Docker, FESCo Election, Android App for Flock, Flock Video Volunteers, and Release Naming (5tFTW 2014-07-15)

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for July 15th, 2014:

Fedora and Docker

The various Working Groups in Fedora have been talking quite a bit about Docker recently. (In case you haven’t seen all the hype, Docker is a platform for distributing and running application containers — a form of light-weight operating system-level virtualization. It also features a cute whale as its logo.)

In the Fedora Cloud WG, we’re planning on producing official Fedora Docker base images — these will be produced and uploaded by Fedora Release Engineering. Right now, because Docker is a key part of the upcoming Project Atomic-based Fedora Atomic, the Cloud SIG is doing the initial work and QA, but, eventually, the plan is to hand this off to the Environments and Stacks WG, because it looks like Docker and containerization will be important across much of Fedora in the future.

And, in fact, this week Docker was a topic of conversation in the other Fedora product Working Groups as well. Fedora Workstation member Christian Schaller blogs about how Docker fits with future plans for desktop containers, and although it’s in early stages, the Fedora Server WG has been discussing using Docker to implement some Server Roles.

FESCo Election

The Summer 2014 special election for open seats on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) is underway. Voting is open to everyone who has agreed to the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (which, by the way, is very lightweight and is not a copyright assignment agreement) and is in one other Fedora group — a packager, ambassador, or pretty much anything else. (Technically, you need to be in at least one other group in FAS, the Fedora Account System.)

Read the candidates’ answers to the election questionnaire, and, if you like, check out the log from Friday’s IRC Town Hall Meeting. Then, vote!

Android App for Flock!

Flock, our annual development conference, is coming up quickly — it’s August 6-9 in Prague. (Interested in coming, but not yet registered? Hurry! Registration closes at midnight UTC on Thursday.)

If you have a smartphone running Android, the Flock conference schedule app is available now (thanks to Fedora contributors at Red Hat CZ!).

Video Volunteers for Flock

Speaking of Flock, organizers are asking for volunteers for session video. According to Miro Hrončok:

Each 45 minute session needs to have a volunteer running the camera, watching a timer, and monitoring IRC for Q&A (if it happens). Without your help, we will get no stream and no recording.

If you are interested in helping, please sign up on the Flock volunteers wiki page.

What’s Fedora 21 Going to Be Named?

This is old news to many of us, but I’ve gotten the question a few times — what will Fedora 21 be named? Well, it’ll be named “Fedora 21”, without any codename. This was decided by the Fedora Project Board last October (and widely reported in the press in January.)

In many ways, the naming system is supplanted by stronger individual separate branding for Cloud, Server, and Workstation as part of Fedora.next. And, as we’ve recently discussed in Board meetings, we’d like to see similar stronger branding for the various Fedora desktop spins too. Basically, more focus on what users are getting, and less on which six month period the release was produced in. (Except for Beefy Miracle, does anyone remember which name belonged with which number, anyway?)

In any case, as the first Fedora 21 Alpha release approaches (August 5th, right before Flock!), various groups in Fedora are working on this, including Fedora Marketing, the Docs and Websites teams are helping to figure out how we’ll present it all in an appealing yet straightforward way. As always, your input into this is very welcome — even if we won’t be voting on (increasingly obscure) names.