FUDCon highlights

FUDCon Raleigh 2008 was a weekend of hacking, planning, discussions, coding, and general mirth. Over 200 members of the Fedora community were in attendance, and a tremendous amount of work was accomplished that will pay off in the Fedora 9 release.

Rather than recap the entire event myself, I have collected up some of the blog posts about FUDCon that appeared on Fedora Planet during and after the event. Check back tomorrow for a FUDCon video.

This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but it will give you a flavor for what FUDCon attendees thought about the event:

Clint Savage, Fedora Ambassador:

I have to say that it was probably the best learning experience one could have at a conference. The BarCamp concept really worked well and I think it gave me some much needed information to move ahead on projects….

I plan to take much of what I learned and start working with it in my spare time. I’ve also started the process of joining the documentation project and look forward to helping them.

Douglas Warner, long time Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS user and Fedora Infrastructure contributor:

This past weekend was great; I met a lot of people I’ve only seen in IRC or on mailing lists, hacked on MyFedora (mockup) a bunch, attended and filmed a bunch of sessions, and just tried to get some of the ‘Fedora vibe’ and see how everyone interacts.

I ended up in the Fedora Infrastructure room working on MyFedora with John (J5) Palmieri, Luke Macken, and Toshio Kuratomi. My python’s not nearly as good as my PHP (mostly just lack of understanding basic structures and what classes are available), but I was able to pickup enough about the TurboGears framework they were using to get the widget configuration written and aide in the basic design of the RSS widget so that we can write new widgets in only 3 lines of code!

Saturday was the Barcamp and was I was surprised to see how many showed up for this event. Max’s opening State of Fedora address was great; it was very nice to get insight from someone that has to have a high overview of what Fedora has done and where it is going. He also announced Paul Frields taking over, and even from the little I was able to see of him, it looks like we’ll be in good hands.

Everyone attended Michael Tiemann’s talk on ‘Fedora in the Enterprise’ which turned out to be a great discussion on how enterprises can and need to contribute to the open source process.

Jeroen van Meeuwen, lead developer of Revisor:

We’ve long anticipated the moment we could import livecd-tools and actually start using that, and after pulling the bits from GIT we are now able to do so. Hopefully, this version is going to end up in at least rawhide soon, too.

In addition, we hooked modcobbler back into what is becoming 2.1.0, hopefully soon to be released to rawhide! 2.1.0 has been re-factored to include these modules, which practically enables us to plug-in all kinds of modules without having to re-factor our base application anymore. The GUI at this point is going to become a module to the Revisor base application also. We’ll ensure though that ‘yum install revisor’ does install the Joe User GUI application.

Jesse Keating, Fedora’s Release Engineer:

Got to talk with Bill and Seth face to face, with a whiteboard, to outline the horrors of how we get rawhide out. Identified a lot of low hanging fruit to make it better, and assign some tasks out. Lots of good work was done, particularly because we could quickly talk about something, show code, white board, etc…

I also got to sit in a talk about Func which is really really cool, and could be useful to what I do in the near future.

This discussion would have been much tougher if we weren’t in the same place, at the same time, for the same event, working from the same context.

Jesus Rodriguez, Red Hat Network engineer

Since FUDCon is in Raleigh this year, I was able to attend this most awesome conference. Max did a great job with the State of Fedora address. He received a standing ovation and introduced the new Fedora project leader, Paul Frields.

We had BarCamp which is a great model for defining a conference. Typically a conference defines the sessions and times upfront. With BarCamp the session topics are defined at the conference itself. They are placed on the board and everyone chooses what they want to attend. Based on the number of votes determines what rooms they are held in. It’s a great format.

John Palmieri, GNOME developer and uber-hacker

Fedora is community and no where is it more evident than at FUDCon, a gathering of Fedora developers from around the world. Catch the Linux.com video feature taken on day one of FUDCon;. I have a small section at the end talking about the community with Karsten Wade.

Kevin Fenzi, Fedora XFCE maintainer and uber-geek

Saturday was the main FUDCon presentation day. This day (and Sunday) were at the RedHat corp headquarters. It was nice to see the location where many Fedora contributors work everyday. Max gave a nice talk to start things off and show the state of the Fedora union.

Next up were lots of barcamp style short talks. I was torn about which ones to go to, there were so many interesting ones. I went to the infrastructure talk, which was nice as I got to put faces to all the names I see on #fedora-admin every day. Next ended up at the bug triage/bug zappers talk, as thats something I have some strong opinions on. It sounds like there is a group of people really committed to working on that problem now, and I hope I can help them out too.

