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Friday, April 13 2018

Fedora Infrastructure Hackathon 2018

This week, a good part of the Fedora Infrastructure team as well as some members from the CentOS Infrastructure team met up in Frederisksburg (Virginia, USA) for a few days of hacking together.

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Wednesday, August 30 2017

Flock 2017 - Day 1

Today was the first day of the Flock 2017 conference in Cape Code.

I arrived there on Sunday, giving me a little time to adjust to the jet lag so I was somewhat ready for this first day. It started with the traditional talk from the Fedora Project Leader about the State of Fedora, updating us on statistics and explaining some of the challenges we as a community are facing and are working on. Having followed or being involved in some of these changes, it was nice to see them brought forward as being important objectives for us to work on.

After that we got a pitch from all the speakers at the conference about what they are going to present or work on. There is quite a large diversity of topics as usual which gets into the traditional struggle of "what do I attend?" :-)

This afternoon, we had our pagure hackfest which has been quite productive considering how many people were present (there were some quite interesting talks at the same time, cf the question above). We fixed the milter integration which allows to comment on issue by just replying to the email/notification. Turned out to be a simple configuration change, but in the long run I do not know if we shouldn't adjust the code a little bit more. So I may open a pull-request to change a bit the behavior there. We also had a new contributor set up his environment and working on an easyfix (PR incoming soon) and together with Matt Prahl we worked on a couple of pull-requests to get the tests running and behave as expected.

After that I attended the presentation about fedora-hubs. Having been involved in the early stages of the project it was nice to see where it is now and to see that it is in good hands!

I then attended the presentation about the Fedora Magazine which was quite interesting and explained how the editorial board works and plan the articles or work with the authors writing them.

The last presentation I attended was from Will Woods and was really interesting. I will likely going to butcher the ideas he presented, but it was about a R&D project he has been working on trying to improve the situation around composing artifacts with RPMs. His findings were that RPM scriptlets are most often the limiting factor and that with some more structure we could improve the situation quite a bit. He showed us the compose of a qcow image being done in less than 30 seconds and, I quote, "before optimization". This sounds really quite interesting for the CI work that currently being done, though integrating both project is likely a long term idea.

The day ended with a game night with pizzas and drinks allowing us to spend time and chat about all sorts of things, work-related and not.

Thursday, August 11 2016

Back from Flock 2016

Flock is always a peculiar time of the year for me. For one it is one of the few time I get to meet with my colleagues but more than that, it's also one of the few time I get to spend a few days with fellows from this Fedora community that is so dear to me.

I have to say that this year was no exception. Flock 2016 has been really nice. I can, of course, only speak for myself, but from what I have seen we got a lot of work done and we are now ready to move forward on quite a few subjects.

One of the most important aspect of flock is the fact that an important part of the community gathers in one place, but we need to be careful as the conference only represent about 10% of all the Fedora contributors. So it is our duty as attendee to report to the broader community about the subjects that were discussed and the talks we have had.

It is of course practically impossible to mention everything here, for one because I took very little note during the conference, but I would like to point out the topics that appeared the most important to me during that conference.

Fedora at large and its community

During the opening keynote, mattdm gave an overview of how Fedora is appreciated outside of our community. It seems that Fedora 24 has been doing great, same for Fedora 23 before that. The IT world seems to appreciate the Fedora.next program we have started and what it is leading to.

Matt also gave a few numbers on the side of our community and our contributor base. These were numbers that had already been presented in his talk at DevConf 2016 (talk that I watched on youtube). So there were really new to me, but I still like the fact that there is about 66% of our community that is not working for our primary sponsor, Red Hat. This is healthy for our community, this diversity ensures that we are not just an echo chamber and that it is not just us liking what we do.

The Fedora Infrastructure

This is a part of the project that I am directly involved in and that I think made some really good progress during these few days. We had a few session. It started with a presentation from Kevin and I about the state of the Fedora Infrastructure. We went a little bit through the changes that happened in the last year and ones planned in the coming year, both from an infrastructure and an application point of view.

This has lead a few questions and discussions, all in a nice atmosphere. I had one comment on the presentation that we have not included as much numbers in it as we had last year making it a little harder for people not accustomed with our work to follow. Something to work on for next year.

We also had a workshop session. Over two hours we went through the changes we want to make to the infrastructure (opening our private cloud to our contributors, start investigate where and how to use docker, reflect the level of support provided to services by using different domain names for examples) and for each of these we came to some agreement and made a plan on how to move forward with it.

I will not go to much in the details of what we discussed and what agreement we reached in this blog post as it has already been summarized on the fedora infrastructure list.

Fedora Docker Layered Images

So this an project that has been worked on for a few months now by Adam Miller in coordination with the rel-eng team. The idea is to allow Fedora to start distributing more than just RPMs and in this case, Docker images.

