Archive | February 2, 2007

Thanks again to BU staff and to gregdek for making this happen.

Reviewing other SotU speeches, Max Spevak presented the Fedora State of the Union. The Axis of Evil: Redmond, RIAA/MPAA and any reasonable large technology company located on the isle of Man. 2nd: a voucher program: one badge entitles one to one FUDPub drink. 3rd: a large budgetary expenditure with no clear goal and no endpoint. “We shall send a Fedora Hacker to the moon.”

What’s my job at RedHat: To oversee all the moving parts of Fedora. Community building whenever we can. External community strong than it was. Internal community building within RedHat: part of the effort is educating what Fedora is within RedHat. Sometimes it appears to run slower in-house than the outer community would wish. Transparency has been another big deal. Working hard to make that better. Private e-mail and chats still happen. The Fedora Board is a big part of that.

Big round of applause for Thorsten Leeman (sp?), leader of Fedora Extras.

Review of last year’s goal:

1. External commits to Fedora Core: moved Core into Extras and renamed it Core. Success!
2. “Fedora Media Project” – Thomas Chung, Fedora Weekly News
3. Fedora Ship-It project: volunteers burning media and mailing it at their own expenses.
4. Fedora Infrastructure: a wild ride. Eliot Lee made that all happen a year ago. He’s moved on to Lulu. Dennis Warren, Mike McGrath, Warren Togami and… missed it.. kept the project running, MM starts working for RH next week.

Results: Punji can build an image customizable to thei needs of the consumers. “Throw some RPMs at it, it dep-solves everything and you get the image you want.” may be too optimistic. Let the KDE group own of the community image of KDE-Fedora?

“I think of Fedora as the conscience of RedHat.”

Yeah, I’m not the first to notice this. The specs, details and pictures are available in a lot of places, better than I could summarize. Interesting things I got out of the presentation: lots of Python (yeah!), this is a great example of dogfooding (discovering useless ticking of kernel that eats CPU power, heats data centers and leads to global warming) in this case means little kids stuck pedaling, and that brings it home for the OLPC developers. The code they will be turning back into the Fedora, Red Hat and Open Source communities will run faster and cooler. They’ve pushed dbus further than before, turning a lot of poor “loop until something happens” code into subscribe-and-notify messages. They’re cleaning up sloppy dependencies where everthing needs Perl (their example, don’t flame me) but hardly use it for everything.

The display is cool. 1900×800 in hi-resolution monochrome for outdoor use, Those 1900 black pixels become individual red, green or blue pixels for a lower resolution backlight color display. Very clever. They replaced the most expensive individual unit in a laptop with, well, a $50 most expensive unit in the OLPC.

It’s an elegant machine.

Tag: fudconboston2007

Jessie Keating, F13 (’cause his keyboard goes up to 13). Fedora Release Engineering. Very open topic – how its done, how he’d like to get it done. New build system trying to get open-sourced from RedHat, replacing Plague.

His job: marshall package collection and keep them working. “DistFC7” is a package collection of everything in FC6 plus Extras. “Rawhide” nightly build. Regularly, create a freeze. Tags are fairly inexpensive, so “F7Test1” is easy to apply. Spin off freeze, run intensive tests on that tag. Different “spins” or collections of tests are done for each frozen tag: desktop, server, KDE “spins” are coordinated by Jessie. Questions remain on how to triage failed builds – what qualifies as a showstopper.

“Pungi” builds a distribution from a manifest, based on multiple languages and architectures. Reads from core repositories, extras, locals, finds the “best” module, resolves all of the dependencies to build a tree of source. Hands off the anaconda tools, build-install, that actually creates images. Next step involves sorting the many package dependencies to create a package order that would allow install from CD1, CD2, CD3. There’s a magic XML file called “comps” that is a combination of experience, black magic and wild guesses. Then, making ISO file systems requires its own black magic as there are a lot of obscure flags that differ depending on the target of i386, PPC, 64-bit and so forth.

Needed: post-build validation before handing things off to QA. Bloat is an issue: a 9-CD, 2DVD distro is hostile, expecially to bandwidth-expensive. Would like to create some different images that don’t include the kitchen sink: “desktop” that’s a browser, chat, email, etc. “server” is a base set plus a set of optional servers. “KDE” spin. Would like to be able to add additional recipies, like an “Eclipse” spin that has a fully-configured install with all the dev tools ready to go. Need help with fine-tuning the manifest. Sorting through the (many bizarrely-named) hardware packages. Need help with “comps” – how to overlay the different issues of dependencies and choices, mandatory, default and priorites.

I never knew how sausage was made 😉

Oh, and then there’s the issue of updates…

Tag: fudconboston2007