Single Point of Failure

Future of Fedora Release Engineering

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 03:00:51 GMT

I have now been doing Fedora Release Engineering for nearly 5 years. My first task was to rebuild every Fedora Core package for a gcc change leading up to the release of Fedora Core 5 (hey look, a --turbo option!). I've seen us through 10 releases, the merger of Core and Extras, countless mass rebuilds, the creation of Live Media and the explosion of spins, an unfortunate security incident, many evolutionary changes in our development process, the creation and growth of a release engineering volunteer team, the creation of release criteria, the migration of source control, and the creation of a plethora of Standard Operating Procedures for release engineering. It has been a challenging and very rewarding 5 years. But I need a break.

Starting after the release of Fedora 14, I will be stepping down as the lead release engineer for Fedora. I will be taking the knowledge and lessons learned from our migration of CVS to git and applying it internally at Red Hat to migrate our internal package source control to git as well. The number of packages and contributors is smaller, but the environment is far more complex, and I am very much looking forward to the challenge. We have estimated that it could take up to a year or longer to complete the task. During that time, Dennis Gilmore will be stepping in to lead the Fedora release engineering team. Dennis has been involved with Fedora for just about as long as I have, if not longer and will be able to fill the role perhaps even better than I could.

I won't be far away from the project, and I will continue to support and improve
things such as fedpkg development and necessary changes for our compose tools such as pungi. I'm always just an email or IRC ping (with data) away.

Fedora talk at fi.muni.cz

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:12:45 GMT

I just finished giving a Fedora talk at Faculty of Informatics Masaryk University. That is one of the reasons why I've spent the week working here from the Brno Red Hat office.

I was told to expect about 20 students, so I was happy to see 40~50 folks sitting in the audience. I gave a talk on the history of Fedora and how we got to where we are now, the lessons we've learned along the way. I also talked a bit about the future direction and why we're doing what we are doing.

It was a short talk with a few slides (because I like talking more than clicking a button) and it only took about 30 minutes. I was worried as I was booked for 60, and I was told before hand not to expect (m)any questions. Imagine my surprise when we then had a good 20 minutes of questions and discussion about Fedora! Many of the students seemed knowledgeable about Fedora and the current happenings. I hope I answered questions well enough and gave them a good sense of what is going on and a good feeling about where we are going. Apparently that is the most discussion any RHT speaker has gotten there, ever!

Tonight is my last night in Brno. It has been a fun week, but I really miss my family and I can't wait to go back. The Brno folks have been very hospitable and helpful. I will look back on this trip fondly.

Tonight I hope to have a simple dinner and find a shop to pick up some gifts, then get to sleep early. I flee the city at 07:30 tomorrow morning for my flight home out of Vienna. Looking forward to seeing my boys!

Looking for emacs folks who use git

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:27:04 GMT

Do you use emacs? Do you use git? Do you use the emacs git integration system? Are you willing to do some tests on an EL-5 (RHEL 5 or CentOS 5) system? Please make yourself known at this bug.

FUDCon Zurich day one

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:27:44 GMT

Like a few people I'm here in Zurich for FUDCon. This is my second European event and I'm excited!

Long flight getting here only to be met with a minor migraine. I was able to sleep it off as Jarod Smith and Spot relaxed in our room and recovered from their travel. We met up with mizmo for a dinner involving lots of cheese. Then we helped a little bit setting up the "expo" part of the show after seeing a bit more of the area around the show building than originally intended :) Went to sleep early to be ready for today, after employing extreme self control and skipping drinks with other Fedora people.

Today we got to the show with little drama having been there the night before. Jared gave a quick "welcome" talk and then Adam gave a talk on Fedora QA. I sat through Marcela's talk on perl but I was working on notes for my workshop and talk.

Lunch happened and it involved curry and more Fedora people. Now I'm listening to Miroslav's talk on Spacewalk.

More talks today and my workshop on rel-eng SOPs at 1600. Then there is an afterparty with the Froscamp folks, and I'm sure more socializing at the hotel bar tonight.