This service is about to land. There are still a few aspect to be worked on, including how to distribute the images to the mirrors and how to ensure users are being redirected to a mirror that is up to date. Dennis, Randy and I had a very interesting discussion around the work that remains to be done for this. It will imply making changes to MirrorManager and likely all of its three components (MirrorManager, MirrorList and the backend services). It might also imply work on the docker side.

Being able to have these discussion while seating on comfortable harmchairs facing each other was really nice. We managed to have a list of applications that needs to be adjusted and a good idea of how the different pieces will work together.

Fedora atomic on a workstation

Patrick gave a very interesting presentation on how he builds and uses Fedora atomic to run it on its laptop. This was really most interesting but it gave a little bit of mixed feelings. On the one side, it looks really promising and exciting to work with, on the other side it seems not really user-friendly and a little hard/time-consuming. I do wonder if, some aspects could not be simplified for me (for example retrieving the list of RPMs currently installed on my machine to insert in the kickstart file instead of more or less starting from scratch).

Maybe I will try to make a little time available this year to try to play with this, it is really tempting.

Automation

Ralph has lead a very nice workshop on automation whose idea was to brainstorm around what we do and that we could automate and what we all have built script to do for us and which thus may need to be generalized.

The discussion has been lively and quite a few ideas were exchanged.

Two of them sticked with me a little more

  • Generate a cron job gathering information from pkgdb, koji, bodhi, fedocal to

give access at a single location about releases. What are they koji tags? What are their bodhi name? What are their current status (released? beta-freeze? beta released? alpha?...)? There are a few applications relying on this information and while a good part of it is present in pkgdb, not all is and it does not necessarily make sense to add it there.

  • Create some sort of service that triggers builds upon git push and even the

creation of bodhi update if we want. There are quite a few use-case that people would like to see supported and some people do not want this at all, so this should be entirely opt-in. Currently is idea is to ask packager to place a ChangeLog file in their git repo, next to the spec and the sources files and place in this file the information needed to create the bodhi update. If in a push, this ChangeLog file is updated, automatically trigger the build in koji and if it finished successfully, create the update in bodhi. That means that: without this ChangeLog file, nothing changes from the current situation, if the ChangeLog is not touched, nothing changes from the current situation, if the ChangeLog file is touched but the build fails in koji, the only change from the current situation is that this service will have saved the user from triggering the build manually.

These were the two ideas that stick with me the most. There has been more discussed and there are more possibilities (like making the service something that is ran locally by the user, as opposed to something ran in the infrastructure).

Pagure

Pagure has been a really nice surprise to me. Many people talked to me about it most often in good terms and sometime with some interesting ideas. I am not sure all the ideas provided will be implemented but there is food for thoughts and enough to keep me busy a little while!

Modularity

I had been following the modularity working group from a little far and I have been quite happy to discuss directly with the people working on this about the work they are trying to achieve.

Ralph and I have had a few lengthy discussion around the life-cycle of packages in this new model and, among others, the impact this would have on tools such as pkgdb. It seems clear to me that while the data model might not necessarily change that much, we will need to adjust pkgdb for this new distribution model. All the details are still not entirely clear, some features will need to be added, the UI will need to be adjusted, overall probably not enough to worth a rewrite of pkgdb but still enough that I will need to spend some cycles on it.

The work done by the modularity group is quite fascinating, I have been involved or the spectator of some the discussion they had and there is really quite a lot of work still to be done and this is sounding really interesting.

If you have not had a chance to see what they are doing, I encourage you to check out their wiki page and check Langdon's presentation at flock as soon as it is available on youtube.

Hubs

Fedora-hubs is a cool project aiming at simplifying the steps new contributors need to take to reach the old contributors. IRC, mailing lists, tickets are all places where activities happen but that might be obscure to new contributors. fedora-hubs tries to fill this gap by aggregating all the activity around a group of people and provide it to new contributors so they know where to look to get aboard.

We ran a workshop with a nice demo at flock. We received some good positive feedbacks and people seem to like how things are looking. Personally flock has also been the occasion to pass the torch on this project. I have been leading it since Ralph changed team but I am really not the expert in the technologies needed for hubs' frontend. So I passed on the torch to Sayan who is much more experienced than I am and who I'm sure will do a great job leading hubs. I will still be around, I am very much interested in helping with backend bits and pieces. FMN still needs some work and a few other applications that I maintain might require adjustments to integrate with hubs the way we want it. So, do expect me around :)

Zanata

Finally, flock has also been the occasion for me to meet up with the folks from zanata (the platform used by fedora's translators). We exchanged a few emails before the conference as we asked them to expand on their web-hooks so we could gather some more stats and include them on fedora-hubs. It was really nice to be able to discuss with them regarding their plans and ours and how we may be able to help each other.

Final words

Well, this has been quite a lengthy blog post, if you made it so far : congratulations!

