Episode: 846
Title: HPR0846: Jared Smith from Fedora
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0846/hpr0846.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:25:21

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Hi everyone, this is Clay too. I'm the last day of Ohio Linux Fest and I'm sitting
down with Jared Smith, the current project leader of Fedora. Hey, Jared, how are you doing?
I'm doing all right. How are you doing?
Pretty good. Fedora 15 is looking really, really nice with it. I can know him three.
What kind of feedback have you been getting on that? What do you think of it?
I think the Fedora 15 release was a good solid release. Obviously, you know, like any release
when you change some things, that there's some pushback and there's some people that
like to change and some people that like to change. And there's some things that need
a little polish and clean up. And so we're working on Fedora 16 right now and obviously
on the GNOME front, it'll have the GNOME 3.2, which will have some of the newer features
and some of the features that they just didn't have done in time for GNOME 3.0. But we're
working on a number of other things as well to make it a good solid release. But overall,
I'm very happy with the way that Fedora 15 turned out.
Yeah, me too. I mean, I've been playing around with the KDE version on my laptop that I've
been playing around with the GNOME version. I have to say that one of the things that I sometimes
keep saying is that GNOME 3 kind of out OS X, the latest OS X release because I saw literally
Fedora 15 GNOME 3 and I was like, wow, this is really nice. And then my school got a
new OS X computer with a line on it. I was like, it's it. It just felt like really like
not.
The GNOME 3 release obviously had a lot of polish to it. It looked really slick. Functionality
wise, there's a few things that we're missing from it. And I think the GNOME team is working
hard on that for the GNOME 3.2. But overall, it's a very usable desktop. It's different
than GNOME 2 obviously. So we have to set that expectation appropriately that if people
are expecting this to be like GNOME 2, it's not.
But if you take the time to use to it and play around, I find it very easy to get around
the GNOME 3. The keyboard shortcuts make it a huge time saver for me. It's unobtrusive.
It stays out of your way. It doesn't distract you with a lot of things blinking in the
desktop.
Yeah.
I quite like it.
So I don't actually, I mean, I know it's been fairly recent, I think. But how long have
you been the project leader now?
I've been the project leader since July of last year. So the lower year now.
Okay.
Exactly. And I've probably asked Paul this before, probably people have asked Max that before.
But what does a project leader do? Like, what do you do as the project manager? Whatever.
The project leader is an interesting role because you're ultimately responsible for everything
that happens in Fedora. At the same time, you don't have a whole lot of power to direct
you. You don't have people reporting to you. You can't just go out and say, this is
what we're going to do and now go do it. Really, it's a role trying to lead the community
through communication and increasing the communication within our community. We work
hard to try to do coordination between the different groups, whether they're special
interest groups or release engineering or the engineering steering committee or the
ambassador steering committee design or documentation or translation, all those sorts of things.
It's getting those, those pieces communicating and working together. And it's keeping on
schedule. And then it's also dealing with personnel issues, conflicts, trying to help
make sure that they're a kind of personality conflict. There are personality conflicts.
Anytime you get a bunch of smart people together, you're going to have differences
of opinions. They're going to have people with less than perfect social skills. But we
do our best to try to resolve those in an amicable manner and try to keep focused on what's
right, not necessarily who's right. I think that's important. What do you see as the method
of communication? Like, what's the answer to that? Like, how is that? How is improving
communication done in your view? So far. There's several things you can do. First of
all, it's helping the people get to know each other outside of just a mailing list or an
IRC channel. I found that when you're arguing technical details with someone over something
like IRC or mailing list, it's not always ideal conditions for getting to establish some
sort of a relationship of trust with that other person. And sometimes getting to know that
person either in an in-face setting or in a wide band setting really helps that. Sometimes
it's as simple as a phone call. There's inflection. There's things you get from either an in-face
conversation with someone or a phone conversation with someone that you don't get over IRC.
That means that it's not always easy to get all the people in the same physical location.
And so there's other things that we're doing within the Fedora community to try to increase
the signal-to-noise ratio, so to speak on things like IRC or mailing list. We put in place
over the past year a code of conduct, which should be self-explanatory. But, you know, a set
of guidelines, these are the sorts of things we expect from people participating in the
project. Treat each other civilly to ask questions, you know, those sorts of things.
Give them benefit of the doubt. Give them benefit of the doubt. Don't question other
people's motives. You know, those sorts of things that help facilitate communications.
And then the other thing is just making sure that everybody understands that we want
the communication in Fedora. We want people to be able to voice their opinion, but we want
them to do that in a specific manner. We want meetings to be transparent and open. We
want it to be clear when decisions are made. Who made the decision? Why was it made?