Posted via LjBeetle

Eclipse, Python, and Vim

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 07:08:21 GMT

I love python. I love vim, and I'm growing to love Eclipse. Until recently I thought I could only enjoy python and vim, or python and Ecilpse, but not Eclipse and vim. At least not freely. That has changed.

Vrapper is a GPLv3 licensed vim emulator for Eclipse. It doesn't work by replacing the editor like some others, it wraps the existing editor which means you get good keybindings but keep all the other good stuff about the base editor. It does it really really well!

It's too bad that I found this after I worked on fedpkg, would have been a much more enjoyable experience.

Help Wanted!

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:09:47 GMT

Do you want to work on some software that will be used by every Fedora packager?

Do you like hacking in python?

Do you have a thing for git?

Well have I got a project for you!!!

The Dist Git Project is back in action and steaming ahead to try and finish before we branch for Fedora 14. Currently I'm working on fedpkg the software to replace our Make system. I could use some help. If you'd like to help, find me on IRC (Oxf13 on freenode) or email. I don't really like livejournal comments so try to use a different way of finding me.

Happy Hacking!

Switching Gears

Fri, 28 May 2010 22:33:37 GMT

Once again we've done a Fedora release. This happens twice a year, and every time it happens I have a sudden gear shift to work through. The three months or so after a release are relatively quiet for release engineering. There are few fires, and fewer milestones to worry about. It's during this time that we work on our longer term projects, fix up our scripts, and generally pay attention to things we were ignoring during the release sprint.

While the build up to the frantic state we're usually in at release time is gradual, the drop off is much more severe. Each time we release, it's like we drop off a cliff. There are no more fires, there are no more immediate or late deadlines. There is just a nice open few months of runway in front. It is kinda hard to switch from being almost entirely interrupt driven to working from a to do list. It's hard to keep concentration going when you're used to being interrupted frequently. My ADD tendencies start to come out.

The other hard gear shift is going from working on release related tasks to working on programming and system administration tasks. I get pretty rusty in my python programming, requiring more time to look up libraries and remember tricks, and remembering where I left various projects off and what work needs to be done.

Things that have helped include flagging emails for later follow up, and judicious use of to do lists. To help with the latter, I've started using "Getting things Gnome" ( http://gtg.fritalk.com/ ). This is an upgrade from using gnotes alone and has helped me organize and sort my tasks, as well as put notes in about each task so that now that I have time to do things I can find things to do easily and work on them. There is also a nice feeling of completion as I clear each item off the list.

So if I look a bit bewildered over the next week or so, maybe confused or waiting for that interrupt you'll know why. Please forgive me and I'll catch back up soon!

The move to git

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:51:20 GMT

The time has come to bite the bullet and move Fedora's package source control on from CVS. CVS has done is well, and although it is a decaying source control, it handled our needs rather well for many years. However nothing is a constant, and over time more and more cracks have shown up in our source control. The time to move on is now, and I feel pretty confident in the plan we are exploring.

First though, why git? Git has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. More than I ever imagined, when I first toyed with the idea of doing the jump to git, back in the Fedora Core 6 days. Most notably the Gnome project has recently made the leap from SVN over to git (amusingly they started in CVS, we'll just be skipping that SVN step). Not only is git popular, it's really a better choice. Why git is better than x does a good job at hitting some of the highlights. Fedora is also a meritocracy, in that the people doing the work are generally the people making the decisions. Code talks. Since the work to do the migration is largely going to fall on me (because I've volunteered to do it) I get to make some of these decisions. Looking at the source control landscape over the past few years I feel confident that git is the way to go.

How are we going to do it? I've been thinking on this problem for years. There are two ideals that I really want to satisfy. Firstly, I want to make sure we stay true to our principles and differ from upstream as little as possible. To facilitate that I want to make it easy to discover our modifications and pass them along to upstream and/or other consumers of a given upstream. One way to force this is to continue working with a upstream archive (tarball release, maybe a snapshot) and our modifications as patches. Easy to see our changes, easy to pass them around. The other ideal is that working directly on source code in a scm repository is far better than trying to work with a tarball + patches. Trying to reconcile both of these ideals has been hard for me to manage, until the light went on the other day...