As a final note, I would like to thank all the organizers of the conference, having tried to place a bid for this year, I have a small idea of the amount of work involved but they managed wonderfully and it was an excellent flock!

Wednesday, May 6 2015

Flock 2015: Your vote has been recorded. Thank you!

The election to select the talks for flock 2015 has started yesterday.

Anyone having signed the FPCA and being in one more group can participate to this election and help selecting the most interesting talks to be held at flock 2015 in Rochester (NY). Some of the talks submitted there look really interesting, I am looking forward seeing the agenda and I hope the ones I want to see will not conflict too much :-)

This year the election is using the simplified range voting approach. The principle is the same as for the classical range voting, but instead of having the possibility to score each candidate between 0 and X (X being the number of candidates, which is 132 for this election), you have the possibility to score each candidate between 0 and 3.

You can of course make your own scale but I went for something along the lines of:

  • 0: not really interested by this talk
  • 1: can be interesting, not sure
  • 2: looks like an interesting talk
  • 3: I really want to see this talk



And you, did you vote?

Monday, April 20 2015

PyCon 2015 - Montreal

This year, for the first time, I have been lucky enough that I could attend PyCon, the Python Conference.

This conference changes location every two years and this year was the second edition at the Palais des Congrès in Montréal, Canada.

Before I venture further into the conference itself, I would like to thank the organizers. The location was great! The organization flawless! And, as an attendee, everything went really smooth.

The conference itself is divided upon three sections

  • The tutorials and the language summit (2 days)
  • The conference per say (3 days)
  • The sprints (4 days)

I did not attend the tutorials but I was invited to the language summit by Kushal Das (PSF board member and CPyton contributor). I was a unique occasion for me to meet and discover how things are discussed and decided within the python community. I must say it made me want to participate more in this community, join the mailing lists and, who knows, maybe try to tackle some easyfix bugs :)

During the summit we had a number of presentation about alternative python compilers like jython. We also had a short presentation by Guido about changes coming in python 3.5 to support declaring types in the function definition. Another interesting discussion was around the requests library and if it could ever make it into the standard library. While I think that specific question wasn't really answered during the summit, it triggered some interesting discussion around endorsing some external libraries within the documentation of the standard library (ie: advising users to use requests on the urllib documentation pages). Another really interesting topic that has been presented was the state of python on mobile platform (Windows Mobile, iOS and Android). While there are still some more work that needs to happen things seems to be progressing on that front and I'm quite looking forward the day we'll be able to easily ship python application in the different store.

The second day of the tutorials was more relax for me. I took this opportunity to wander around Montreal a little and joined the crew of volunteers at the end of the morning to help preparing the swag bags for every attendee of the conference.
We first took out all the goodies shipped to the conference by the different sponsors and align them on two long tables. Then in the middle of the afternoon we started the 'bag stuffing' process :) This is a complicated process in which experts are carrying bags along the two long tables and another set of experts are translated items from the table into the bags.
Placing myself at the very beginning of the chain, I have probably been in contact with 2500+ bags of the 3000+ bags prepared (I would set the bags and be helped by one or two person that would either give away the bags or help me setting them up depending on the stash of prepared bags :)).
These were some interesting, fun, relaxing and sportive two and half hours! If you have not had the opportunity to stuff bags this year and are going to pycon next year, I highly recommend you to join this crew. It is a lot of fun!

The following three days have been the conference itself. To summarize, here is an overview of the talks I went to over the three days: Friday

  • Opening: Julia Evans
  • Keynote: Catherine Bracy

on the Coding For America project and in a broader sense what I would call, civic coding. (ie: how developper can help the community at large by making publicly accessible information and tools). This was a really great keynote, her talk was inspiring and motivating as well as calling for further reflection upon the roles of FOSS developper in our society within our field of expertise (developing) but outside our traditional scope (web, desktop, OS, company).

  • Machine learning 101: Kyle Kastner

This was also a very interesting talk going over the different machine learning algorithm, libraries and use-cases. That helped getting an overview of the field

  • Introduction to HTTPS: A comedy of errors: Ashwini Oruganti & Christopher Amstrong

This was presenting what are the current issue when dealing with https in general, within python or not. I can't say I learned new things in there but it is always good to get refreshed on this topic

  • Insite the Hat: Python @ Walt-Disney Animation Studios: Paul Hilderbrandt

This was a really interesting presentation about the use of IT in general (and python in particular) at Walt-Disney Animation Studios and of course it was full of pretty pictures from Big Hero 6 as well as some other pretty pictures from a couple of other movies. Paul also presented the overview of how animation movies are made and how Disney developed their own tools to facilitate this process insisting on the idea that the tools have to adapt to the artist rather than the other way around.

  • How to interpret your own genome using (mostly) python: Titus Brown

This talk presented tools and workflow that can be used to analyze and compare genomes, taking a population that had a particular history as example and going down into the genome to figure out what (at the gene level) makes this population so specific. It also gave an overview of the possibility for high-throughput genome sequencing and the application that can derive from it as well as touching the surface of the ethical concerns that raises from these technologies.