The last talk I went to was on func. func is very cool. I had seen some info on it, but thought it was another cfengine thing, but instead it looks very nice. I am going to try it out on my home machines very soon, and then possibly look at using it in larger deployments.

Then, there was cake: One with the fedora logo, and one with the CentOS logo (since they just had their birthday, we made them a cake). Good stuff.

Overall, the biggest problem I have right now with fedora is that there is so much interesting to do and work on, that it’s hard to choose.

Warren Togami, Fedora Engineer

FUDCon was over the past weekend. Eric Harrison and I planned on using the two hackfest days to get the bulk of the LTSP5 integration into Fedora done. Unfortunately there proved to be far too many distractions of other things going on at FUDCon (cool shizzit going on). I personally managed to resolve several long standing issues in a few packages with only a few minutes of face-time with certain developers that I rarely see in person. Subsequent to FUDCon, Toshio Kuratomi joined us for focused hacking on Monday and part of Tuesday. Toshio was a huge boost to our efforts before he flew back to California mid-day Tuesday.

Yaakov Nemoy, Fedora Infrastructure contributor

The first hacking session was great. Between everything else, I managed to get about 70% of the security features I wanted to stick into Smolt. Most of the details need to be fleshed out, but I can safely say, Smolt is very very anonymous. If you feel your identity has been compromised, just ask for a new one; it will be fully automated. Also, Lee took some of our queries to our MySQL backend, and optimized them, so I’ll be integrating that work in over the weekend.

The second talk I went to is the Pyjigdo talk given by Fedora Unity. Fedora Unity has been using Jigdo and other tools to develop their Respins of Fedora. I also went to their third talk about revisor, and between the two of them, it was great to see how the entire Fedora Unity stack comes together software wise. Also, thanks to Jon and Jeroen showing off how to write a plugin for Revisor, I have a couple of fun ideas for Wevisor which I’ll go into at the end.

On one of the mailing lists, there has been heated discussion about our init system, and how we are going to move forward in the future. Casey Dahlin has a no nonsense approach to building a new init system, but I was happy for the my first chance to see how Fedora Developers resolve these conflicts in person. I suggested to Casey that he have someone record the discussion, because it seemed like it would be a great way to show the world that sometimes Fedora developers can do things amicably.

The fifth talk was just fun. I got to meet Seth Vidal, and talk about Yum. I wish I could have seen something about writing plugins for Yum, but it it was fun to talk about why Fedora doesn’t do live upgrades the way that Debian does. Funny thing is, I’ve stopped missing that feature in some ways.

Finally, there was Luke Macken and Toshio’s Turbogears session. Given the whole complexity of Smolt, it was funny to see Luke make things look easy again. Luke’s got a great eye for making presentations, so if you missed it, I highly recommend you see the slides and notes. They are put together very well.

Michael DeHaan, Red Hat Emerging Technologies engineer

Wow. I can’t believe I haven’t been to one of these before. The beginnings of the HackFest today in the fancy boardroom felt like the start of a James Bond film, with all the leaders of SPECTRE gathered to spread great evil throughout the world, but instead of great evil, it was great Linux.

I am so totally stoked about the excitement behind Fedora now, I know I was technically kind of a part of it before, but FudCON makes you really feel like you are doing something important. I would definitely encourage anyone who didn’t go this time to try to make a FudCON in the future. It was especially nice to meet all the people I knew from IRC or email addresses in person. The package stats that show this is no longer a distribution controlled exclusively by Red Hat is especially promising–and attendance showed it. We’re international, free, and non-partisan. How cool is that?

The growing momentum behind Func now I am most impressed with (join the list and #func on IRC to join the party), but also with the turnout for the Cobbler talk and hearing people get excited about things I work on that they didn’t know about before. At a lot of places you can work on technology XYZ and never really get to meet and help your users face to face–either a marketing guy does it for you, or get togethers like this just aren’t possible. It means so much more to be working on stuff that is more personal. While Open Source was certainly the way for technical and philosophical reasons earlier, it’s also growing more clear every day that it is also better on motivational rounds. We don’t do this to just earn a buck but to also help each other out–regardless of what we do.

Another thing that strikes me is that working on Fedora doesn’t feel like work… no matter if you are actually doing it for your work. It is a team where everybody mostly seems to be get along, have fun, and do some neat things. I know the mailing lists get a little heated, but I think FudCON and knowing people helps that even more.

This entry was posted by Max Spevack on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Fedora, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.