Kevin's musings

Another full day here at Fudcon.

Fudpub was great fun, but left me with not much sleep by the time sunday morning rolled around. Still, I made it over to the venue right around time to snag a bagel and coffee and head into the my first session of the day: 10 fun yum tips and application streams. Lots of good info there, but I mostly already knew all of it. Was still nice to see the questions and some ah-ha’s from people around the yum tips.

Next I spent an hour in the IP law presentation. Again lots of good background info of things that Open source tech types need. I skipped out on this to go to spot’s “Next big thing in Fedora Infrastructure”. Lots of interesting pitches. I voted for almost all of them, they would all be great. We will see which ones show up soon.

For lunch I went to a 5 guys burger nearby with Rex Dieter and Stephen Parrish. Good burger and good conversation.

After lunch was a bunch of lightning talks. Again interesting items. Mel’s presentation on The Dreyfus Model was fun and entertaining. I was impressed how far the eclipse plugin for dealing with Fedora packages had gotten. It should be nice for new contributors. Seth’s idea of a jabber server to track peoples day to day events was interesting as well.

Right around the time of the lightning talks, the Xfce folks released 4.8.1 versions of several components. I got those all updated in rawhide, as well as a new version of midori (0.3.0). Also, more excitingly, the nasty anoying Terminal bug that caused it to eat cpu and grow in memory got fixed. I pushed a patch into the rawhide version that fixes it for me, so all you folks who switched to other Terminals can go back to using Xfce’s Terminal again.

After those, everyone split up into hackfests. I ended up going with a group of people working on governance in Fedora. Should we revamp how things are setup, or at least clarify what each of the various parts work with and report to. We did degress a few times, but then we managed to get some good progress toward the end. Hopefully we can work more on that tomorrow and see if we can have something we can ask folks for feedback on by the end of Fudcon. After that session, I just wandered back to the hotel and grabbed some quick food. Going to try and get some good rest for tomorrow.

Up tomorrow: Would be nice to finish the Fedora Governance stuff, would be great to work on EPEL wiki pages too, before having to head to the airport and head back to Colorado just in time for a snowstorm. ;(

Today started way too early (after going to sleep late). Breakfast was in the hotel food area. I had a nice chat with Dave Malcolm about python and packages and so forth, then off to the main event.

Lots of folks in the main opening talk. Lots and lots of barcamp pitches. Max wearing not one, but _two_ silly hats. A nice “state of Fedora” from Jared. Then over to the barcamp area where I had a nice chat with jlaska about AutoQA. I wish we had a better way to get people involved there, but it’s hard. I suggested a few new tests and suggested it might be easier to get folks interested once some of the tests are actually active.

Then LUNCH! A nice sandwitch while chatting with more folks.

After lunch was the “Furture of Fedora” and “Reducing Bureaucracy” combined talk. Jared showed the Board’s list of 15 items and discussion was raised on serveral of the items and related topics. I’m not sure how much concrete was really accomplished, as people seemed more interested in specific tactics to accomplish or meet the goal, rather than the list of goals themselves. Hopefully the Board will narrow things down and we can focus on trying to meet 1-3 specific goals soon.

Next in the same room was the excellent Mike Mcgrath talking about a new cloud setup project which he could demo, but not name. There was much discussion of cloud issues and cloud computing and how Fedora could fit into this new world. Lots of things to think about, but all the tech seems so new and blazing it’s own trail.

Finally I headed to another room for the “Future of spins” talk. Jared led things with a description of where we are and a bit of history, then if we still think spins are a good idea and what for, and finally only in the last few minutes leading to discussion of solutions. I think there was agreement that the spins wrangler or lead or czar or whatever should have the ability to deny spins for failing a variety of participation in maintaining and building and supporting their spin. Christoph said he would be willing to be that person, but he’s already very busy, so I hold out some hope we could find someone else interested in the process to manage things. I’m wondering if we need some completely new setup. Have a list of criteria for entry into the spins-kickstarts package, additional criteria if you wish to have your spin composed by rel-eng, and if we shouldn’t have the non-desktop spins on a different release schedule from the desktop ones. Lots of things still to be determined here, so hopefully we can hash something out before the end of this fudcon.

The afternoon of sessions ended with some more talking (and listening) to folks in the hall. Lots of good info and amusing stories.

Now it’s almost time to head out for FudPub, which should be a great time as always.

Just a quick report (I need to get a little sleep before sessions start tomorrow) on Fudcon day -1.

I had a reasonably nice flight and travel through the airport. The security guard checking tickets asked me both “Whats the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” and “whats the answer to life the universe and everything?”. He seemed to be at the end of his shift and very merry. On the flight they gave us all hot chocolate chip cookies, which was a nice touch.

After a nice lunch with my sister on arriving (at a place called “Carlsbad Tavern”), I got to the hotel and checked in. The hospitality suite was in full swing and I munched on pizza and beer (courtesy of opensource.com, who are celebrating their 1st anniversary!). After that I had many many conversations with various folks, ending with a long chat with Adam Williamson and Peter Robenson (and others). Good stuff.