  • How to build a brain with Python: Tevor Bekolay

While still being bioinformatics this was a very different topic than the previous talk I attended. This presentation was really about the inner (ie: chemical and physical) modeling of neurons of a brain. The presentation started by introducing a couple of application used to model a single neuron and then introduce their own application used to model several neurons at once. Quite impressive and interesting presentation although knowing more about the biochemical and biophysical properties of the brain would have probably lead to a better comprehension of the work presented :)

Saturday

  • Introducing python wats: Amy Hanlon

While I must say I knew most the example she presented of curious behavior of python, I must say that I did not know completely the reason of these behaviors. The presentation was really nice in that it gave some clues and as well as some tools to help figuring out what is actually happening in the code and why these, sometime surprising, behaviors.

  • Learning from other's mistakes: Data-driven analysis of python code: Andreas Dewes

This was an interesting presentation describing the approach develop by this company to do static code analysis but considering the code not as text but as a graph. This approach allows to find out bugs in the code due to, for example, typos in property names. It seems that the service is freely available but unfortunately, if I understood correctly, the tool is not FOSS.

  • Technical Debt - the code monster in everyone's closet: Nina Zakharenko

The interesting bit about this presentation is that anyone that worked on a reasonable size project could relate to what was presented. There are many times where I thought that I have been in the situation described and some time when I thought I wasn't doing too bad (but here I guess it depends on the projects). There were some good elements to help figuring out the size of the debt as well as some good ideas on how to organize the work to reduce this debt.

  • Achieving continuous delivery: An automation story: James Cammarata

This presentation was about Ansible and how different companies are using it to automate their deployments. Several examples of companies were given, some even integrating Ansible with an IRC bot allowing everyone on the IRC channel to see what the other admins are doing.

  • Build and test wheel packages on Linux, OSX and Windows: Olivier Grisel

Wheel are a format that can be used to compile python packages into binaries that can then be installed on multiple platforms. There are clearly some advantages in this but I am not quite convince especially with regards to architecture specific code and the different architectures that we have today (x86, arch, arch64, ppc...) But anyway, since Fedora does not allow shipping binary files directly wheel isn't quite an option for us. On the other hand it might be one for applications such as liveusb-creator or pyrasite that aim at being cross-platform.

  • Graph database patterns in python: Elizabeth Ramirez

The presenter of this talk works at the New-York Times journal and was presented the approach the use internally (as well as the tools and library) to store semantic concepts, link them and navigate the graph they make. After the presentation I ended up having a very interesting talk about the difference between full-graph database and rdf databases and what the former allows that the later does not. While I am still a little unclear about this difference, it was a really interesting conversation and something I would like to look further into if I was still working with/on semantic web technologies.

Sunday

  • Keynote: Van Lindberg

This was a presentation from the head of the PSF board about the state of the python community and python in general, how it went from being a trendy language when it was created into something stable and sure these days, but also how other languages are growing, potentially threatening python by being the new trendy languages. Community wise, I have written one quote from this talk that I really like:

  A community where people interact only when they are paid to do
  so is not a community, it's a bunch of mercenary
  • keynote: Jacob Kaplan-Moss

This was a great talk about the perception that we have as developers of themselves. For example, did you realize that there are two kinds of developers: the great ones and the terrible ones while if the quality of a developers could be quantified we know that just like everything else it would follow a normal distribution, ie: most people would be average developers and only a few would be great and a few would be terrible. If you have seen it I would like to say:

 Hello, I'm pingou, I'm a mediocre programmer

If you haven't seen it, I invite you to watch it as it was an inspiring talk, really.

  • Interactive data for the web - Bokeh for web developers: Sarah Bird

Bokeh is a library that can be used to create interactive graph that can be included in web pages. The examples shown during the presentation were really impressive and while it probably needs some understanding of the different ideas, concepts and of the library itself, it is definitively something I will look into the next time I have to do some data visualization.

  • WebSockets from the wire up: Christine Spang

While I have heard about web-socket I have not had the opportunity to play with them more than this. In this talk the history and principles of web-socket was described, giving a nice idea of what they can be used for. I must say I know kinda want to play more with them, build more reactive UI using web-sockets. However, for the projects I work on these days I feel it would be a little bit overkill. Maybe for next one ;-)

  • Type hints: Guido Van Rossum

This was a very similar presentation to the one Guido gave during the language summit, presenting the work coming in python 3.5 to support type documentation in function definition. Here, as well as during the language summit, I got quite enthusiast about this idea but the syntax of putting the type in the function definition is really not appealing to me. It makes the function definition both harder to read and, in some case, much longer. To be honest I would love to see the same syntax be supported in docstring which is where I believe it belongs (plus, as a bonus, it kind of encourage developers to document their code, if you start writing docstring for the type, maybe you can add documentation about the arguments themselves and the function, and so on).

