FUDCon Lawrence 2013 - Day 1

It's that time of year again - FUDCon time! I wish that I had a little more time to get stuff ready after Fedora 18 was released but there's not much I can do about it at the moment.

Today started as most FUDCons do - with a rundown of how BarCamp works, voting and a "State of Fedora" talk by our fearless FPL, Robyn.

The talks today were interesting and not quite as bunched up as Blacksburg last year - I remember having time slots in which I wanted to attend all of the presentations but also having time slots where there weren't any particular presentations that I was excited about.

I learned a bit more about HyperKitty and the role it plays in the upcoming MailMan 3.0. I'll be interested to see the kinds of back end indexing and statistics that'll be available after release - especially some of the stuff about conversation filtering by type (question, flame war, debate etc.).

The other two talks that I found most interesting were Spot's talk about the idea of turning Fedora into more of a release-based distribution (doing major changes in chunks of 20.0, 20.1, 20.2 etc. instead of trying to get a lot of major, not quite related changes done between 20, 21 and 22). It would be a big change to Fedora and while I do have some concerns about the details, I am intrigued overall.

What surprised me is how useful my talk on the blocker/nth process was to me. I expected it to be mostly describing the various complexities of blocker proposal but it ended up yielding quite a bit of good information from the Anaconda devs and one person who wasn't already familiar with the blocker/nth process.

  • The anaconda devs had several good points about some of the weaknesses in our processes and suggestions on some of their pain points that the pain points that they see as more of a distro-wide problem
  • While describing the process of proposing new blocker bugs to the newer person, the craziness became a bit more apparent to the point where it's probably time to discuss what we want to do with the blocker process in the long run.
  • We need to change the name and alias for 'NTH' bugs - it's confusing and just makes the process overall more complicated than it really needs to be. One suggestion was to change it to 'freeze break' so that 'F19Alpha-accepted' would become 'F19Alpha-freezebreak' and 'F19Alpha-freezebreak-accepted' but that'll need to be proposed on the Test list before anything actually changes.

Outside of the talks, I spoke a bit with lmr about what autotest can do and what we want to do in the future for AutoQA. I still don't have any really good ideas but that's a good chunk of what I want to get done over the rest of the weekend; solidify the requirements we have for Fedora test automation. If I can get a better handle on that and come up with a more concrete idea of what I'd like to see happen to the blocker bug tracking process, I'll be really happy with what got done over the weekend.

The rest of tonight will be playing games and socializing on top of the discussions I've mentioned above. I want to get the automation and tools things figured out but some fun is good for the soul :)