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 Haïkel Guémar (hguemar)
What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?
I have been in the project for nine years, I’m currently provenpackager/sponsor, ambassador and part of the Cloud WG. I was part of the last Fedora Board and partly responsible of the creation to the Fedora Council.
I’m also part of the CentOS Cloud SIG where I lead the Openstack packaging effort.
Do you think Fedora should be time based or more feature driven distribution? Or compromise?
We’re living in a fast-moving world, I’m not against reconsidering the schedule but I’d rather release more often than the contrary. I’m leaning toward keeping the current 6 months schedule and make Rawhide a more usable alternative to advanced users.
On the other hand, I would very like see Fedora Products (namely Server and Workstation) offer long term releases (2 years ?) to suit the needs of our community. That means adapting our infrastructure and getting more contributors helping out.
What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today (from engineering POV)? What should we do about them?
Fossilization.
Fedora has been a great place to innovate and doing the right things, but we’ve slowly trapped ourselves in our own processes. Our infrastructure is also dealing with its own history and limited resources. The difficulty is to evolve without losing our DNA, I don’t want to compromise with our foundations.
FESCo should encourage the various engineering groups to be more daring and supervise their work and interactions. We need to simplify processes without compromising with our quality.
Self-hosting
Since the beginning, Fedora has made a lot of effort to remain self-hosted, but the new collaborative platforms has changed that. Now, a lot of projects are mainly hosted on github, tasks managed through trello etc. We need to provide better collaborative tools to our contributors and not be tied to proprietary platforms. One of the Fedora Infrastructure, I have biggest hopes is Progit which is a sane collaborative code hosting platforms.
I’m afraid that FESCo has little influence on that topic and that should be addressed by Fedora Council.
What are your interests and experience outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?
I have been staff representative and I have proven being quite “obstinate” at defending my peers and ethics My $DAYJOB is software engineer dealing with cloudy technologies and I’m an agile methodologies/software craftsmanship expert. As an “agile” monkey, I have experience in identifying and fixing bottlenecks/impediments to improve the overall workflow.
I have few hobbies but none is really relevant for Fedora.
Anything else voters should know?
Why am I applying to FESCo? I think that current FESCo members do their work pretty well, but it’s lacking diversity and new blood. I don’t think that I am better than any of the other candidates but I have a different perspectives and it could be valuable. Especially my experience at CentOS, may help bridging the two communities.
My favourite Dr Sheldon Cooper quote is “I’m not insane my mother had me tested” (Just checking if people are actually reading this).
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?
Definitively, FESCo is the technical leadership of Fedora and it should be able to reach a far larger audience. Many contributors have little knowledge on FESCo and what it does, it needs to be fixed.
What can you accomplish as part of FESCo that you couldn’t accomplish as a contributor to Fedora without sitting on FESCo?
Address pain points, improve contributors life effectively.
With the advent of Fedora Council now, what do you see as the significance of FESCO in Fedora project?
As one of the persons who led the governance change, running for FESCo should be enough proving that I do believe that FESCo is still relevant. FESCo is still an important body of Fedora leadership, as it participates to the council through the Fedora Engineering representative (currently Josh Boyer).
Do you think FESCo can help with the reduction of the backlog of >400 packages awaiting review?
Yes, as the problem is that our reviewing process doesn’t scale as that falls under FESCo reserved domain. But it’s unlikely to change as there’s no consensus in how to fix that issue. I could try leading a consultation on Fedora devel and come up with few proposals to FESCo to remove bottlenecks. So the only way to get this sorted is to encourage packagers to do more reviews, and I expect that provenpackagers and sponsors shows the way. In my own opinion, sponsors/provenpackagers that have not reviewed any packages in the last two years, should be removed from these groups. Since fedora-review, reviewing packages is much less painful as it was in the past, there are no excuses!
One of the most interesting initiative on that topic is Fedora Review Server.