  • Keynote: Gary Bernhardt

This keynote was probably the most technical keynote we had (except for Guido's presentation just before). It presented a comparison between strong type languages and dynamic type languages.

This is it for the talks I attended. There are more talks I would have liked to see but either I was doing something else or there was another talk at the same time. Luckily all the talks have been recorded and are available on youtube.

Among the talks I would like to see are:

  • Building secure systems - lvh
  • What can programmers learn from pilots? - Andrew Godwin
  • "Words, words, words": reading Shakespeare with Python - Adam Palay
  • Is your REST API RESTful - Miguel Grinberg
  • l18n: World domination the Easy Way - Sarina Canelake
  • Good test, Bad test - Dan Crosta
  • How our engineering environments are killing diversity (and how we can fix it). - Kate Heddleston
  • Open Source for Newcomers and the People who want to welcome them - Shauna Gordon-McKeon
  • Cutting off the internet: Testing applications that uses requests - Ian Cordasco
  • Rethinking packaging, development and deployment - Domen Kozar
  • Describing descriptors - Laura Rupprecht
  • Avoiding burnout, and other essentials of Open Source self care - Katheleen Danielson
  • Python performance profiling: the Guts and the Glory - A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

As you can see I'm in to spend few hours watching youtube videos :)

The third part of the conference was the sprints.

The idea of the sprints is to take advantage of the fact that many developers come to the conference to keep them a little longer and offer them projects to work on.
During these four days, you can see people hacking on Django, MailMan, Jython, CPython itself, sage, pypy and many more projects. I took this opportunity to spend more time with the people from my team not that we don't work together most of the time but it is nice to be working together in the same room. As for the project, most of the time has been spent on making pagure closer to something we would want to deploy/use. I must say that at the end of this week, since are looking good. Pagure now has support for webhooks, pull-requests can be assigned, they have a score and the project can require a certain score for a pull-request to be merged. Basically, for what I want pagure needs: a) more documentation, b) more unit-tests and c) more tests and d) support to upload tarball/release (although this might arrive only in 0.2). So once documentation and unit-tests are there, I will tag a 0.1 release and move pagure to production (I'll announce it here so keep in touch! ;-))

As final words, I started this (long, sorry) blog post with saying how lucky I am to actually having been able to attend this conference and I would like to thanks Red Hat in general and more precisely the OSAS team that funded my flights and pass for the conference.

Monday, December 15 2014

Fedora 21 release day, 7 days later

Last week Tuesday, we released the 21st version of Fedora. The morning of the release we noticed that the load of some of the proxies was running very high. So we started checking our monitoring for the incoming traffic. A week later, this is an overview of the traffic on our proxies over the last ten days (so 3 days before the release and 7 days since).

collectd_f21.png

The third one is quite impressive and looking at more of these graphs we can see a similar pattern where the traffic for F21 release really bumped on release day and the following two days and is now slowly recovering.

If you want to see more of these pretty pictures/graphs, check our collectd

Friday, December 12 2014

Infra FAD 2014 - Part 2: Ansible

Part 1: MirrorManager

It has been two days since I came back and others have already reported about our progress (Ralph, kevin day 0 & 1, kevin day 2, kevin day 3, kevin day 4 and finally, kevin day 5) but I wanted to came back on it as well :)

So seven of us from the Fedora Infrastructure team meet up in Raleigh in the Red Hat office there. We had Matt Domsch for the first couple of days to help us understanding and apprehending how MirrorManager works (see Part 1).

The second part of the FAD was dedicated around moving forward the infrastructure task of moving away from puppet in favor of Ansible. This is led to the most productive week we ever had on our Ansible git repo. I have been able to start porting things like varnish or haproxy while Ralph was doing the heavy lifting on working on porting the proxies themselves. Patrick worked on porting the nameservers and managed to actually re-install them using Ansible (and moving them to RHEL7 while at it). Smooge has been poking at the setup for fedorapeople.

With all that we also managed to get MirrorManager2 in staging and Luke wrote some awesome unit-tests for mirrorlist which already allowed us to make still some small optimizations.

All in all, I have to say that I have had a great time. I have the feeling that we achieved a lot of what we wanted to do and that we have been really efficient at it :-)

To remain critical about the organization. I think I agree with Ralph that for the next FAD we should be extra-careful to really organise some sort of social event. We have had strange hours (having lunch at 3pm or even 5pm once) and the one afternoon where we said we would take off we ended up working... Being involved in the organization while not on site makes it difficult to find something nice for the social event, but I think we/I should have tried harder to find something nice to do.

Anyway, like I said, I have a great time and I'm thankfull to everyone that have been able to make it to Raleigh, to the OSAS team at Red Hat that funded most of this FAD and to Ansible for inviting us for dinner on Friday evening :-)

Thanks a bunch folks!