What was the, what was the, the data leading up to that decision?
Well, I mean, that's always been one of the things that I really, really like about
Fedora. It's like any, whenever a decision is made, it's always, it always feels like
it is a community decision. I mean, I know there's always going to be a minority and a majority
of people on one side of an issue, but it's always in contrast to other distributions
that I might not mention. It seems like Fedora really, really gets the community, or it
is built from the community. We, we, we, we really try to do, you know, have that
transparency and everything. You know, that means that sometimes it's not the most
efficient way possible to make a decision. And sometimes it takes entirely too long to
make a decision. But I would, personally, I would rather err on the side of taking a
little bit longer, taking a little bit more time to get community input rather than
just making a quick decision. But, you know, it's always, it's always that balancing
we could, we could debate a topic for years and years and never come to a consensus.
Right. Yeah. We always try to try to make sure that the people that are interested in
are following along, have the chance to, to make their, their, and known the
decision. One of the things that I mean, I know I'm really, really guilty of is that
like something will go up for a vote, literally a vote, then you can go to the site and you
can vote on something. And, you know, I put it off and I put it off and then it
ends and it gets voted on. I like, well, it kind of underscores the idea that if you
don't participate, your, your voice isn't heard. So I remember it's, it's gotten a
lot easier logistically to sign up to be a part of the Fedora community. You
know, you upload your SSH key, public key, stuff like that. What about like just
drawing new people, even more new people into being really a part of the
process rather than just kind of being users? Yeah. Well, that's something we focused a lot
on over the past year. Obviously, even signing up to be a member of the Fedora
party. You know, you no longer have to generate a public key and I want that sort
of thing. We, our website's team, late last year and early this year, spent a
lot of time revamping the Fedora project. Web site to make it really appeal to
people who don't know what Fedora is and really starting out. What is Fedora? How
do I get started? How do I figure out where within Fedora I fit? You know, my
people person, do I, do I want to become an ambassador? I'm not a writer. I
want to be part of the documentation team. Am I going to be a package or am I
a technical person trying to help those people get their first steps within the
community? Obviously, we have more more steps to do. One of my focuses for this
next upcoming years to increase mentorship within the project. Help people
think about, it's not just about who we have in the project here today, but
how can we take the people who are kind of on the on the outskirts of the
project who would be willing to help and want to help and have that ambition to
help, but they just need to get up to speed in the tools and the techniques and
the workflows and the process. So if you know you're a good writer and you know
you can communicate well, but you don't know public and then maybe there's like
maybe you don't have to like wait until you teach yourself public in exactly
probably. And unfortunately, I've seen so many people, you talk about the
docs side of things. So many people come in and say, hey, I want to be a writer
and we say, yeah, start writing. They're like, I don't understand the tools and
yeah, I don't understand doc book and XML and other things. And my answer is
always don't worry about that. Don't worry about the mechanics. Just go right
right. Text editor. Don't let the tools and the process get in the way of your
contribution. We'll help you with the agging and the conversion and those sorts of
things. Well, I don't think that's it. I don't think that's a typically expected
answer. I would not expect that if I went into Fedora IRC and said that, I don't
think that's what I would expect. So there's things like that we can do to help
people say, just just dive in and start. Do your best. Doesn't have to be
perfect. We're not going to mock you for for trying, you know, but get going to
do something and then we'll help you. We'll help you get up to speed on the
tools and the processes and the workflow. Very cool. Okay, well, so stepping back,
how did you get involved with Fedora yourself? Like what's your background? I've been
a long time Linux user. I started with Red Hat 4 2 and I've been using Linux
for ever since when Fedora got started. I was always a user of Fedora. I would
always sign, I was always a member of the test list and whenever a beta would
come out, I would download install it and try it out and try to help, help
triage bugs and that sort of thing. But I didn't really take an active, an
active role in being a contributor to Fedora. Can you tell about the
Fedora 6 time frame right around there? And that's when I really got, I was
doing some writing and doc book for other things and so I joined the Fedora
bot project and that's how I got my start. I write some things and more than
writing I was doing a lot of helping with the tools and conversions and kind of
the backend dirty work that needs to be done but isn't always out there in
public line line. So I helped out with that and then a couple of years ago
because of some of the voice over IP work I was doing, I helped set up a voice
over IP server within Fedora called Fedora talk. Fedora talk, is that you? So I
used to use that for, I would go into those rooms and use them for quick
interviews with people. I would record the calls. Jeff Ollie and I went, thanks.
