I figured, since I just got home from dinner and had a little time on my hands before I try to get some Docs work done, that I would post some abbreviated minutes from the BoF session earlier this evening for those of you who missed it. (“I wouldn’t say we were ‘missing’ it, Paul.”) This is a combination of the introductory comments made by the panel, questions asked by the audience members, and answers given by the people in attendance. Hopefully any of the other attendees who heard something different than I, or find something erroneous herein, will feel free to correct it. If you see something that looks wrong to you, it’s probably because I’ve misstated it.
- Jack turned the mic over to Max Spevack, the new chairman of the Fedora Project Board, who talked a bit about the board and how it was constituted. Basically, this boiled down to people who have contributed/are contributing a lot to Fedora, regardless of whether they agree with Red Hat about any particular subject. (That’s a paraphrase and not verbatim, thus no quotes.)
- Max wants to make sure that the financials of the Fedora Project are made as transparent as possible.
- Why can’t we do a proviate non-profit foundation? It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s that doing it does not bear a substantial value beyond what the Fedora community can already do for itself.
- The illustrious Jeremy Katz opened the door for the perennial MP3, DVD, etc. questions, which were dealt with efficiently. He did not hesitate to point out that legal MP3 usage is possible with the generous efforts of the kind people at Fluendo. He further pointed out that they have other neat GStreamer related goodies in the works.
- If Fedora changes away from CVS to some other revision control system, we only want to change once. At least for the next “three to four years” (that’s a quote from Jeremy, who wisely refuses to crystal-ball any further out than that).
- A question was raised about continuing hearsay of mixing third-party yum repositories. Extras is now open for everything that is appropriate for inclusion in the actual “Fedora” umbrella. Third party repositories are welcome to move whatever they can into Extras. In addition, their continued cooperation with each other will minimize the chances of these kinds of conflict. Beyond that, Fedora doesn’t have any real interest in “making” third-party repositories do anything they don’t want to.
- Lots of progress has been made on the Fedora LiveCD. But it needs more work, and would benefit from the help of a few ambitious community members with mad Python and Anaconda skillz. Jeremy mentioned that, when you think about it, the LiveCD problem is very much related to Stateless Linux, which has undergone a sort of resurrection lately. There are “people actively working on” Stateless again at this point.
- One audience member asked what the focus of Fedora was, and the general answer seemed to be that this was a “herding cats” question. In particular, the question seemed to be about the GUI-central nature of Anaconda, which has progressed at the expense of the text-mode installer. This progression has been driven by requirements. Since running X is no longer even close to the big deal it used to be, that is where the work has gone. CLI-oriented folks are used to doing their own thing, and most of them are (or should be) choosing Kickstart for installation anyway.
Anyway, that’s how I remember it. I took some notes with Tomboy during the session to keep things somewhat straight. Again, if you see an error or omission, it’s likely mine alone.