Changing Times , Riddles of Rochester - Flock 2024

Epilogue

Flock is the annual event for Fedora and this years marks 8yrs of me attending. Flock has taught me so much over the years and this year was just little it special. The direction Fedora Project takes from this moment on will be significant. The contributor base it amasses, might feel overwhelmed and debate the value to cost ratio but this all is part of much bigger picture. The change(s) will help the project to have leaner, meaner and lighter infra workload. The decent increase in the quality of life of contributor and smoother contributor convergence (in-sync) with rest of Open Source life!

The prep

I flew in from Kolkata,India (CCU). I will spare you folks the 40hrs of madness and travel shenanigans.  This time a lot was on my mind, from the redhat side of things .. the impending change in org structure. Fedora Project is actively trying to find another git forge replacement and sunset pagure and bugzilla. Konflux-ci is on the rise and that will be a change to the build ci soon.

Session Highlight

FPL x State of Fedora 

State of Fedora by Matthew as always addressed the folks at Flock about what Fedora project is striving for in recent times. The session focused on the long term strategy Fedora is adopting for 2028 and will be continuing in the same path. This talk briefly touched upon the usage of AI in Fedora and how the project intends to make firmer decisions in the future. Amongst other things, we also go to see the usual numbers and how survey results have helped out the project. 

Leadership Sessions

The Council Townhall and the FESCo Live are two of the regular panels which happens every year (usually Day1) ; they are more of AMA type session where the people ask questions and the leadership answers them to best of their knowledge. This year, we had all of FESCo and Council in the house to quench the thirst of audience. 

Running Fedora Linux Workstation at Scale 

In the recent days Fedora is being deployed by RHT on their company laptops for employees. The sheer scale of running and handling a community powered distro in an industry leading, mission critical systems always comes with it's own challenges. The fedora CSB (as it's called) got major feeedback and this talk highlighted the same. This talk showcased how performance at scale is being dealt with and provisioning the endpoint system is still being done with Ansible Automation Platform.

 

What does Red Hat want?

For those who are regular to Flock, Bex is the one who has been presenting this for sometime now. This talk is like Jack Sparrow's Compass (shows what RHT wants in their hearts for Fedora). Too bad, we will miss Bex :) 

I believe he had some major commentary about the leadership and the suggestion to work together with CentOS and other upstreams in the same space. 

 

State of Fedora AI/ML

Tim Flink, one of my teammate presented on the AI/ML and where things are. He touchbased on projects and the efforts thereof both in terms of Intel and AMD HW and software ecosystems like Pytorch. 

 

Git forge replacement 

This one has been on the cards for LOOONG. There are some amazing updates to this saga, we have the arc investigation happening and multiple stakeholders are planning to have regular updates as we move in through the process. The QA team is now working closely with CPE to formulate requirements and figuring out the best possible tool among Forgeo and Gitlab.