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Wednesday, January 23 2013

Back on FUDCon Lawrence

English version

Last week-end, in Lawrence, Kansas, the Fedora community held its North American FUDCon (Fedora User and Developers Conference).

I have had the chance to be able to go there.

I was great!!The organizing committee (including, Ian , Ruth and our dear FPL Robyn) did a grea job! A big big thanks to them.

On the friday I was able to:

  • Participate to the infrastructure session in the morning when we presented what we did over the last year and some of our plans
  • Attend the talk on fedup (the new upgrade tool from Will Woods
  • Give a lightning talk on fedocal, a web-based calendar application for Fedora
  • Give a presentation about micro-web framework and designing maintainable web application. I must say the audience was pretty small, but I think there were interested, maybe even convinced at the end. Yup, all three of them :-)
  • Attend the talk on Ansible
  • Attend the end of the talk on copr
  • Attend the talk on "Saving spins and Fedora Formulas"

At the end of the day, we had pizza in one of the big room of the hotel and I was able to discuss about future plans with different people from the infrastructure team, that was really a nice evening.

I spent the Saturday and the Sunday with the infrastructure team again, we have hacked on a number of things as reported by Kevin or Ralph.

Personnally, I have been working with Toshio on packagedb. We remove some of the older code that is no longer maintained and has been ported to our brand new packages application. This change will go live in ~2 weeks.

On the Sunday, I worked a little bit on copr trying to get the first steps into making an API and a CLI for it. It is still work in progress but some patches went through :-) I also tried to give a hand to Patrick who has been busy, although being in Europ, moving the OpenID server that we run within the project into its own container.

At the end, I think for me, what I enjoyed the most has been the meet all the guys from the infrastructure team with who I have been in contact for almost 18 months. I finally got to meet them and that was very nice.


So, Toshio, Seth, Kevin, Luke, Ralph, Aurélien, Tom, Ian, Ricky, Matt, Xavier, (and all the other that I have met and who participate in this great atmosphere of FUDCon) thanks a lot for the great time I've had, and I hope to see you again soon.

Like Ralph said, The Fedora community is full of some pretty awesome people.


Finally, I would like to thank the Fedora project and Bluehost for sponsoring my travel and thus allowing me to participate.

Monday, October 22 2012

Back on FUDCon Paris (2)

I have already presented what I have been busy with on the first day of the FUDCon EMEA 2012, now is time to present what happened on the other days.

Second day: Barcamp

On the second day we had the barcamp.

I attended a number of them


The Fedora User Experience talk from spot, great talk on how we should/could improve user experience in Fedora. There are a lot of ideas in the air and I am really looking forward to see them coming to life!


The I gave the barcam Cloud @ Infra, let's keep this one for now, I'll come back on it just below.


Then I followed the presentation from Kévin on the Fedora websites. He is doing a great job with it even if it seems to be messy sometime. If you're looking for a nice place to help Fedora, feel free to contact him!


Right after this talk, I have been able to see the end of spot and Ruth about the Raspberry Pi. I got one not so long ago and I am still starting to play with it but it is definitevely something fun to do.


I followed then the Kernel talk from Josh, very interesting even for someone like me who never really had to deal with the kernel (except for the traditionnal Graphic/Wifi bug). Josh already presented his talk and the consequences on his blog so I won't come back on it. Although I still have to ask him where I can get rawhide non-debug-activated kernel to test on my machine at work which gives me weird graphic glitches.


The last session of the day was with the ambassadors team, where we discussed a couple of subjects including mentors in EMEA and how to "filter" the list of ambassadors on the wiki to remove from it the ones which are now longer really active and that new comers might still try to contact without getting answers. One solution might be to simply check, while generating this list, if they have logged in using their FAS within the last 6, 9, 12 months or so. That would prevent from removing people from the group while still keeping a reasonnably up to date list of active ambassadors on the wiki (and bonus point: it easily allows people to come back!). That was one of the solution proposed but I am sure there will be some more discussions before the group agrees/settle down on one.


So that's pretty much it for the Sunday. Quite a busy day but also really really interesting!