Git helps here in a few ways. Creating new repos easy, fast, and scriptable. Since it's a DSCM everything can be done locally on any filesystem. Commits to git can be exported in a text file format that is easily transportable and contains not just the diff, but context about the change such as author, reason, further log info, etc... These exported commits can be applied to a given repo easily and quickly, even if it's a brand new repo. So while we can maintain a forward moving repository of .spec file and patch files management, we can also on the fly create "throw away" repos of the upstream source code, plus our patches applied git style, leaving the developer with a repo that they can do development/patch management with and export the results back into our package source control, throwing stuff at upstream along the way. This really is the best I could come up with for the best of both worlds.

Details? See my slides.

Time line? I'm currently throwing our CVS archives at the cvs to git conversion tools, cvs2git (part of cvs2svn) and the git cvsimport utility. I think I have a good strategy for getting our release sub directories imported as real branches of a package module, where the master or unbranched content would be the rawhide content. Lots of work needed here to verify that the import is doing the right thing. But that's as far as I've gotten. I'm still in the idea phase, attempting to proof of concept my current idea and discovering where it falls down. I hope to get through this phase in the next few weeks so that we can get to the proposal phase where we get FESCo buy in. Implementation depends on the amount of work needed, but hopefully near Fedora 13 release.

Help wanted! I would love to have your help. Your thoughts on my plan, your experience in this area, your time to write scripts, your time to verify conversion output, your time to document progress in wiki pages, etc... As I work on the raw cvs into git conversion, we'll need a fpkg utility written that will take over from the Make system. Work on this tool can be very modular and well suited for many people working on it collaboratively (hey, great idea for a Fedora Activity Day!). Once we get a good format settled on for the packages and a good start on fpkg development, we'll need koji changes to be able to build from this style of repo. Good news, that code is pretty isolated and there already exists some git code. If you're interested in helping out, find me and I'll try to put you to work.

Keeping up with progress. I plan to talk about our progress in this task at our weekly Fedora Release Engineering meetings. Those meetings are summarized on fedora-devel-list so you can keep watch there. Eventually there will be a wiki page that will track progress, as well as a trac milestone and ticket set and all sorts of fun project management stuff like that as we progress.

FUDCon Toronto 2009

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:10:22 GMT

I'm back in the USA, having just attended FUDCon Toronto 2009. I haven't blogged about this before due to the state of both the hotel and the campus Internet offerings.

I felt that this FUDCon was wildly successful. We had a lot of familiar faces there, plus a good many who have never been to a FUDCon before. The barcamp talks pitched were amazing both in the sheer number of them, and also in the quality of the topics. There were very few talks that I /didn't/ want to go to, which made it really hard to pick the few I could go to, particularly because I was talking twice.

The first talk I did was a joint talk about message buses, and in particular how I plan to use a message bus to tie a number of our services together and start automating certain things. This is a fun topic for me as I've wanted to do this for many years and the pieces are now starting to come together for it.

The second talk I did was a last minute entry, something I decided to do after talking about it one evening with Jarod Wilson, and then with a variety of people during the long bus ride up to Toronto. The talk was my current plans for moving away from CVS as Fedora's package source control and instead using git. Not just that but some improvements to our work flow along the way. Slides found here.

Hackfest days were spent planning out the first onslaught of messaging targets, fine tuning release criteria with QA, discussing the Fedora updates experience, fine tuning release engineering tasks around releases, fine tuning the F13 schedule, and working on the dist-cvs->git transition. By the time the bus rolled into Westford this evening I had a series of commands working pretty well to convert some package modules in CVS into git the way we want it, but much more testing is required.

I'm really looking forward to seeing more results from FUDCon and while I don't want to travel again for a while, I can't wait for the next one!

