Saturday came a bit less early than the previous days as we had no keynote, just workshops, so everyone seemed a bit more refreshed. Again infrastructure folks met up and worked on various projects. Dennis got the builders all upgraded so we could test some dnf/mock patches, but that caused things to break in another area. Happily Ralph was able to iterate on a patch and we applied it as a hotfix to get all the builders up and building again. There was some interesting discussion about using PCP (performance co-pilot). Very interested to see what kind of information about our infrastructure this could bring. John containerized out pastebin service as a proof of concept. I am looking forward to looking it all over and seeing how it's done and how we can better use containers and such for our applications. After workshops everyone split out to various places for dinner. I went with a group to the Genosee brew house. Very nice view and great beer!

Friday started with a keynote by John Schull at eNable. They basically are a community around designing, building and distributing upper limb prognostics. With 3d printers getting so common and good, it's enabled people to design and print their own. There's tons of places people could contribute to the project, from designing things, printing them and shipping them, to helping gather statistics about the community and help them move on to other exciting areas. Really a very cool project that I had never heard of before. Kudos to the flock organizers for bringing John in. After that we moved on to workshops (both today and tomorrow). The infrastructure team gathered up and started using a gobby document to do a sort of bar camp thing so we could discuss the things we wanted. Then we went through them. We didn't mange to get them all, but we got a lot of them. Look for mailman3, bodhi2 and other exciting things very very soon. After a lunch break we came and everyone started hacking on various things. I wrote down many of the things I discussed, but will need to gather them and go through them to make them coherent. :) The friday evening event was at the Eastman house. Very cool place, lots of great pictures and old cameras, as well as a chocolate fountain. :)

Thursday came all too early. After a quick breakfast, it was time for the keynote: Major Hayden talked about impostor syndrome and related difficulties (like the Dunning-Kruger effect). He suggested a method used by airplane pilots might help some people to move forward when they are affected by these sorts of things: The OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. Interesting topic and many people seemed to know it in the room.  Next up was my talk on open source etiquette. It wasn't completely horrible, but while giving it I saw a bunch of places I should change the pacing and what I wanted to mention and what pictures I might use. There wasn't a big crowd, but there were at least a few people and one person did thank me after the talk so it can't be completely bad. ;) I went back to the hallway track until lunch (another nice one at the hotel). Then on to Paul Frields talk about remote work. I've worked remotely for the last 15 years, so I think I do ok, but there were some nice ideas Paul had about how to prioritize things and simplify workflow. I may well try a few of the things he mentioned in the coming weeks. Next was a talk by Mike Mcgrath on Atomic and Openshift and docker and how all the things fit together. It was pretty high level, but it did clarify for me some things about what things were used in others and how they all fit. Then off to a talk from Ralph Bean about technical debt and microservices. Some good background for other people, and some ideas we should definitely try out in coming months. In particular I liked the idea of doing a week where we just try and do cleanup and fighting down tech debt every few months. The last session of the day was the "meet your fesco" session. Sadly, we didn't get all FESCo there, but we did have some good discussions and questions. There was talk about how to better handle secondary arches, how to better deal with security updates, how we should handle the old "Incomplete" changes that never got actually submitted anywhere, and what the role of FESCo vs the council was. Great stuff. The evening event was then at the Strong museum of fun. It was awesome. There were a bunch of old video and arcade games. I had fun playing centipede and air hocky and hercules (The worlds largest pinball). The winner tho was a game called "Whirly Bird" which was this mechanical helicoper game from 1969, it was quite cool. The food, drink and company was great as well. Tomorrow will start out at 9am with another keynote and then we will go into workshops. Looking forward to actually getting things done tomorrow instead of just talking about them. :)

Flock is finally here! :) The conference is in the hotel, so there was pretty much no travel time or chance to get lost. Registration was quick and easy and well run. The keynote was from our Fedora Project Leader, Matt Miller. He had a number of great slides of statistics about how Fedora is doing in various ways, showing things are growing and looking pretty good. I caught a few talks, and they were all pretty good: 10 ideas that are killing open source had some great discussion and a nice way of looking at the various reasons people don't open source their code, and how to convince them to change their minds. After that I went to the "hallway track" and talked with a bunch of folks about a bunch of things. It's great talking to people in real life in high bandwith to try and explain or learn about something. It's also of course great to talk to old and new friends. Lunch was pretty nice there at the hotel as well, then back to catch part of Patrick's talk about the state of Fedora Infrastructure. There were a number of questions which Patrick handled just fine. It was great to see that he knows the infrastructure setup so well and can field questions nicely. The final talk of the day I went to was "What does Red Hat want?" Which was a great talk by Denise Dumas. She went over how Red Hat culture is setup and noted that there's even a clause for employees that if they participate in an open source project, they can put that projects needs over the company if they need to. There were a lot of questions on how to better communication from Red Hat to Fedora and vice versa. It would be great to hear more clearly from Red Hat what they really do want so the Fedora community could decide what and how to help them. A bunch of us then went off for a team dinner at the Old Toad. It's a nice british pub type place. The beer, food and company was all excellent. Back at the hotel there was a games night. I didn't manage to play any games, but I did talk to a number of folks to round out the evening.  

Morning came far too soon, but on the plus side there was a nice blanket of fog over the city. The Fedora 23 Alpha release went out nice and smoothly. I merged websites branch into master, fixed a prerelease redirect we had in place and acked the announcement that was written by marketing and FPL and sent by our Release Engineering leader. There were a few minor link issues, but quickly fixed. BW climbed over the day, it seemed a pretty popular release. We went over to java's, a local coffee joint. I had the Aztek coffee. It was awesome! Then we wandered over to the Old Toad for some lunch. Also very nice. After that we decided to go back to java's and hack the afternoon away on various projects. Dinner was at Dinosaur BBQ just down the road. It was pretty excellent as well.  

