Flock Followups, 1-week Slip for F21, LinuxCon NA (5tFTW, 2014-08-12)

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 August 12th, 2014:

Flock Survey and Wrap-Up

We just finished the second annual Flock conference, and it was a smashing success. If you’ve been following Fedora Magazine, you’ve already seen a lot of our coverage. If you want more, take a look at the Planet Fedora blog aggregator for many reports from attendees.

If you attended, either in-person or virtually, please fill out the Flock attendee survey. (If you didn’t attend, please don’t take the survey, but do feel free to pass on any suggestions in other ways.)

Thanks so much to all the organizers who put so much work into making it a success: Miro Hrončok, Tom Callaway, Josh Boyer, Jaroslav Reznik, Jiří Eischmann, Joe Brockmeier, and especially Ruth Suehle, who put in a lot of behind-the-scenes work resulting in the magical appearance of a smooth and trouble-free conference.

Bids for Next Year

And, with that, it’s time to start thinking about next year. Development-focused Flock alternates between Europe and North America, with user-and-developer FUDCons continuing in Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Since this year’s Flock was in the Czech Republic, we’re looking for locations in North America for 2015. If you have an idea in mind and would like to help, see Ruth Suehle’s message on the Flock planning mailing list — Start working on your bids for Flock 2015!.

Flock Followups

Flock has a bit of a paradox — it’s a conference where much of the community gets together to engage in high-bandwidth discussions about the future. That’s great, and lets us make a lot of fast progress towards consensus — at least of the people in the room. But, of course, not everyone can be in the room, so it’s important that proposals hammered out at Flock be decided later in the community at large.

Kevin Fenzi posted a great reminder to this effect — making decisions in the open based on real community collaboration is essential to Fedora’s health.

I attended sessions with proposals around the Fedora schedule, the future of EPEL, focus for Fedora workstation, and, perhaps the biggest impact, changes to the Fedora Project Board. I’m sure there are many others. Were you there? Start a discussion on the relevant mailing lists — I’m hoping each of these will be features in 5tFTW in the coming weeks!

Fedora 21 to Slip by One More Week

Because of a problem with the glibc ABI (see this LWN article for technical details) and a possible gcc bug, we are doing another mass rebuild — recompiling all of the packages in Fedora. This will result in an additional one-week delay for Fedora 21. See the updated schedule on the wiki.

See You at LinuxCon in Chicago

Next week, I’ll be speaking about Fedora at LinuxCon North America. My talk is How Linux Distros Became Boring (and Fedora’s Plan to Put Boring Where It Belongs), and I hope to see you there!