Another 6^H 5 months, another Fedora release

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:35:16 GMT

Fedora 12 released today, go get it. This is the 8th Fedora release I've had the pleasure of being paid to work on in a release engineering role. It has been a long and hard trip, but with lots of rewards along the way. Our community is stronger than ever, with more volunteer (both outside and inside Red Hat) people taking up leadership roles or driving features through or just helping out where help is needed.

12 is cool. 12 was really hard to get out too. 12 had a shorter development period than previous releases, because we lost a month due to an infrastructure incident during the Fedora 10 cycle. We decided to give Fedora 11 a full 6 months as we had a lot of really cool features lining up for it and we were going to do a shorter 12 cycle to polish things up. Turns out we had people doing lots of polish, but other people doing lots of features too, even in a compressed timeline. I'm deeply impressed with the amount of work that can get done, often in spite of the challenges faced by a Fedora developer/maintainer. I can't wait to see what kind of productivity we see as some of these challenges are addressed in the Fedora 13 cycle. Some big changes are coming, tune in to the upcoming FUDCon where there will be multiple talks and hack sessions regarding these challenges our developers, maintainers, testers, and users face.

A few interesting data points for Fedora 12:
- First release in a looong time (ever since I've been doing it perhaps?) that we didn't have to slip the final release date once we got past Beta.
- First release probably ever where the x86_64 DVD is seeing more torrent downloads than the i386 DVD
- Smoothest release day EVER. Seriously. The infrastructure folks really have this down and there were 0 issues.

One more thing that seriously impresses me about Fedora 12 is the launch of our spins site. This is a fabulous new site to really help showcase the different looks that Fedora as a project can offer, finally bringing to fruition something we had been talking about for many releases/years now. There is more website (re)design coming, and I am very excited about it.

Go on, give Fedora 12 a try. A Live image gives you folks with commitment issues something to try without risk, and the install DVD/CDs (and network install iso) gives you fine tuners the ability to hand select the software you get from our vast repository. I promise you we'll do the best we can to ensure a fun, safe, and free ride.

LinuxCon 2009 Trip Report

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:09:11 GMT

This is a first year event, partnered with a second year event, the Linux Plumbers Conference. It was in beautiful Portland, OR where the weather was just about perfect. I only wish I had followed through with my plans to bring my bicycle. I would have had plenty of riding opportunities.

We had a Fedora table in the exhibitors area, and once the event kit showed up we had it pretty well setup with media and demo laptops and a nice banner. This was a multi day conference style event, and so by lunch time on the second day anybody who wanted to stop by the booth had and the visitors trickled off. The last day of the event the exhibitors area was closed.

I went to a number of talks, some about new developments coming and some about high level thought stuff. There was a pretty mixed bag of really technical talks and very fluffy talks,I suppose that means there was something for everyone. All in all the event seemed very well put on, very coordinated and easy to find the talks. The provided refreshments were great too.

I did get to talk to a number of people I haven't seen before / in a while, particularly on the third day which was a joint day with the Plumbers Conference. We got to have a number of hallway and bar conversations about Fedora and the development process. I feel better about the direction we're headed with rawhide et al.

I definitely want to go back next year, although I think I would be better about submitting a talk or two, something to show off Fedora. Hope to see some of you there next year!

Tethering iPhone 3.0 with Linux (Fedora 11) over bluetooth

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:18:56 GMT

I was recently pointed to an article that described how to enable the built in tethering capability of the 3.0 iphone software. I tried it out and indeed I was able to enable the setting and tether with one of my OS X systems.

While that's neat, I don't typically take my imac with me when I travel, and well I hate using OS X. So I need to get this working on my laptop, which currently runs Fedora 11. First I tried plugging in via USB to see if I could just use that, and while Fedora sees the iphone, it decides to use the iphone as a camera, ignoring the other capabilities of the device. Rather than go down the road of blacklisting (which does need to happen), I decided to try the more simple approach of using bluetooth.

