Archive for February 2005

“Fedora creates the DNA that allows us to create a new product”

Fedora will engage customers is what hit the news sites, during FUDCon. And with Extras, and what happened, we seemed relatively successful with the meeting and then the launch of the committee. Then we also did the fedora-maintainers list, which seems to not have gone down so well, in-spite of the -readonly copy of it. Acceptance of it has been spotty at best, reading fedora-devel-list.

But it is a necessary evil. Power isn’t reserved for an elite group, and Seth points out quite nicely other private partys. But where do we draw the line is the question. I was part of the unanimous decision to create the semi-private party at fedora-maintainers, because there was no way all the @redhat’s were to sit at f-d-l, and there was quite the bit of noise. Its a fair requirement that if you maintain a package you get placed on another list. You are now a valuable contributor, as opposed to being a regular noise maker, no?

Take the recent “let’s slim Fedora Core 4 down” discussion. I’m even afraid to count how many messages there were for that. The point of -maintainers is that we figure people won’t bring up the “lets move GNOME/KDE to Extras” kind of discussion. The same discussion gets old. Read the list archives. But the core problem with open source is that everyone feels they need to have an opinion. And everyone feels that their opinion is right. And is the be all, and the end all.

So FC-4 is going to have 5 CDs. Abiword, Exim, bzflag and a whole bunch of other useful packages are disappearing from Core. But they’re not gone anywhere. They’ll be in Extras. Extras will even be enabled, by default, in /etc/yum.repos.d/, so if you’re missing bzflag, a simple “yum install bzflag” will get you happy again. “Core is what Red Hat maintains. Extras is what the community maintains,” aoliva says. And yes, Red Hat is part of the community.

Back to communication. We’re still not definitely good at it. But if there are wanting contributors, the Extras/IdeasSandbox is a good place to start. We have a public schedule for the “shit that needs to get done”. And the Fedora News Updates will come back, as Fedora Traffic; so if you were a wanting contributor, now’s a good time to send me some e-mail.

FUDCon is over…

So, FUDCon is over. Boy has it been a blast for the last week. Fedora Meeting Status Report is generally a good read – it tells ya’ll what happened at the meeting, and was presented at FUDCon. Some of the interesting bits are:

  • Extras build system should be released soon in public CVS; it doesn’t need to be complete, it can get completed over time
  • For other architectures that need supporting (ppc/sparc/alpha/etc…), as long as there’s community interest, and there’s things happening, The Fedora Project will try its level best to get it into the build farm
  • The website at http://fedora.redhat.com is to be revamped; the module should be available in CVS in due time.
  • Packaging guidelines are coming right along, to make packagers happy.
  • Regular meetings with relevant people; increased communication with the public.
  • Creation of the Fedora Extras Steering Committee. More details about this as we update the leadership document, but the general idea is that there’s a committee, there’s going to be work done, and if we don’t, there’s going to be an avenue to complain about it.

What about FUDCon itself? I thought it was a blast. With a live stream, an IRC channel, both the rooms got their stuff recorded, amazing stuff open source is. FUDPub later was fun as well – we took over a relatively small-ish pub, had good food and drink, and the last to strut out were pjones, paul (from BU) and me. Thank you all for coming to FUDCon, thank you all for helping organise FUDCon, thank you for letting me come to this great event, just generally, thank you.

Now for the rumor mongers. FUDCon 2 should be happening alongside Linux Tag, in Germany, in the middle of the year. Interested? fedora-marketing-list might be a good place to express it. Want a FUDCon at your location? I’m sure something can be organised. We learnt a lot, and know how to improve for the next one…

FUDCon #1

Oye, oye! FUDCon is here. And you can watch it too. User track: http://128.197.127.23/. Developer track: http://128.197.164.36/. There’s a java client, or you can use Totem – just append :8800 to the URL. Talks will be uploaded as I get slides delivered (i.e. probably after each talk, since most are still being written). Also, there’s #fudcon on freenode in case you’d like to chat with some of the folk around.

My software has testicles

Oops, test suites. A joke that I’m sure the fedora people will get. Yesterday was spent on the showfloor, meeting interesting people and converting them to Fedora. Dinner at the Google party was moderately okay, but the party was somewhat of a letdown; thats okay, the club Paul, Peter, Jesse and I rocked up to was lots better.

Today was our Fedora meeting day. Lots of good came out of it, and we all surprisingly didn’t come out of it with any bruises of any sort. Some very positive things came out of it, we now know who’s doing what, there are roles assigned, and I’m sure when I cleanup the meeting minutes (which is before tomorrow), there’ll be a presentation on it at FUDCon. Also just finished writing the fedora/ppc portion of the talk for tomorrow. Dinner was great, and I guess, just watch this space (and the announce/devel list) real soon now for some good, forward moving, Fedora news

Fedora Extras launches; FUDCon shapes up

Fedora Extras
As Sopwith announced, the official Fedora Extras tree is now open. Make sure bug reports are at RH Bugzilla.

[Extras]
name=Fedora Extras
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1

That can be placed in /etc/yum.repos.d/extras.repo. You’ll need the GPG key, which is available at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/RPM-GPG-KEY-Fedora-Extras. Great going on getting a build system skvidal!

FUDCon
FUDCon is taking shape. We’d get an announcement out soon, and a logo is being designed thanks to Diane (thanks dfong!). Its all coming together, and I think Boston University is going to be a rocking location! Boston itself, will be rocking ;-)

Asia Source #5 and #6

Field study to a school today. Well, a series of local schools. The marriage of ICT with the regular teaching method is nice. The local educational software is made up of about 67 CDs, each CD being tri-lingual: English, Hindi, and the local state language. Its reached nine states already! The sad part is that the government of India literally sold its soul to Microsoft – they have got cheapish/free licenses; the other company that got the tender ended up doing some ugly Mandrake Linux hack that is broken (so they’re locked into MS Windows).

I have finally watched Revolution OS. Can’t really comment much on it, considering lots of things have changed in the Linux world since then, but good effort.

More migration things today. I see where Synaptic on Ubuntu fails for complete end-users. I see where getting folk to edit the yum.conf file fails in Fedora. I see a lot of complete end-user failure points in package management that make it too hard for the average small office/NGO with no technical capacity to even want to bother with installing software, yet alone to getting updates. Don’t even mention source packages. I can’t wait for PUP to become a Fedora reality, I think I have my test-base to make sure it “just rocks”.

The other major weird thing we should all worry about is how Nepal’s king has taken over and screwed democracy. Spare a thought, yes.


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