DSC_0026.1.JPG

Saturday, December 6 2014

Infra FAD 2014 - Part 1: MirrorManager

The last two days have been quite busy for the Fedora infrastructure team. Most of us are indeed meeting up in Raleigh, in the Red Hat tower down-town and together with Matt Domsch, the original developer of MirrorManager, we have been on MirrorManager2.

It was really great for us that Matt could join. MirrorManager is pretty straight forward in theory but also full of small details which can make it a hard to understand fully. Having Matt with us allowed us to ask him as many questions as we wanted. We were also able to go with him through all the utility scripts and all the crons that make MirrorManager working.

The good surprise was that a significant part of the code was already converted for MirrorManager2, but we still found some crons and scripts that needed to be ported.

So after spending most of the first day on getting to understand and know more about the inner processes of MirrorManager, we were able to start working on porting the missing parts to MirrorManager2.

We also took the opportunity to discuss with Matt, Luke and David how things should look like for atomic and Ralph was able to make the first changes to make this a reality :-)

So yesterday evening we had all the crons/scripts (but one in fact that one isn't needed for MM2) converted to MirrorManager2 \ó/

That was a good point to stop and go quickly to the Red Hat Christmas party before meeting Greg who invited us for a dinner sponsored by Ansible. We had a really nice meal and evening, thanks Greg, thanks Ansible!

Today started the second part of the FAD: Ansible, but more on that later ;-)

Saturday, August 9 2014

Flock 2014 - day 1 to 3

Today is the fourth day of flock. As usual the last three days have been really nice. I got to go to a number of interesting conferences and could even present a couple of project that I am or will be working on.

I assisted to the conference from Luke on how pushing updates in Fedora will look like in the coming months. Bodhi 2 is the new version of the application we use to manage our updates in Fedora. Luke and others have been working hard on it but the work they did is really impressive! Bodhi 2 looks better from all angles, UI, Infra, Workflow. Apparently the timeline is to get it deployed before the end of the year but after the release of Fedora 21, so stay tuned it's arriving ;-)

I have been able to assist on the presentation about python 3 in Fedora. I must say that this is looking promising and there are some new shiny things in python 3 that I am already looking forward for (most notably the possibility to have keyword only arguments in functions, this is going to be sweet).

On Thursday, I gave a presentation about the future Fedora Review Server (we couldn't find a better name for it and people seemed to like it :-)), more on that later.

The same day, Adimania presented a little bit his feeling and the state of things with regards to Ansible in the Fedora Infrastructure. I think it was a nice summary of why we are moving and what we like about Ansible.

Thursday afternoon, I went to the talk about NoSQL in Fedora Infrastructure. More than a state of things, it was a plead that we should consider and keep in mind the NoSQL technologies for the Infra and not fear using them where they make sense. Yograterol did a nice job presenting the different NoSQL technologies and clearly we should consider them where it makes sense. Thinking further about it with Raplh we thought that using MongoDB for datagrepper might be interesting, we should benchmark this :)

Finally yesterday I was able to present a little project I have been working on for a little bit progit, I will blog about this in the near future so keep in touch ;-)

Then I attended the talk from Kevin about the present and future of the Fedora infrastructure. This was a good overview of the different irons we have in the fire at the moment and those that near the fire aren't yet too hot. One thing is sure, I am really looking forward having our bugzilla hooked up on fedmsg!

The joint session on Fedora.next chaired by our dear FPL was also quite interesting and provided a very nice overview of what the different working group are currently up to. It was nice to see things moving forward, if some parts are still a little shady, I guess it won't remain this way for long anymore.

Yesterday afternoon, was a session on EPEL.next. There are still a number of concerns and questions about how things could or should be in EPEL. Some things are good and some could be improved, there are some generic idea (such as having a new repo: EPIC which would contain more rapidly evolving software or more recent version of software compared to what is currently in EPEL), but there again the devil is in the details and there will need to be some more thoughts and work before we can see this live.

I guess this is it for the talks, I attended a few more but I can't possibly detail them all here :-)

Next time, more info on what we actually got done during these few days!

Friday, April 11 2014

Presentations at FOSDEM and DevConf 2014

This year I attended both FOSDEM and DevConf and at both conference I was given the possibility to give a presentation.

At FOSDEM, together with the Debian developer Nicolas Dandrimont, we gave a presentation about fedmsg for both the Fedora and the Debian infrastructure.

At DevConf, I gave a presentation about Automation in the Fedora lan presenting all the tools available to our developers to help them do their best work.