After some googling around, I ran across an article about how to do this with Ubuntu. That seemed simple enough, although way more manual than I would like it. One of the comments mentioned using blueman to set this up instead, so that's a good piece of info.

To get started, first ensure that you've got all the right packages installed.
gnome-bluetooth
bluez
blueman
are the critical bluetooth parts. NetworkManager and NetworkManager-gnome should be installed as well.

The bluetooth service will need some configuration in order to be able to use the iphone as a network device. The configuration file is located at /etc/sysconfig/bluetooth. What I had to add to the file is as follows:
PAND_ENABLED=1 PAND_OPTIONS="--role=PAN"

Then restart the bluetooth service if it is already running.

Now you'll have to pair your iphone with your computer via bluetooth. I've found that the easiest way to do this is to use the gnome bluetooth applet (not the blueman one) to get it setup.

First click on the icon (it's the smaller of the two if you're already running blueman) and select setup new device.

Click forward to begin the wizard.

At this pint you should see a list of devices. You may have to go to the bluetooth setup screen in your iphone in order to make it visible to your Fedora system. Select the iphone and go forward.

Enter the numbers on your iphone. It should have popped up a dialog to enter them.

Now your Fedora is ready to accept connections from your iphone. You'll have to actually select your Fedora system from the iphone in order to connect.

After selecting your Fedora system from the iphone, you may get a popup dialog on the Fedora system that alerts you that the device is connecting. The iphone should show you as connected, and you should be ready for the next step which involves blueman.

First, on the iphone, make sure that tethering is enabled.

Next, launch blueman and right click on the iphone device, selecting Network Access -> Network Access Point

At this point your iphone should display a blue bar regarding Internet Tethering. We should be able to go to Network Manager and select the device from our list. It will likely show up as bnep0

You are now connected via bluetooth to your iphone, and should be able to browse the internet (somewhat slowly) over the cellular uplink.

In the future, this will become much less complicated. Ideally you won't have to involve blueman at all to connect via bluetooth. Also, we should be able to support using the device via USB, since you'll likely plug it in anyway to save battery. But for now, enjoy the tethering! Those that have done this before me claim that they have not seen any added charges on their bill, but don't hold me responsible if you get charged. Use at your own risk!

Using Evolution with a hosted Google Calendar

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:10:52 GMT

My personal domain is hosted with google. I finally got tired of being a mail admin and fighting the hackers, spam, security patches, needy users (myself), etc... So I opted for google since it was free, I mostly use my domain for public email lists anyway, and they have some neat services I wanted like a calendar.

Now, while my email is hosted at google, I rarely use the web interface. I prefer to use clients such as Evolution, or the mail app on my iphone. Why Evolution? Well it has fairly decent imap support, integrated contacts and calendar, with ability to sync those with remote sites.

So, google calendar in Evolution. Easy right? Eh, sortof. Evolution as shipped in F11 has a half-baked Google backend for syncing calendar and contacts and stuff. Don't use it. Instead use the much more mature CalDav support to connect to your google calendar. This means you'll have to enter in some URLs manually, but oh well.

It's the manual URLs that are the fun part, particularly with hosted sites at google. Not much documentation exists for what the URL format should be. But I googled around a bit and figured it out. To enable your google calendar in Evolution:

1) Go to Calendars tab in the left pane.
2) Click File -> New -> Calendar
3) Change the type to CalDAV
4) Name it whatever you ant
5) Pick a color for the bike shed
6) Choose to copy contents offline if you want (I do)
7) Choose to make this your default calendar (I did)
8) Put in the url for your calendar. This is the fun part. For your hosted domain you should have one default calendar for your login. If you just want to use that calendar that's easy. The URL would be:
caldav://www.google.com/calendar/dav/email@address/events/ It seems the trailing slash is VERY important. Lost a bit of time to that one.
Be sure to use your entire email address, user@domain.foo. See below for using multiple calendars or a calendar other than your default one.
9) MAKE SURE "Use SSL" IS CHECKED
10) Put in your username. Again this is your full address.
11) pick a refresh rate and you're done.