It's gone now. It's gone now, unfortunately, but that was something we both
worked on and helped set up for going. And about that time I started paying more
attention when Paul Freelds became the Fedora project leader. He was in my local
lug. We were different. So we started talking a lot more about the mechanics of
what happens inside of Fedora and I started attending more fun cons and that
sort of thing and really became Fedora contributor more than just an end user.
I take my experience of being a kind of a user, slowly became a contributor,
slowly got more up to speed in what was happening and wanted to contribute more.
And I think other people should have that same sort of experience. It's
always exciting to me to see people go through that same transition. For me and
you probably felt the same way when you were doing it. I mean like when you
start getting more involved with the project and you realize that you can be
more than just a user and you're like, wow, you mean I can really actually make
a difference in the software that I use anyway and love anyway. And yet I'm
also now like, you know, you feel like you're built, well, you are building it
even though you're not a program. I feel cool. I'm not responsible for every single
bit and bite that goes out. Right. Yeah. I have a chance to make a difference in
the world. Yes. Very reward. It's crazy. Can you tell me a little bit about
FedCon? What is it? Where does it happen? Why does it happen? Sure. So
FedCon is the Fedora users and developers conference. Kind of a name on the
Fed fear uncertain. We have a FedCon four times a year. So once each year in
North America, once in Latin America, once in Europe, Middle East Africa area and
once in Asia Pacific region. So we've got several FedCon's coming up. And the
next one is in Milan, Italy, the beginning of October. So that will cover our
European region. We've got one coming up in November in Pune, India. So that
covers our Asia Pacific region. And then on North America's FedCon is coming up
the middle of January, the 13th through the 15th of January, Blacksburg, Virginia
on the Virginia Tech campus. Oh, cool. Okay. What happens there is it just
basically like the Linux festers a bit more of like a I guess it's got to be
more of a planning thing, right? It's a little bit of everything. Usually the
the FedCon has about half of it is about maybe a little bit more than half
is a bar camp style. Talks people show up the first day. They present
they they stand up and propose say I want to do a presentation on a
documentation or I want to do a presentation on packaging or I want to do a
presentation on robots or you know whatever whatever their passion is about.
And then we vote on those in the bar camp sessions about the things that
people want to hear about. The other half of FedCon is usually a set of
hackfests and planning meetings and people who are passionate about a
particular topic get together and say hey what can we do to make things
better for the next six months or the next year or the next release. And then
there's a lot of informal meetings as well. People getting together with
people you know that they've chatted with on IRC here, emailed back and forth
but getting to know people better and having a good time we usually have
an event we call FedPub which is usually a dinner and drinks and get
together and you know sometimes shoot pool or go bowling or things like that
just to develop those social relationships as well. Yeah well like you say
which is important so the next time you think something is a horrible idea you
don't end up flaming the person because oh no it's a real person. It's a real
person. Yeah very cool. Yeah I'm gonna probably try to get down to the the one
this is January in Virginia. Last but not least what what's upcoming in the
next release what are the big exciting ideas they've got I mean I know
16 is just an alpha right now so it might be pretty early but while we still
have a we have a pretty good idea of new features going into Fedor 16 on
the kind of desktop front updated version of GNOME we'll have the GNOME
3.2 stack but updated version of KDE as well so we you know trying to keep
track of the desktops there yeah from kind of the internal plumbing kind of
stuff with Fedor 15 we went to the system D initialization system but we were
using it in kind of compatibility mode where it was still using system 5-style
initialization scripts okay we slowly started moving all those initialization
scripts over to be being made of system D so I have I have a question about
that I guess I'm sure is that going to change the way on the rail boxes at work
that I like like if that was to well I guess it wouldn't change anything
like rail because as much switching to system D but yet but would let's say I
have a Fedora server or something would that change the way that I would
start and stock services and stuff or is it um you can still use it if you're
used to saying like server service such as you can still do that check and
figure still check and figure is still valid but you can actually use the
native system D tools to get a little more fine-grained control of that one
example is is in the system 5 initialization system that we were using before
you had run level 3 and you had level 5 right with system D you have a much
more flexibility you say oh I have a network target I have a graphical
target you can define your own targets and saying these these targets have
dependencies on these particular services okay and so instead of just
numbering them to get them to come up in order or or saying you know these
these static run levels we can actually have targets that are very flexible
that's pretty and instead of saying oh they have to come up in this set order
they can say this one depends on this one so it's dependency that's really
dependency resolution like we do with packages yeah but with our with our
startups there's lots of other interesting things you can do a system
but it's probably a little more advanced the rail you want to have in quick
interview sounds really exciting and thanks for thanks for talking
to me it was good meeting you too thank you
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