Name for a FESCo Successor

FESCo in its yesterday out-of-order meeting agreed to follow the proposal I posted on fedora-advisory-board to merge the Core Cabal and FESCo into a new committee that handles the day to day work around the stuff that was formally known as Fedora Core and Fedora Extras. In other words: we integrate Jesse (aka f13) and Bill (aka notting) into FESCo (Jeremy is already part of FESCo), merge the responsibilities of both groups (and thus give it lot more to do). The Fedora Board will probably discuss the proposal in todays meeting, too.

But one issue is still totally undecided and needs to be solved soon: What do we call that FESCo and Core Cabal successor? The "E" in FESCo until now stood for Extras, but soon Extras will vanish due to the merge. So hat do we want to call it? Suggestions that came up:

• FTC -- Fedora Technical Committee


• FTT -- Fedora Technical Team


• FET -- Fedora Engineering Team


• FEDCo -- Fedora Distribution Committee


• FESCo -- Fedora Steering Committee


• 42

None of the above name suggestions did receive a "yes, that's a really great idea, I like it, all the people I asked love it, thus go for it" from the people involved in the discussions. Thus we'd like to ask the community for suggestions and its option: "Which of the above names do you like most or do you have something better in mind that sounds good, is not to easily confused with other stuff from this world and roughly describes what the committee does?"

Please participate in the discussion on fedora-devel. Thanks!

Ohh, some backgrounds for the proposed names:

• FTC -- name clash with Federal Trade Commission. A bit bad, but seems some people don't care much about that.
  39 meanings in total on acronym finder


• FTT -- "Failure to thrive (FTT) refers to a baby or child that is not
  developing as well as desired." 12 meanings in total on acronym finder


• FTT -- Field-Effect Transistor 24 meanings in total on acronym finder


• FEDSCo "Federal Employees Distributing Company (Co-Op)" 2 meanings on acronym finder


• FESCO-- Fedora Steering Committee is to easily confused with the Board, thus probably a no-go


• 42 -- The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

P.S.: For those that missed it, I'm not FESCo's chairmen any more (but still a FESCo member) since last Thursday -- After doing the job for one year I felt that it's time for me to hand it over to someone else with fresh blood and new ideas. Brian Pepple is FESCo's interims chair now and I'm sure he'll do a great job. Please help him as good as you can -- and always keep in mind: You don't have to be in FESCo or any other committee to to help improving Fedora!

thl's irssi notification script [UPDATED]

A while ago Luke Macken wrote an irssi notification script and blogged about it. I really liked the idea having pop-ups (using libnotify) on all of my desktops when somebody mentions my name in on of the channels. But well, the script had one big problem for me: It requires irssi to run on the local machine.

But I run irssi within screen on another machine in another network – I just ssh into that machine normally and resume the irssi-session with "screen -R". Thus I could not use lmacken's script :-(

I looked a bit more into that some time ago and came up with another solution: fnotify. Download it and put it as fnotify.pl in .irssi/scripts/ and load it in irssi with

/load perl
/script load fnotify

Is somebody chats to you directly (query) or mentions your nick somewhere in one of the channels it will put something like

#fedora-devel foo> ping thl

into ~/.irssi/fnotify . I can read that file from the client via ssh now and fire up notify-send locally. I use this startup script do realize that:

# yes, we need a way to flush the file on disconnect; i don't know one
# yes, that's flush is not atomic (but good enough for me)
ssh remote.system.somewhere "tail -n 10 .irssi/fnotify ; : > .irssi/fnotify ; tail -f .irssi/fnotify " | sed -u 's/[<@&]//g' | while read heading message  do  notify-send -i gtk-dialog-info -t 300000 -- "${heading}" "${message}"; done # the sed -u 's/[<@&]//g' is needed as those characters might confuse  notify-send (FIXME: is that a bug or a feature?)

This results is nice pop-ups in the bottom right corner of my desktop:

Site note: Yes, there are probably 1000 other ways to realize something like that. The above stuff is far from perfect, but it suits my needs.

Mailing list reorganization, FESCo Chair

I looked at the mailing list mess that evolved in the Fedora Project over the past years and -- after the Board asked me to drive deeper into the issue -- worked out a proposal for a mailing list reorganization. I posted it to fedora-devel for public discussion. Comments -- on the list please -- appreciated.

Ohh, and while blogging for the second time in my life it's probably a good time to announce something else: I'll step down as FESCo chair tomorrow. I did that job for one year now and I think it's time for a new chairmen with fresh blood and new ideas. I'll stay in FESCo for now.

I have a blog

mether talked me into it. Let's hope it it's not yet another close-to-never-updated blog -- I'm quite busy with all the Fedora stuff, real life and my work already.

It was just a quick click-through-and-yes-I-accept-all-your-term-and-guidelines setup and I probably have to look closer now how to actually use and fill it :-)