You should get a login box once you've hit OK and this is the password for your user account.

Now, what about multiple calendars? You can have more than just one in google calendar, as well you can sync more than just one in Evolution. The settings are the same except for the URL and for that you actually have to log into google to find.

First log into your hosted site and click on Calendar. Then click on Settings in the upper right corner. Then click on Calendars within the settings box. Then click on the calendar you want to sync with. Near the bottom there is a section marked "Calendar Address" and it is here, in parentheses you'll find the Calender ID. It'll look like a bunch of soup, something like j2solutions.net_3p1f0ub33hzegvd9dx4qpcs64s@group.calendar.google.com. (I've changed my ID here to protect my innocence). It's best to just copy this string of text.

Now that you have the ID of the next calendar you want to sync, you can go through the same steps above for adding a calendar, only now the url would be: caldav://www.google.com/calendar/dav/calenderid/events/ . Replace calenderid with your calendar ID fetched from above. Be sure to pick a different color too!

Now you should be setup for handling multiple calenders in your hosted google site via Evolution. Have fun!

Getting Fedora Schedules into google calendar

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:48:07 GMT

I'm a calendar junky. If it's not on my calendar (and synced to my evolution and my iphone) I likely will forget about it. That's why it was important for me to figure out how to get my google calendar shared by both iPhone and Evolution so that I can make changes at any of those three points and have all there kept in sync easily. I'll detail that arrangement for anybody that would like it.

John Poelstra has done great work for getting a schedule in place for Fedora. Part of that work is producing .ical files for the various different task lists. See http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/ for all that is available.

Given my capacity to forget dates, I wanted to import the .ical file for Release Engineering tasks into my google calendar. This turned out to be far harder than it needed to be, mostly because of how .ical is a fairly loose standard and no two producers/consumers shall agree. Every time I attempted to import or the .ical file I wound up with odd timezone issues and events spanning multiple days. Turns out that Zimbra reads X-MICROSOFT-CDO-ALLDAYEVENT:TRUE while google doesn't, so google was going by the timestamps on the events, offsetting the UTC for my Pacific timezone and generally making a mess of it.

Of course, I couldn't just find what Google wanted to see, searching for terms that involve google is not exactly easy. What I wound up doing was creating a test calendar in google, adding an event that was an all day event, exporting that as a .ical file and reading what it wrote. BINGO! Seems that in order to accomplish an all day event in google calendar parlance, you just have DTSTART and DTEND be just dates, without any time attached. Once I had that info, it was easy to sed the .ics file from John to strip the time parts out of the events (since all the events are listed as all day events) and then I had an .ics file that imported nicely into google. John says he'll look at doing the sed himself when creating the .ics files since he already has to post-process them out of TaskJuggler.

Lessons learned:

1) When testing importing events to your google calendar, do create a scratch calendar to test with. Deleting 40 some odd events by hand was not fun :/

2) When in doubt of an expected format, generate said format from the tool itself to get an idea of what it would like.

3) TaskJuggler can do neat things, but ZOMG does it have a learning curve. I wasted two hours or so trying to figure out how times and dates were set thinking that the .ics was getting generated incorrectly, and I still don't really know how it does things. I just backed away slowly and went on with "ok, just fix the .ics manually after the fact" route.

Day 3 of FUDCon Berlin

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:23:09 GMT

It's day 3 here at FUDCon Berlin. Day 2 was a whirlwind of presentations, talks, conversations, greetings, and collaboration.

I attended Steven's talk about using Koji at CERN which I must say was really awesome. CERN is using their own instance of a koji build system to build rpms that are then deployed across the grid they have around the world. He talked about how much better koji is than their old build system, but also had some questions about how to improve his use of it and their strategy around it. They also need to produce .debs and would like to do so via koji so that should be interesting.

I also went to, and participated in the Git for Hackers talk put on by Yaakov and Jeroen. I even got to get up and show people some of my favorite things to do with git. I learned some new things too which will make my development efforts just that much more easy.

