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.