Both presentations have been made available now :)

Thursday, April 10 2014

Back on LGM 2014

Last week I have had the opportunity to attend my first Libre Graphic Meeting conference, this year located in Leipzig (Germany). Not being much of a graphic person, I must say that I was sometime lost a bit in some of the talks (being during a presentation or at the coffee corner), but on the other side I have learned a lot! I discovered a whole new side of the Open-Source Software community working on low-level tools and algorythms for image and video manipulation. Meeting these people with such a deep understanding of computer science and photo, for example, was a really extremely enriching experience.

I have learned about image manipulation and the cool effects provided in gimp by the g'mic project. I have met some of the dev of the darktable and inkscape projects, these guys are doing a remendous work, kudos!

On the Friday, we had a presentation about the gooseberry project by the Blender foundation. If you have not pledged to help them, go do it now!. Their project is amazing and need more help!

Another amazing talk was Sebastian Koenig presenting us his work on reviving a medial manikin with Blender. Basically the story is that a museum in Leipzig (the GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst Leipzig) had this old maniki (22.5cm tall) which used to be animated, you could move her arms, legs, fingers or toes but it got old and stucked. So the museum in collaboration with the university did some sort of scan of the manikin and they asked Sebastian Köning to see if he could reconstruct the manikin using Blender. The resulting movie is now on display in the museum next to the actual manikin. I found this research amazing both from a technical and a historical point of view! And icing on the cake, since they had the mesh to reconstruct the animation on Blender they have also been able to make a 3D printed replicate of the manikin giving it back its ability to move.

On the last day, I was able to attend a workshop offered by Tobias Ellinghaus darktable developer and Patrick David about image manipulation on darktable and gimp. I had to leave before the end but the workshop was really, really interesting. Patrick did a live image editing demo in gimp, performing it on photo taken just a few minutes before. I need to practice this a little bit otherwise I'm going to forget all the good tips that were given.

I could also discovered some cool project related to DSLR such as the Magic Lantern which provides a new OS for Canon DSLR, awesome right? There is also the entangle project allowing to remotely control your DSLR, quite handy for macro or astro photos.

I was also given the possibility to contribute to the party. gnokii and I gave a presentation about nuancier as a FOSS contributing and voting application for wallpapers. I think it was well-received and there is apparently already interest to update it to support font. In addition, I took the opportunity, during a lightning talks session, to present HyperKitty and its demo instance which also seem to have brought quite some interest.



All in all, this was my first LGM meeting, I learned a lot about the whole libre graphic ecosystem, met a lot a new people and was given the opportunity to introduce a couple of projects dear to me. I really enjoyed it and would advise it to anyone interested, even remotely, into libre graphic.

Thank you for anyone that helped me attend or enjoying it (Gnokii, Ryan, Garrett, Chris and all the others ;-))!

Friday, January 31 2014

Conferences & talks -- Part 1: FOSDEM 2014

February is always a busy month and this year will be no exception.

Later today I am leaving for Brussel to attend FOSDEM over the week-end, with as added bonus a presentation on Sunday.

The presentation will be about fedmsg and its ecosystem and one of the particularity of this talk is that it will be done together with Nicolas Dandrimont (his blog) who is a Debian developer.

Think about how awesome it is to have in the distribution track a talk about a technology and its possibilities given by two person from two different distributions.

I must say I am looking forward this presentation :-)

Wednesday, August 14 2013

Back on Flock 2013

Flock 2013 !

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Since my last blog post about my arrival to Charleston (South Carolina), I have been participating to the Flock conference.

This time, around 200 contributors from 19 different countries gathered to discuss, debate, exchange and more importantly work on Fedora.

This is briefly what I have been doing over these four days:

Day 1

After helping out with giving away goodies, badges, lunch cards and T-shirts, I assisted to the fedmsg presentation by Ralph Bean. It was a nice overview of the project as it stands today and also a good presentation of the environment that is growing up around it (datagrepper, fedora-mobile, Badges and many more).

Then I had to decide between HyperKitty and the talk "Why Fedora sucks", knowing Aurélien and knowing that I am able to speak frequently with him, I went for the later. Christoph explained that he went back on some criticisms made few years ago about the project and going through this list, a number of them have improved or even some solved. On the other side he also listed a number of current issue, on UI, on comps and other aspect of the project. So there is still some work for us and we can't all retire yet ;-)

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The last talk of the morning was from Haikel Guémar on FOSS development and Agile methods. I learned some things bout Agile itself and found out that some ideas I like are actually part of known project management processes. Quite cool all in all :)

The afternoon was dedicated to one larger discussion and a hackfest.

The discussion was about the future of IT in general and trying to get some ideas of where we would like to be in five years as a project. Quite an interesting debate started from this with ideas bouncing around of where people believe we will be in five years. Time will say if we were right during this session :)

The second part of the afternoon has been dedicated to a hackfest on semantic web technologies and more specifically how we could include the ontologies in our application. Using the DOAP ontology we can provide a standard way of describing a project, using the same standard as launchpad, pypi or debian. This should make data integration that much easier in the future.