Monday morning was a pretty ordinary one, fix some broken things, sort out some tickets and so forth. Then, in the afternoon it was time to head out to flock 2015. Flock doesn't officially start until wed morning, but tomorrow is Fedora 23 Alpha release day and I wanted to make sure I was not traveling for that in case any issues came up, so I decided to head out to flock a day early. Travel was as fun as it always is: I made it to my first flight with lots of time, but it ended up leaving about 20minutes late. Then it got into the Minneapolis airport basically on the opposite side as my next flight, so I had to basically run to catch the next one. I did manage to make it with a few minutes to spare. The last leg into Rochester was uneventfull as was the taxi ride to the hotel. Now to get some sleep before getting up early to push Fedora 23 alpha out.

The summer is just flying by and next week is the 2015, North America version of Flock, this time in Rochester, NY. Flock is the annual Fedora conference, which alternates between North American and Europe each year. It's a great time to listen in talks what other Fedora folks are working on and have less format hallway talks with people you work with all the time but don't live near. Some information for this years flock: Will be Aug 12th to the 15th in Rochester, NY. If you can't make it in person, there will be likely live streaming and transcripting going on. Please Join #fedora-flock on irc.freenode.net for general conversation with other flock goers and as a place to find more information for remote attendees. Registration and conference rate hotel room are long closed, but if you still find yourself able to make it to there in person you are welcome to attend. (You may not be able to get a t-shirt or lunches or evening events, but the conference is open to everyone!) Evening events have been announced: http://tinyurl.com/flock2015evening The schedule of talks: http://flock2015.sched.org/ Please thank our wonderful sponsors: http://www.flocktofedora.org/sponsors/ I'm looking forward to it. :)

It's been a little while since my last rawhide post. Things have been busy. Fedora 23 has branched off rawhide heading for it's Alpha release hopefully next week. A number of people have hit a common issue with rawhide recently and I thought I would talk some about that. Namely, it's getting a rawhide release installed, ie, the install path. Once you have an install, things are usually not that bad. DNF hides broken deps from you, you get the updates you can apply and things roll right along. However, the upgrade path is a really hard one which we should fix. First of all, in order to produce a rawhide compose at all, the following have to work:

1. The rawhide comps xml file from https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/comps.git has to be valid and usable. If this breaks, the compose fails and nothing is produced.
2. The chroot that rawhide compose runs it needs to have no broken deps and is installable. This is what you get when you do a mock --init
3. The chroot has to be able to install: "koji yum createrepo make intltool findutils mash yum-utils rsync repoview hardlink"
4. mash (in the chroot) has to run and complete ok.

Once that happens the compose will finish (even if parts of it are broken after that). In order to produce a boot.iso for the day:

1. mock has to be able to --init a chroot
2. All of: "pungi nfs-utils setarch" have to be installable and have no broken deps.
3. lorax has to be able to run and produce images (This requires no broken deps from anything in the set of things on the boot.iso).

So, as you can tell things can (and do) break down in various places. Recently there was a rpm build that changed soname. This meant that a few of the tools in step 2 of the base case above had broken deps, so result was no rawhide compose at all for those days. Then there was a broken dep in grub2, which meant the boot.iso couldn't be created. Then, finally today there was a broken dep in tigervnc which meant no boot.iso. So, there's two obvious approaches to try and make all these parts better, we could take one or both of them. :) We could gate builds entering rawhide and run some kind of dep check on them. I have a plan for how we could do the gating part pretty simply today, but dependency checking is pretty hard. It might be we could leverage taskotron for this, but not sure. And/or, we could just try and fail faster/quicker. Identify the packages in all the above sets we need to be working and anytime any of them change we try and build a new iso or test compose. If it fails we ring loud alarm bells. We could then even untag the offending build if it cannot be fixed quickly. Right now failures are not very visible, and they really should be so that everyone in the community can work to make sure they get fixed. I'm running a workshop at flock next week on friday afternoon (yeah, I know, but still). I do hope interested parties will be there and we can try and make rawhide installable for everyone all the time. :) http://flock2015.sched.org/event/6c9cb5cd93903549d911c58e5cc71533

The Fedora planet that is. :) The old site: http://planet.fedoraproject.org/ will continue to work and redirect to the new site: http://fedoraplanet.org for quite some time to come, but you should go update your feed links now while you are seeing this. :) Why did we do this change? It's part of us trying to make sure everything in *fedoraproject.org is using https. This allows us to set a HSTS header to get all browsers to use https with fedoraproject.org sites and also get that preseeded in some browsers. planet.fedoraproject.org shows blog posts of the entire Fedora community and those posts may well have http links in them, or https links to self signed certs or the like, so there isn't any way to make planet.fedoraproject.org fully valid https, so we moved it to it's own domain where it can happily use http until browsers no longer accept it. This brings us one step closer to a https future. :)

We just switched the fedorapeople.org server over from a old rhel6, puppet managed instance to a new shiny rhel7 ansible managed one. :) Hopefully everything is humming along fine, but if you run into problems with something that used to work but no longer does, please do file a ticket in the fedora infrastructure trac and we will try and fix it up. This is also a great time to go and look over what files you have there and delete old/unneeded items. Personally, I had some fedora 12 and 13 repos that didn't need to be around anymore. If everyone could clean up files they no longer need it would save us time and backup space. Thanks and enjoy the new fedorapeople.org.