Now let's go back on the barcamp I gave

Cloud @ Infra

So the idea of this talk was to see if we could come up with ideas on how we could use the cloud that we recently got in the Fedora infrastructure.

And we came up with some ideas :

barcam_cloud_at_infra

  • The first one is an idea I have been working on for a couple of weeks now, use the cloud to run a Jenkins instance with build nodes on differents OS (Fedora or EL). Eventually we could even offer this as a service for project hosted on fedorahosted.org.
  • One other idea would be to use the cloud to be able to use a simple build environment giving developers/packagers a similar tool as the PPA on Ubuntu.
  • Of course the cloud could be use to provide testing VMs on different distros
  • The cloud could be use to build personnalize VMs images, and maybe with a nice GUI tool on the top
  • The QA guys could use the cloud for a testing environment
  • Finally, one idea which I really liked: using the cloud to run automatic/periodic FTBFS. We could use the cloud to rebuild every packages that at branching have not been built since the last branching. Some were even proposing, rebuild every three months, all the packages that have not been rebuilt in the mean time. I think this would be pretty nice and woul help tracking down packages that fail to build on a newer Fedora for X, Y or Z reason.


Third day: Hackfest

The last day of this FUDCon was dedicated to Hackfest. A number of them have been proposed,

hackfest_fudcon_paris

I have been involved in:

And I also worked on a webapp, which I should present more thoroughly in a near future (suspens...).


This is the end of my report for the FUDCon 2012 EMEA in Paris. I had a great time and I would like to thank all of those who had the hard task to organize this event, especially Kévin who had the lead and did a large part of the work.


Next FUDCon, Lawrence, Kansas, US in January. I am already looking forward.

Sunday, October 21 2012

Back on FUDCon Paris (1)

Last week-end, from October 13th to October 15th, there was the 2012 EMEA FUDCon in Paris. Over these three days I have been quite busy and I thought it might be interesting to present here what I have been busy with.

First day: Conference.

The first day started with a very interesting conference from Robyn Bergeron, the current Fedora Project Leader (FPL). She talked about Fedora, where we come from and where we could go. Really interesting talk and well done.

The afternoon was dedicated to conferences given by member of the Fedora project but open to anyone.

I went to see the presentation by Remi Collet about RPM packaging, since I am already a packager I didn't learn much but, it's always interesting to see how people present such a topic. I find it quite hard to do since I think it is the kind of subject on which you learn mostly by doing, so presenting it as good as you are remains mostly theoratical.

Then I made a presentation on web-application within the Fedora Infrastructure, entitled Fedora Infrastructure. The what? The what for? & The for who??

After my talk, I assisted to the presentation of Christoph Wickert on leadership in leaderless organisation, with the difference between authority and power and this is reflected in leaderless organisation such as FOSS project.

The last talk of the day I attended was the talk from Hans de Goede entitled ‎Spice introduction, future and USB redirection‎. I did not know anything about Spice when I attended, but the talk was really interesting and the demos from Hans have been quite awesome!!

The day ended by the FUDPub at the "Flam's" restaurant in the center of Paris. It was really nice, the service was fast and we could eat and drink pretty much as much as we wanted. The only annoying thing is that we really waited a while before they started to bring us the dessert and in the mean while they took away our plate and cuttlery. So a lot of people left before the dessert, pity...

And that was the end of day 1.


Now let's go back in time a bit and let me introduce what I have been presenting (in case you were not there!).

Fedora Infrastructure. The what? The what for? & The for who??

The idea of the talk was to present the different application developed or maintained by the Fedora infrastructure, present what they are doing and who are their targeted users.

I presented these differents applications by following the progress someone might have within the project.

