This week, the Fedora Infrastructure team is convening for a Hackathon from April 9-13 at Fredericksburg, VA. You can also attend/partake remotely in #fedora-admin from 09:30 UTC-5 daily. The hackathon is intended to help the team leap ahead for several critical Fedora and CentOS initiatives. We interviewed members of the Fedora Infrastructure team to ask what the goals for the hackathon are and why it is needed.
Modularity (formerly, Modularization) is an ongoing initiative in Fedora to resolve the issue of divergent, occasionally conflicting lifecycles of different components. A module provides functionality (such as a web server) and includes well-integrated and well-tested components (such as Apache httpd and the libraries on which it depends). It can be deployed into production in various ways: as “classic” RPM packages or a container image, and is updated as a whole. Different modules can emphasize new features, stability, security, etc. differently.
Modules differ from traditional packaging in certain important ways. Perhaps most importantly, they allow us to separate internal implementation details from the exposed interfaces of the module. Historically in Fedora, if a packager wanted to deliver a new web application, that would also often mean that they needed to package and carry the framework or other libraries used by that application. This tended to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, those libraries were now available for anyone to pick up and use in Fedora. However, in many cases, this meant that the primary maintainer of that package might actually have no specific knowledge or understanding of it except that its lack would mean their application didn’t work. This can be a problem if a person is carrying around a library for the use of a single helper function and don’t want to be responsible for issues in the rest of the library.
Like any FOSS community project, Fedora relies heavily on volunteers. It is, therefore, no surprise that we’re always looking to increase our contributor base. There is always so much to be done. Of course, many teams work in harmony to keep Fedora ticking. Each team tends to have its own “on-boarding process” for newcomers, which if you’ve been around recently, you’ll have noticed CommOps has been working on improving one by one.
This blog now has a drop-down category called Modularity. But, many arteries of Modularity lead into a project called Factory 2.0. These two are, in fact, pretty much inseparable. In this post, we’ll talk about the 5 problems that need to be solved before Modularity can really live.
Image courtesy of The Awkward Yeti
Fedora Hubs provides a consistent contributor experience across all Fedora teams and will serve as an “intranet” page for the Fedora Project. There are many different projects in Fedora with different processes and workflows. Hubs will serve as a single place for contributors to learn about and contribute to them in a standardized format. Hubs will also be a social network for Fedora contributors. It is designed as one place to go to keep up with everything and everybody across the project in ways that aren’t currently possible.
This article will help you set up a Fedora Hubs development environment on your local machine.
The Modularity working group is looking to flesh out a set of personas to help focus the work being done by the team. Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might interact with a “product” in different ways. They are not market segments but should be thought of as user archetypes.
Personas can be useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of users to guide decisions about a product. They should be based on user research and can include all types of information about that particular person. Our personas include information related to behavior patterns, goals, skills, pain points, attitudes and daily activities. If you want to learn more about personas and their use, I recommend your start here.
Some benefits a team can see with personas include:
Co-authored by Courtney Pacheco and Ralph Bean
Note: This article is a follow-up to Introduction to Modularity.
The purpose of our Modularity initiative is to support the building, maintaining, and shipping of modular things. So, in order to ensure these three requirements are met, we need to design a framework for building and composing the distribution.
In terms of the framework, in general, we are concerned about the possibility of creating an exponential number of component combinations with independent lifecycles. That is, when the number of component combinations becomes too large, we will not be able to manage them. So that we don’t accidentally make our lives worse, we must limit the number of supported modules with a policy and provide infrastructure automation to reduce the amount of manual work required.
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At Flock 2016 in Krakow, Poland, I had the privilege of updating the community on the status of the Fedora Docs Project.
I made a small presentation and moderated a discussion in the Hackfest: Fedora Docs Learn and Hack panel. Unfortunately, my co-presenter and Fedora Docs Project Lead, Pete Travis, could not attend this year. Therefore a lot of the conversation reflected my opinions and what I have gleaned from others.
The presentation slides are online. Unfortunately, the session wasn’t recorded or transcribed, so I wanted to try and present the conversation here. I am not attributing any comments in order to avoid mistakes. Additionally, I am working from my memory and the memory of other attendees, so omissions are accidental.
There was a FAD in May 2016 to formulate ideas for moving the project forward. Two big ideas came out of this meeting:
Source: StaticFlicker
Modularity is an exciting, new initiative aimed at resolving the issue of diverging (and occasionally conflicting) lifecycles of different “components” within Fedora. A great example of a diverging and conflicting lifecycle is the Ruby on Rails (RoR) lifecycle, whereby Fedora stipulates that itself can only have one version of RoR at any point in time – but that doesn’t mean Fedora’s version of RoR won’t conflict with another version of RoR used in an application. Therefore, we want to avoid having “components”, like RoR, conflict with other existing components within Fedora.
Although RoR can be thought of as a component, the definition of “component” is actually a work-in-progress. In other words, another example of a component might be a “LAMP module”, where module is defined as a well-integrated and well-tested set of smaller components that provide functionality. The LAMP module would contain the necessary smaller components required to build and deploy a dynamic, high-performance Apache web server that utilizes MariaDB and PHP. Such a module would be completely independent of all other modules.
Fedora is always moving forward and that means switching to Python 3. There are plenty of upstream projects that already support Python 3. Unfortunately, they are often not packaged in Fedora. We try to keep track of such cases and more in the Fedora Python 3 Porting Database. There, you can see these packages marked with a blue color and listed on the page for Mispackaged packages. Get up to three Fedora badges for updating spec files to support Python 3! Join the porting party, help us move to the future and get your reward. We can port it, but not without your help!
Join the Python 3 Porting Party!
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