Josh Bressers talked to us a bit about security, and the RHT security team and how they interact with Fedora. He was amazed at how responsive the Fedora project is to security issues, often fixing them before the team he works on is able to check in on Fedora. He is looking for more ways to get involved though. I set him off thinking about what kind of code review we can do in an automated way as code is checked into packages.

Finally I gave two talks (linked to in an earlier blog), one on the future of the Fedora Development Cycle, and one on Automated QA.

We had a rather adventurous dinner in which I got to sit at a table with folks from Romania, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, and more. It was a fun evening of comparing cultures and food and sports and life styles. The great conversation made up for the fact that food took over an hour to show up (the drinks didn't hurt either).

Today is a hackfest day, and I'm working more on the autotest packages for autoqa. I also got to learn about Fedora FEL which is a fantastic agent of change, not just a simple remix of packages. Chitlesh really has something special going on and I'm glad to see that Fedora was able to provide the platform to launch his efforts. I look forward to seeing more success out of his project. Later he asked me about a problem he was having with his Fedora Hosted site, and I'm looking into updating the git plugin to help out. I also got to meet and talk to Phil Knirsh, mostly about the Fedora on s390 effort. They're ready to start composing images which means I'm going to have to be ready to start writing or reviewing pungi packages as I'm certain there are changes necessary to make it work for s390. I look forward to it, but please, don't send me an s390 (: (I wouldn't mind a beagleboard for playing with Fedora arm...)

I'm going to head out a little early this afternoon and try to see some more sights, like the DDR museum (no not that DDR) and maybe a few other places.

Tomorrow begins my 36~ hour Monday. Boy will that be fun. After I get home and a quick night of doing laundry, I'll be taking a few days off with my wife and son and we'll be staying at my uncle's lake house in Lake Chelan, where I'll be on a boat!

FUDCon Berlin slides

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:51:51 GMT

I pitched two barcamp sessions for this FUDCon. The first one is Fedora Development Cycle 3.0, which reviews the recent Fedora Activity Day I ran recently and explains where it is we're trying to go with our proposals. The second is a review of the AutoQA project, where I will explain what the project is, where we're at, where we're going, and where we're looking for help.

I've uploaded the slides to my fedorapeople page. Enjoy!

FUDCon Berlin 2009 Day 1

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:32:05 GMT

It's day one of FUDCon Berlin 2009. Max gave a good intro talk, working in just enough subtle Michael Jackson references to set the mood. Hackfests today, as well as pre-arranged talks in our area that were put on the LinuxTag agenda. Hackfests are a little light, I think there are too many people still trying to take part in the pre-arranged talks and the other LinuxTag offerings. However the wireless folks seem to be making loads of progress by all being in the same room. I sat in with the Red Hat Security team and discussed some issues regarding security and package signing in Fedora. It was very helpful to have them all there. Also loads of other people who have taken advantage of face to face time to have high bandwidth quick discussions has also been very valuable. I feel that we've talked about and reached understanding of things that would have taken weeks or longer via email/IRC.

I'm putting some final touches on the talks I wish to pitch at our barcamp kickoff this evening, and then bracing for the FUDPub impact. Tomorrow will be all FUDCon all day and should be interesting to see how many new faces we see here at the event. This being my first non-North America FUDCon I have no idea what to expect.

As mentioned before I have a flickr set for LinuxTag and FUDCon as well as a fudcon tag that others are using as well. I'm also microblogging over at identi.ca for more frequent activity.

LinuxTag / FUDCon Berlin 2009 Flickr feed

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:35:03 GMT

I've created a set of photos in my flickr for LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin 2009. You can follow it here. All the photos should be tagged with fudcon as well.

iPhone

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:58:11 GMT

Seriously there is Internet in my pants!

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Photos

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:51:34 GMT

I'm now a flickr..er? My account is "iamjessekeating".

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Photos

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:51:34 GMT

I'm now a flickr..er? My account is "iamjessekeating".