  • First you create a Fedora account, for this you face the Fedora Account System (FAS)
  • Then, you're new to the community and you do not know exactly where to help so you can help by using:
    • Ask, you actually don't need a FAS account for this but as a member of community you can help by watching over the questions asked and help where you knowledge allows.
    • Tagger, this allows you to add tags to your favorite application. It is also built as a game, the more tag you can add the more points you get. This is something easy to do that will profit anyone in the community as the information are/will be included in PackageKit.
    • Easyfix, when you do not know what to do one evening or you're just looking for a quick project, easyfix is the place where you can find a number of tickets considered by the developers are easy to fix (ie: not requiring a full knowledge of the complete framework).
  • You are now becoming a member of the community as such you start using tools such as:
    • The wiki, this is the place that centralize everything that is happening in the community. Every groups use it, it is one of the most used application we run.
    • As a member of the community, you can now vote for the different stearing committees, for this you will use the Election application. Voting is a right and a duty as a member of the community, it is one of the thing you can do to influence the development of Fedora.
    • Being a community member you gain access to fedorapeople which provides you with a space on the web where you can upload files to share them with the community.
    • The planet is a space accessible to you as a community member. There you can express your opinion and talk about what you're doing for Fedora.
    • But of course there are a lot of other tools available to the community: mailing-lists, IRC channels, local communities...
  • Now that you are in the community, you might be interested in becoming a package maintainer, you follow the procedure to join the package maintainer group and your package is approved
    • You are now able to use pkgdb to manage the ACL on your packages
    • Koji is the tool you will use to build your packages in a safe environment
    • Bodhi is the tool you will use to push your packages to the Fedora repositories as an update, first an update to be tested (repository: updates-testing) then a stable updates (repository: updates).
  • Finally, you have an idea of a tool that might make the life of community member easier, so you want to develop it
    • Fedorahosted is a forge provided by the Fedora project where you can have a trac website coupled with a repository for the sources of your project (it being svn, git, bazaar or mercurial) and also mailing-lists to build a community around your project.
  • You are now a settle member of the community and the whole world can see what you do via the tools we have to expose Fedora to the outside world:
    • Packages is the best place for someone outside the community to find out what is in the Fedora repositories. Which packages is present, in which version, who is maintaining it, what patches have been applied, what bugs have been reported against it. All this kind of questions can be answered there.
    • fedmsg, this is a brand new work made by Ralph Bean. It is a message bus which expose to the whole world what's happening in Fedora. This is basically the place where you see Fedora alive!!
    • There are not much application using the bus for the moment, but two already in place are: busmon, the bus monitor and gnome-shell-extension-fedmsg which has been accepted in Fedora a couple of weeks ago.
    • Docs, this ressource might not be developed by the Fedora Infrastructure, it is probably the best place to find documentation about Fedora, including the changes between releases (and a big kudos to the translation teams to keep this ressource up to date in the different languages!)
    • MirrorManager, this application might be one of the least known, but it is clearly one of the most used since everyone use it everytime you run 'yum update'. It is also an application which is nicely used by other communities to manage their mirrors.

This is for the status on the current application ran in the Fedora infrastructure, but there are developments in progress and I wanted to finish by giving you an idea of what's going to happen in the coming months/year

  • Tahrir/Badges, use the OpenBadges to give badges to contributors
  • Statistics. Using fedmsg get some statistics about updates, active people and all what's happening on the bus
  • New elections, the election application is being rewritten and should come which a bunch of ponies ;-)


I think this covers most of what I presented. There has been some interesting questions (for example regarding Bodhi2) and I would like to thank the audience that was present and seemed to have appreciate the talk.

You can find on my fedorapeople the slides I used. It is not written on the pdf (I should update it with this), but the license is CC-BY-SA.


I will talk about the other two days of the FUDCon in another post.

Thursday, October 11 2012

FUDCon Paris - useful links

English version

The FUDCon Paris wiki page already contains quite a number of information but I thought it might be nice to repeat them once again here.

So here is a list of useful links/information

Some links


Last minute info

If you are arriving late (after 23:00) from Charle De Gaule (CDG) airport, there are work on the train line, so you might have to take a bus instead of the train to the center.

This is also valid, if you have to take a train late (after 23:00) on Monday evening to CDG airport.

In both case, the connection between the normal trains and the bus substituting is done at the station Aulnay-sous-Bois.

