OK, so this is a late blog post for day 1, but the reason for that will be forthcoming. Here's a make up post for both! :) Alright, well this REALLY didn't happen, saw this hanging out in my drafts when I went to make another blog post. Ooops!!! Long live FUDCon :)
So we arrived on the FUDBus from Boston much earlier than anticipated, due to the ease of crossing the Canadian border (much easier than I thought - they asked no questions, and took my ID and gave it back to me in about 10 seconds), along with everyone else. We were probably in and out of the border at about 20 minutes or so.
We got in Friday night around 9PM, and stayed up for quite some time in the hotel lobby as is normal for a FUDCon, and went over to the "Irish Pub" (yes, that's what the sign said)
The session pitching unfortunately got started late, and was entirely too long. I know that it ruins the spirit of a true barcamp, but something online for doing session pitching prior to the conference, and a limited number of slots reserved for "day of" type things might actually be better, Dunno on that one, though
After the delayed session pitching, there were a good many sessions, all of them entirely excellent! First session that I went to was a session on eclipse for Fedora packagers and C/C++ developers, and I thought that Eclipse was only for Java peeps!
After a decent lunch, I went to Simon's talk on Zikula and how to integrate that into the Fedora Infrastructure, and talked to him later about the "state of Zikula in Fedora". I mentioned some of the release practices of Zikula, and he made me see things from their point of view. Specifically, the issue that I had was when I was doing a review for a plugin, there are two things that I ran into. First, there is no direct way to download the tarball (or zip file, as the case may be) from the upstream website. Secondly, the contents of that tarball, even though it may be named the same, are not actually the same. The reason for this is that when someone does translations, the translators expect the translations to show up immediately, with no interaction from the developers. This is slightly different than how most upstreams handle translations, only picking them up when a package is rebuilt (and having scheduled rebuilds to do nothing but pick up new translations)
After that, I attended the sysadmin and developer panel, where we explored the diametrically opposed desires of sysadmins and developers - sysadmins desire a stable system since we are the ones that get woken up at 3AM when the developer's code that uses the newest bling that no one can support breaks in the middle of the night, while developers always want the newest bling. I really think that we can coexist peacefully though :)
Then I attended a session on getting rid of dist-cvs!!!! Yay, it's about time! We're going to be moving to git ,and migrating away from the common module and make entirely! Part of the work required to do this is already ongoing as part of my work to migrate the CVS filesystem to use filesystem ACL's rather than using the existing mechanism of a flatfile that's checked by CVS hooks. Most of the code is written, I just need to figure out how to make it do only incremental updates (there's code there to pass it things on the command line to act on, maybe the best way is not in the script itself, but in something external that calls the ACL-setting code???)
Laslty, there was a session on MediaWiki formatting for non-experts, presented by our great Wiki czar, Ian Weller. I personally learned a great deal, because I'm not head down in the wiki all day, but I do have to edit it occasionally, and it seems that every time I do I quite thoroughly botch it up in new and interesting ways.
I got a lot done at the hackfests around the mailing list migration project as well as the aforementioned filesystem ACL setting script. I also potentially interest a new contributor to the project since I happened to be on IRC at the right time and he needed some guidance on ways to contribute to Fedora, so I happily provided that and introduced him to some folks that could get him going!
All in all, it was an excellent FUDCon, and well worth my time going there!
So we arrived on the FUDBus from Boston much earlier than anticipated, due to the ease of crossing the Canadian border (much easier than I thought - they asked no questions, and took my ID and gave it back to me in about 10 seconds), along with everyone else. We were probably in and out of the border at about 20 minutes or so.
We got in Friday night around 9PM, and stayed up for quite some time in the hotel lobby as is normal for a FUDCon, and went over to the "Irish Pub" (yes, that's what the sign said)
The session pitching unfortunately got started late, and was entirely too long. I know that it ruins the spirit of a true barcamp, but something online for doing session pitching prior to the conference, and a limited number of slots reserved for "day of" type things might actually be better, Dunno on that one, though
After the delayed session pitching, there were a good many sessions, all of them entirely excellent! First session that I went to was a session on eclipse for Fedora packagers and C/C++ developers, and I thought that Eclipse was only for Java peeps!
After a decent lunch, I went to Simon's talk on Zikula and how to integrate that into the Fedora Infrastructure, and talked to him later about the "state of Zikula in Fedora". I mentioned some of the release practices of Zikula, and he made me see things from their point of view. Specifically, the issue that I had was when I was doing a review for a plugin, there are two things that I ran into. First, there is no direct way to download the tarball (or zip file, as the case may be) from the upstream website. Secondly, the contents of that tarball, even though it may be named the same, are not actually the same. The reason for this is that when someone does translations, the translators expect the translations to show up immediately, with no interaction from the developers. This is slightly different than how most upstreams handle translations, only picking them up when a package is rebuilt (and having scheduled rebuilds to do nothing but pick up new translations)
After that, I attended the sysadmin and developer panel, where we explored the diametrically opposed desires of sysadmins and developers - sysadmins desire a stable system since we are the ones that get woken up at 3AM when the developer's code that uses the newest bling that no one can support breaks in the middle of the night, while developers always want the newest bling. I really think that we can coexist peacefully though :)
Then I attended a session on getting rid of dist-cvs!!!! Yay, it's about time! We're going to be moving to git ,and migrating away from the common module and make entirely! Part of the work required to do this is already ongoing as part of my work to migrate the CVS filesystem to use filesystem ACL's rather than using the existing mechanism of a flatfile that's checked by CVS hooks. Most of the code is written, I just need to figure out how to make it do only incremental updates (there's code there to pass it things on the command line to act on, maybe the best way is not in the script itself, but in something external that calls the ACL-setting code???)
Laslty, there was a session on MediaWiki formatting for non-experts, presented by our great Wiki czar, Ian Weller. I personally learned a great deal, because I'm not head down in the wiki all day, but I do have to edit it occasionally, and it seems that every time I do I quite thoroughly botch it up in new and interesting ways.
I got a lot done at the hackfests around the mailing list migration project as well as the aforementioned filesystem ACL setting script. I also potentially interest a new contributor to the project since I happened to be on IRC at the right time and he needed some guidance on ways to contribute to Fedora, so I happily provided that and introduced him to some folks that could get him going!
All in all, it was an excellent FUDCon, and well worth my time going there!
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