This year, we had Nest conference instead of traditional Flock, which has been canceled due to COVID. The conference happened purely remotely over the Hopin video conference. This was good and bad. The good is that we saved a lot on traveling and that it happened at all. It would be bad if it was canceled. The bad part was that I found it hard to focus on the conference. There are too many distractions at home. It was much harder to socialize. And a lot of people had issues either with microphone or internet upload. It was sometimes hard to follow. The conference was organized mostly for US folks, and therefore some sessions were very late in my timezone.
There were a lot of interesting pools. Some of them:
The Lenovo ThinkPad laptops that are going to be released soon with Fedora installed currently all have Intel processors. Would you be interested in purchasing one with an AMD processor?
Which desktop environment do you use?
Here are my notes from the session. The notes are probably very raw:
Lives at https://github.com/juhp/fbrnch.
A new tool (not yet in Fedora, but lives in Copr) to automate even more things than fedpkg. E.g., fbrnch create-review my-new-package.spec, fbrnch bugs [package]
For me, the most interesting part was when I found about rpmbuild-order, which sorts rpm package spec files using the build order. It can even find the loops. This is already in Fedora.
In case you do not know yet - Lenovo created a small team focused on supporting Linux on notebooks. What is important - they introduced themself to the community, and they are easy to reach using email or forum and are working on broken things.
There is going to be a Fedora portal on the Lenovo web site. The URL is going to be announced. When you register with your @fedoraproject.org then you will receive a discount. The discount will vary and will change from time to time. But it should be very close to what Lenovo employee has as a discount.
Lenovo is working on LVFS very hard. No details or dates disclosed.
ThinkLMI - utility to access to BIOS WMI. It is being prepared to upstream but does not meet the quality to land in the kernel as a driver yet.
Work with upstream: Lapmode sensor enablement - accepted; Palm sensor, Performance mode control - in progress.
Fedora - 117 Physical systems, 250 Virtual Systems
And more for CentOS (I did not have enough time to copy the numbers from slides).
Rawhide gating completed late in 2019.
Noggin - replaces FAS2, uses FreeIPA for the backend.
CentOS Stream.
DNF counting - better statistics based on countme
Fedora-messaging.
Toddlers - small programms listening to fedora-messaging.
MBBOX - Module Build in a Box
rpmautospec - getting rid of changelog in spec files.
Monitor-gating - end to end testing of entire packager workflow.
Interesting number from Data Center move (107 servers moved, …)
My subjective feedback is that CPE is corporately organized, which has good and bad consequences.
Koji{-hub,-builder,ra} and MBS deployment in OpenShift.
For me, the new thing was that templates in OS are deprecated in favor of Operators (ebook).
rpkg-util approach adds too much complexity.
Emulating a human, as good as possible.
New macros: %autorel, %autochangelog.
fedpkg build triggers Koji builder plugin, which ensures that git tag is written in dist git and runs rpmautospec, which generates missing changelog and passes it to build.
Known shortcomings: among other - scratch builds from local SRPM don’t work yet.
Source code: https://pagure.io/fedora-infra/rpmautospec
Neal explained why he uses so many IRC nicks.
Kevin said that we should work on faster releases, increased pace without sacrificing quality.
There was a discussion on how are FESCO members influenced. By RedHatter and others.
It lasts 45 minutes before the first question about modularity pop up. Neal explained that it is floating, but much better than Software Collections.
It happened in Mozilla Hubs, which is a kind of VR. Interesting experience.