For the evening program we had dinner in a restaurant few minutes walking from the hotel. We had a good time, it was hot and quite humid but we were outside and the fans helped us quite a bit.

Day 2

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The day started with an awesome talk on 3D printer by Aeva Palecek from Lulzbot. Unfortunately, as pointed out by kevin earlier are out of stock for their printers :-D.

After that I went to the presentation of Suzanne Reed from FOSSBOX RIT the project she worked on gourciferous based on gource to visualize the history and evolution of git-based project. Quite a nice tool and a nice presentation as well.

Following this presentation, I went on learning a little more about darkserver and what it can be used for. Kushal had already introduce it to me some time ago but I wasn't sure I had understood it completely, while I have a much clearer idea now :)

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For the last talk of the morning I went on learning a little more about clouds and Eucalyptus. Greg DeKoenigsberg is a really good speaker and the presentation (even was unfinished slides) was really really nice! It gave me a clearer representation of the cloud stacks available these days and how they differ form each other. Really interesting, thanks Greg!

The whole afternoon has been spent with the infrastructure to figure out how we would design and eventually setup a AuthZ server using some of the 0Auth principles (but not all).
The idea is to support the use case of people running job via CLI or cron against the Fedora Infrastructure but limiting their range of actions by providing them certain tokens that restrict them to the given action. (Am I clear here?) This is something we want to work on, so keep in touch if you are interesting, there are more thing coming ;-)

In the evening, we went to a bar, pretty much right in front of the hotel. The food was nice and the atmosphere really to 'relax'. We ate, we drunk, we danced and we had a very nice time over there. Toshio and Aurélien are making such an amazing dancing duo! Do come to Flock, if only for that ;-)

Day 3

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The keynote speaker of the day was the author of the Cantarel font, used by default on Gnome 3. The talk has been about font development, open-font, he touched upon the web-fonts as well. It was quite interesting, less in my usual area of interest so most things were new to me which was nice.

I was supposed to give a presentation after that session but when I showed up in the room, no-one was there. I waited until ten past the hour and nobody showed up so I just went to Ricky's talk on code review for Fedora apps. Ricky did a nice job in presenting the advantages and limitations of code review as well as listing the different points to pay attention to when doing one.

The following talk had been by our local OpenID expert, Patrick. He presented us with how OpenID works in general and what are the extension that he developed for the Fedora Infrastructure, to satisfy our needs. All our application are slowly moving to OpenID, providing a single, central place where the user gives his password. In theory, ultimately, our contributors should not have to enter their password in any other place than the OpenID server.

And the last presentation of Flock I went to, was the presentation about Census by Nathaniel. Census is the replacement for smolt. It's still work in progress but the progress made are really nice. Nathaniel presented us with the design of the application, I must say I really liked its simplicity. I do think it should scale well and we should be able to make something of it. The bonus is that on the contrary to smolt, Census is design in such a way that we can throw any kind to data at it. So it is another place for us to collect and provide statistics about the project and its contributors.

The afternoon has been spent hacking on fedocal with Haikel. The next release is almost out of the door. Haikel, lbrabec and I were able to close the last remaining tickets for the version 0.2.0.

For the last evening, the organizer planned, I think, one of the most awesome dinner location I can think off. We had the full aquarium of Charleston for ourselves! From 7pm to about 10:30pm, we had drinks and food at the aquarium, looking at fishes, some snakes, an impressive white alligator and a very cute bird that spent 10 minutes seducing tatíca! It was an amazing evening a big thanks to the organizers for this awesome opportunity!

Day 4

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The last day was dedicated to hackfest. So I hanged around with the infrastructure team. We were able to make a list of the coming tasks we want to do as well as those that we want to spend more time discussing about. After lunch, when we all moved to our tasks, I spent some time testing the new fedocal, fixing some of its configuration files and adjusting its spec file, testing the DB upgrade, only a couple more things to check/do (such as the update of the documentation) and I should be able to push this new version.

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I have had a really good time with everyone in Charleston. I met new people, made new friend, got work done and work planned and we just had some good times all together.

The Fedora project is full of awesome people and every time I meet them I realize how lucky I am to be and work with them :)

A big thanks to the organizers and Fedora for making this event possible and giving me the opportunity to be part of it.

DSC_0956.JPG Organizers at work ;-)

Wednesday, August 7 2013

Arrived in Charleston

Yesterday evening, after about 18h of traveling I landed in Charleston where will be held from the 9th to the 12th Flock.

So this morning I was able to walk through Charleston and discover this nice city, here are some of the pictures I took:

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Some more are on my gallery



Images under CC-BY license.

Tuesday, May 14 2013

Talks / Hackfest @ Flock

1 talk and 3 hackfests:

  • Fedora vs the semantic web
  • pkgdb2
  • fedocal
  • DOAP in fedora-packages

I'm not sure if any will be selected but we shall see :-)

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!

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