Freitag, 9. Februar 2007

Leaving FESCo

Just FYI, I'm not in FESCo any longer. Now with the Core and Extras merge it became to conflicting with my day job (we all need to earn money somehow for living), so I left (after being in FESCo for about 1 2/3 years) before the problems became to pressing. Yes, stepping down as chair some weeks ago was a preparation for this step; but no, I probably would have stepped down as chair then, too, even if I wouldn't have to leave FESCo now.

And be warned: I'll stay active in Fedora land. I'll in the long term hopefully do what I'd really like to see more in Fedora land: "Simply work on stuff, solve problems, write proposals, write policies or help with getting shit ^w stuff done that is needed or improves Fedora, even if you are not in FESCo or a similar committee". IMHO way to many people yell about (organizational) problems in Fedora land, without actually really helping to make those problems go away.

I wish FESCo all the best with its work and I'm sure it'll do a good job -- but guys, please make sure the community at least gets as much involved as in the past and make sure you try to get them even more involved. I think that's hardly needed, especially now with the merge when Extras-maintainers from the Fedora Community get in touch with Red Hat employees more often -- that's afaics sometimes like people from two different worlds meeting for the first time without actually understanding how the other world works and is organized. That can result in a lot of trouble...

My plans for the short term: finish some stuff like co-maintainership (I prepared a updated proposal, just need to look over it again) and the mailing list reorganization (that's still blocked; I'm waiting for decisions how we want to realize it technically -- e.g. a new server, a alias hostname that points to the current server, or just continue with the current setup...). I plan to get a lot more involved in EPEL (again) -- I had to put that down on my agenda a bit for the past months, as other FESCo jobs were more important.

For Fedora 8 I hope to revisit and rework the kernel module packaging standard -- we sat down and talked about it with some people on FUDCon. I hope we actually can have a enhanced standard for kernel modules in the future that is a mix of the current one and a dkms like solution in addition for those that want it (that might use dkms -- still unsure how to actually do that, but well, we'll see). That should fit most people: "normal" users then can get pre-compiled packages via yum while other that really want to (for whatever reasons) can use a dkms(-like) automatic build solution. Ohh, and I have two other Fedora-related, not-yet-publicly-announced pet projects that I plan to work on, too.

Ohh, and yes, besides that I hope to actually find time again to read a book or two :-)

4 Kommentare:

Unknown hat gesagt…

Hopefully the Fedora politics work out, I'm rather a newbie to this stuff.

About the dkms solution -- I recently discovered the excellent dkms ati & nvidia video driver RPMS from freshrpms.net. While of course these can't be part of Fedora main, the dkms part of this solution solved a big problem for our ~200 workstations, which needed a way to keep those kernel modules up to date while we poor sysadmins could just upgrade the kernels without thinking about that -- or rather we do some testing, but we don't have to wait for the ATI & nVidia RPMs to be updated for the new kernel. One reboot later and our users are up and running again.

Just an example to let you know what dkms is actually being used for in the wild...

Thorsten Leemhuis hat gesagt…

> Just an example to let you know what dkms is actually being used for in the wild...

I know about it, but I don't want to force all Fedora users that need kmods to install gcc (remember: it won't be a part of the desktop spin!), kernel-devel and a solution that builds the module dynamically, as that is quite fagile. It's okay for experienced users that now how to fix stuff in case it goes wrong, not for the normal users that don#t want to care.

kwizart hat gesagt…

In my view the kmod scheme is documented ( http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
Packaging/KernelModules ) and allow end-users to rebuild easily a module to patch/update it because it uses an easy embedded framework(kmodtool). When there is a need to make an update, only the compiled version is redistributed so the compile time is reduced by 200 if you use 200 computers. dkms scheme is déficient by design, but that's good that freshrpms experiment it, it can answear others question... (do it will need manual rebuild ?)
@Thl thx you for the time you given for the community. Your seeds won't go away. It seems that you ask for the right questions, i hope to make things evolve with your help!
Nicolas (kwizart)

Unknown hat gesagt…

I just like to thank you for all the work you did for the community. I'm sure without you Fedora would not have been where it is today.

BTW, what's your daily work? I am asking becasue I wonder how the core/extras merge interfere with it