This is a part of FESCo Elections interviews series.
Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The elections started on June 22nd and closes promptly at 23:59 UTC on June 28th.
Please read the responses from candidates and make your choices carefully.
Feel free to ask questions of the candidates here or elsewhere!

Interview with Germano Massullo (germano)

What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

I am a Fedora user since 2009.
I co-mantain the Darktable package, and I am working to get soon the co-mantainership of some other packages.
I do tests of Fedora pre-releases in order to have the most stable releases.
I give my help in English-Italian translations and documentation editing.
I actually provide support to users in the Fedora website and mailing list of my country.

Do you think Fedora should be time based or more feature driven distribution? Or compromise?

I think that the actual Fedora paradigm is a good compromise between them: we have two releases per year and each of them with a 13 months support. Fedora updates policy states that package maintainers should introduce a major update for each release, providing to users the possibility to use the old version (using the n-1 Fedora release) or the bleeding edge version (using the latest ‘n’ Fedora release).

What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today (from engineering POV)? What should we do about them?

Recently we experienced some regressions during distro upgrades, indeed some users prefer to wait some weeks before starting the upgrade, so that possible new bugs can be fixed. These problems could be avoided with a more deeper testing.

What are your interests and experience outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?

Concerning information technology, my main interests outside Fedora are in grid computing platforms, in geodata handling and metropolitan area wireless networks. I don’t know if they can help me in this role, but I think that the grid computing platforms can apply in Fedora Cloud area of interest.

Anything else voters should know?

I am from Rome, Italy. On my wiki page you can find more details about me.

How can FESCo do a better job communicating with the rest of the Fedora community, or do you feel that FESCo is already doing well here?

I had good experiences in contacting FESCo to solve some problems: there have been a few package maintainers that did not respect the Fedora policies, so I opened some tickets and FESCo solved the problems in a very good way.

What can you accomplish as part of FESCo that you couldn’t accomplish as a contributor to Fedora without sitting on FESCo?

As FESCo member I could help Fedora contributors in solving their problems and listening to their needs. Moreover I can bring my vision of things in the decision process.

With the advent of Fedora Council now, what do you see as the significance of FESCO in Fedora project?

Council is the top-level community leadership but I don’t think that we have overlap between FESCo and Council areas of interests. FESCo is pretty technical, Council instead has many other responsibilities.

Do you think FESCo can help with the reduction of the backlog of >400 packages awaiting review?

I think that the FESCo could propose some new guidelines: for example suggesting that each package maintainer should do a review of a certain amount of other packages. But what we need the most, is some new contributors, the community is doing a great job, but sometimes we feel that if we had more contributors, many problems could be solved in less time. For this task we need a support from Fedora ambassadors that everyday do a wonderful work in promoting the Project and seeking for new contributors.