But there is more to it. CI, again, could help here as via early integration we encourage maintainers of dependent packages to work closely and discuss the changes happening in interacting packages early in the development phase, and to actually contribute into each other’s test suites.
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