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

New phone number, new company

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:10:02 GMT

After our 2~ year trial with T-Mobile, we're running (not walking) back to AT&T. We are also have new numbers since nobody around here expects a 617 area code.

If you happen to have my old number stored somewhere, contact me (or just call the old number and listen to the voicemail prompt) and I'll give you the new number.

Fedora Development 3.0

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:35:33 GMT

When Fedora first started, there was Fedora Core, done by Red Hat, and Fedora Extras, done by the entire community (including Red Hat people). Core was special, and treated different. Core was defined by "It was in Red Hat Linux". Core packages were.. lets face it, junk quality for the most part. Extras had a set of standards that didn't seem to apply to Core, and if you were lucky enough to work for Red Hat, you could get your package into Core and avoid pain. Core would have releases, Extras just sort of flowed. Core was on the DVD/CDs, Extras weren't. Core had updates with info and a tool to manage them. Extras not so much. This was 1.0.

Around Fedora 7, Core and Extras went away. There was just Fedora. All packages were outside of Red Hat. All packages had to adhere to a set of standards. It didn't matter who you worked for, you could get a package in "Fedora", as well as on the DVD/CD. Fedora had releases, and freezes. All packages use an update tool and have info about the updates. All packages went through freezes. Only one development tree, and was the "release to be", which hid "next release". This is 2.0. We are here.

Fedora Activity Day - Fedora Development Cycle 2009 just happened, as did the release of Fedora 11. We looked at our development process and identified a number of things wrong with it. We picked important items and researched why we felt things were wrong with it, and what we were really trying to accomplish. We prototyped solutions to the issues. We drafted a number of proposals. Where we go from here is up to the community, but this really feels like a major step, and perhaps Fedora Development 3.0.

Fedora Activity Day - Fedora Development Cycle wrap up

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:21:02 GMT

We've finished up the FAD today. The net result of today's effort is a series of proposals to fix some issues and ultimately make life easier for maintainers and consumers. You can see the announcement here. I'm sure (as the email says) we'll see more chatter about these proposals in the near future.

This is my first time running a FAD. It felt like a hackfest day of FUDCon, only with a very concentrated set of things to work on, and 3 days to do it, which is vastly different from FUDCon hackfests which are usually a wide assortment of things to work on and only a few hours for each thing. I think FUDCon is great for face to face collaboration which can breed ideas and opportunities for more focused smaller group meetings such as a FAD. I hope the project does more as I feel it was a very valuable use of our resources, or can be as we try to move these proposals forward and get feedback. In one month's time I hope that our proposals have made significant progress and we can point to that and show what this FAD really benefited Fedora.

I'm still in Raleigh for the night, I will be meeting with James Laska, Will Woods, and Seth Vidal tomorrow to go over some Auto QA stuff that was off topic for the FAD. Since I'm not on the Fedora Board soon, and didn't run for FESCo, and just got F11 out the door, I have some magical "free time" to pursue things such as Auto QA, which would help a lot of our proposals along. More on that later!

The Brain Drain

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:16:20 GMT

Day one of the Fedora Activity Day is wrapping up. We're talking about where to get food and decompress a bit.

Today has been a major brain drain. We did brain storming on all the things that are wrong with the development process and things around the process. We limited negative energy and threw out simple terms and phrases, feeding on each other. There were a lot of things written on the white board, pics to come.

We then used barcamp style voting to determine what were the really important things to people in the room. From that list we sorted them and started researching each item to define what the phrase means, what we're trying to accomplish with whatever it is, and what things are going wrong. We've gotten about 25% of the way through, but as we work up the stack from least to most important, we cover various ways that they effect the most important thing.

As we define what it is we're trying to accomplish, and the problems we're having with, we can explore better ways of accomplishing the goals and lessening the problems along the way.

Tonight is dinner at Lilly's, a fantastic pizza place, and then back to the hotel to try and catch up on a little sleep. Tomorrow we plow through more of the important items as we work our way to the top, and start thinking about solutions. It will be fun!