The official documentation says:

Due to work, there will be NO trains between Aulnay-sous-Bois and
Charles De Gaulle Airport on Monday to Friday from 23:05 to the
last train, until november 2012. Trains will be replaced by a direct
bus service.

To CDG Airport : departs from Aulnay-sous-Bois station (23:20 > 00:45).
To Paris : departs from Roissypôle - CDG Airport bus station (23h05 > 23:55).

Allow an additional 15 to 20 minutes for the journey.


Couple more of information

Subway station

  • The closest subway station from the hotel is Corentin Cariou, subway line 7
  • The FUDCon on Saturday is closest to the George V station, line 1
  • The FUDCon on Sunday and Monday is closest to the Porte de la Villette station, line 7 (but if you are at the IBIS hotel, you might as well walk to there)


  • The Effeil tower can be accessed from the stations:
    • Bir-Hakeim, line 6
    • Trocadéro, line 6 and 9
  • The Louvre museum is at the station Tuileries, line 1
  • Notre-Dame can be accessed from the stations:
    • Cité, line 4
    • Saint-Michel, line 4
  • The Sacré-Coeur (one of the nicest view of Paris) can be accessed from the stations:
    • Anvers, line 2
    • Abbesses, line 12
  • The Champs-Élysées can be accessed from the stations:
    • Charles de Gaulle - Étoile, line 1, 2 and 6
    • George V, line 1
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, line 1 and 9
    • Champs-Élysées - Clemenceau, line 1 and 13

Q&A

  • Is there a Android app for the transport?
    • The RATP provides an Android app on the market but basically only the main maps are accessible offline, no trip planner, no maps of the surrounding of a stations, no map of a subway/bus line and no traffic info (that's not so surprising though)
    • I found another app Metro 01 (Paris) which seems to do trip planner offline.
  • Where can I get a map of the transportation network?
    • I gave a link to a PDF of this map but in case you cannot/forgot to print it, be aware that every information desk at every station can provide you with a paper version.


I hope this can help you to visit and enjoy your time before and after the FUDCon (not during hé ;-)).

If you have any questions feel free to ask!

Monday, October 8 2012

Preparing for FUDCon

English version

Already next week-end (October 13th to 15th, 2012) is the FUDCon Paris. This will be my second FUDCon but this time I am somewhat involved in the organization.

In addition, I have also a lots of ideas on what we could do/work on. I will probably focus more on the infrastructure side, more specifically the applications bits of it.

First, I think I will propose a talk regarding the infrastructure, something along the lines of: "What, What for & For who?".

Trying to list and go through all the different apps, the old ones, the new ones, what they are for and what you can do with it.

Also, I will likely propose a couple of workshops, one will be regarding fedora-review and the other will be around the Fedora's webapp. I have some work in mind for elections and FAS that should be available to beginners as well as confirmed people.


Now, things can still change, is there any topic which you would like to see, have presented?

Regarding the hackfest, is there something one of you would like to work on?


If so, do let me know!

Monday, August 20 2012

Hotel @ FUDCon Paris -- D - 11

For those of you that have not yet booked their hotel for the next FUDCon EMEA in Paris, you have only few days left!

You have until Robyn's birthday (August 31) to book your hotel.

Do not forget to register on: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Paris_2012#Pre-registration
(This is also useful if you are looking for someone to share the room with)

More information about the hotel can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Paris_2012#Lodging_.2F_Hotel

More information about the subsidies : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2012-August/003099.html

And if you still refuse to come we have hired the best ones:

Tuesday, August 7 2012

Hotel @ FUDCon Paris

For those of you that have not yet booked their hotel for the next FUDCon EMEA in Paris, you have only one week left!

You have until August 15 to book your hotel.

After this date the room that have been reserved for us will be made available for booking by anyone, so you might not be able to book a room in the same hotel as everyone.

Do not forget to register: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Paris_2012#Pre-registration (This is also useful if you are looking for someone to share the room with)

More information about the hotel can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Paris_2012#Lodging_.2F_Hotel

More information about the subsidies : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2012-August/003099.html

Again, there is only one week left. Do not postpone this!