Tomorrow things start bright and early, so time to catch a few winks.

Just heading to the airport for a day of travel, then late lunch with my sister in Tempe, then to the fudcon hotel/party central.
Looking forward to seeing lots of fedora folk.

I use IRC a LOT. Most/all IRC Clients can send what are called “private messages” (or PM’s).

There are a few cases where PM’s could possibly be acceptable:

• You have something that NEEDS to be private (account info, phone number, etc). You should ask yourself however if a unencrypted IRC session is the right place to send that info. Perhaps a phone call, a scp to a secure server, or a gpg encrypted email would be better?
• It’s something you need to impart to JUST that one person. A friendly jibe or conversation with someone you know well perhaps, or a quick note from someone that they are running late or are going to do something for you.

That said, there are a number of cases where they are NOT a good idea (especially in support channels):

• The person you are PMing might be busy, so you get no answer, but many others in a common channel may know the answer to your question.
• The person you are PMing might give you a incorrect or incomplete answer, which other people in a common channel could correct or expand on.
• Other people in a common channel cannot learn from your question or any answers you get. Perhaps they too were interested in doing that? Perhaps they have a related question that comes from that one? It’s good for everyone to ask questions in a common channel.
• It doesn’t scale. You can’t always ask a person your questions directly. Sometimes people are on vacation or busy and you will not get answers. If 100 people try and ask one person privately each question most IRC clients would go crazy with tabs and trying to keep track of those seperate conversations.
• Some people provide support for things for a living. If you are directly PMing them shouldn’t you pay for private support?
• IRC is somewhat transitory. Unless someone has setup a bouncer (znc, bip, dircproxy) and set it to record private messages, they can easily be lost (just reboot without checking all of them and many clients won’t show them on restart of the app). So, if you PM someone the message may well not get through anyhow.

Finally there are some modes of interest (on freenode at least):

• /umode +R – This will prevent people who are unidentified with freenode services from sending you private messages.
• /umode +g – This will prevent you from receiving private messages from anyone not on a session-defined whitelist. The content of the whitelist can be controlled using the /accept command. When a user not on the whitelist attempts to contact you, you will receive a notice informing you of the fact and you can then use /accept user to speak to them. Users can be removed from the whitelist using /accept -user. Finally, /accept * will print the whitelist.
• Other clients or IRC bouncers may have ways to log/ignore/etc private messages. See your clients docs.

In some channels/areas it’s polite to ask before PMing: “Hey, foo, mind if I PM you my phone number?” or “Hey foo, can I PM?”.

So, next time you are in a community channel and want to PM someone, do consider the above before doing so, odds are it would be much better to just ask in the main community channel than PM some particular person.

I hope to see lots of folks at Fudcon this year, but I know sadly that some Fedora contributors are not going to end up being able to make it.

If you can’t make it to this fudcon you can drop by #fedora-fudcon on irc.freenode.net and share with folks who are there. Also watch the Fudcon Tempe 2011 wiki page for news and reports of sessions and other good info from the event.

If you are going to be there, remember that we should be using Fudcon to discuss and create ideas, which we should then present and allow input from the Fedora community before enacting. Document clear proposals for everyone to discuss, improve and ratify in normal ways. Try and include people on mailing lists, irc and other communication channels, especially if part of your group is not present.

<End public service announcement>

Fudcon 2011 will be coming up next weekend. I’m looking forward to it, and hope to see lots of Fedora folks I talk with on irc and on mailing lists, as well as new folks I haven’t met yet.

A few things I would like to try and get done while there:

• I’d like to try and sort out what will happen with spins in f15. The spins SIG is pretty much defunct, so we need to either setup a new better way to manage spins, or drop them, or something else. This is going to be tough, but I think Fudcon is just the place to hash it out.
• I’d like to do a lot of listening to others. Since I serve on many Fedora committees and groups I’d like to hear from Fedora Developers and users: What can we do better? Do you have ideas on something, but you don’t know how to approach it? What can we change or adjust to make YOU happier and have more fun with Fedora?
• I’d like to sit down with any EPEL folks (and perhaps we could grab a website person or two) and revamp the EPEL wiki pages. They are old, outdated and hard to find things in. We need to draw up a whiteboard plan for what they should look like, implement that and nuke the old pages. I hope there are some EPEL and websites folks interested in helping me on this…
• It would be good to get together with the other IRC support folks who are able to attend and perhaps do a talk on “Supporting other Fedora users”. I’m not sure I have time for slides, etc, but perhaps others in the group do, or we could ad-hoc it.
• The governance and future directions talks will be very interesting. Our structure is a bit confusing and has grown over time. Perhaps this is a good chance to revamp FESCo, FAMSCo, Board or setup a new way to run fedora for the next 15 releases.
• I look forward to hearing about the current progress of things like AutoQA, Abrt, and lots of other tools we use/want to use moving forward.

All in all it looks like it will be a great Fudcon. Hope to see everyone there!

EDITED: fixed the title. Sheesh. Stupid typos. ;(