Kevin's musings

I recently went to Brno, CZ for CPE (Community Platform Engineering) meetings and then devconfcz 2019 and thought I would share my take on both of them.

Travel to and from Brno is always a long one for me. I’m currently based in Oregon, US, so my journey is:

• Drive to portland airport (PDX)
• Flight from Portland to Amsterdam (AMS) (a 9-11hour flight)
• Flight to Prague (PRG) (usually a 1-2 hour flight)
• Bus to train station (30-40min)
• Train to Brno (2-3 hours)

And then the same in reverse on the way back, with all the associated timezone issues. 🙂 I am very happy about the direct amsterdam flight, so I don’t have to change planes in london or frankfurt or something.

A short word about the CPE team. We are a team in Red Hat that works on Fedora and CentOS (formerly Fedora Engineering). We have some application developer folks who write and fix our custom applications (bodhi, pagure, release-monitoring, etc) as well as a number of Operations folks who keep the Fedora and CentOS infrastructures running smoothly.

We spent the week of Jan 21st meeting up and discussing plans for the year as well as ways we could be more responsive to the community and better handle our (large) workflow.

• 2019-01-21: Brian Stinson went over the CentOS CI setup we have and we identified projects that we care about that didn’t have any CI and worked on fixing them up. We got a bunch more projects with (all be it simple) tests running.
• 2019-01-22: We talked about ways to be more efficent with out workload. We determined to try and have a ops person paired with a dev person on deployments to avoid delays. We talked about doing more pair work. We talked about changing our status reports. Then we wrote up all the planned work we know of in the coming year, prioritized it, gave it owners to write up. We should have this info up on the wiki before too long (or somewhere).
• 2019-01-23: We talked about rawhide gating and changed our plan to be simpler than it had been. We went over the fedmsg to fedora-messaging changeover. We moved some apps to openshift and fedora-messaging. More to come.
• 2019-01-24: We had some meetings with some internal Red Hat teams on how we could help each other by doing things first in Fedora and how best to do that. We worked some more on priorities and upcoming tasks.

Then it was time for devconfcz. Always a great conference. Tons of talks to see and tons of people to talk to in the hallway track. A few of the talks I really wanted to go to I got to too late and they were already full, but I did see some interesting ones.

There was a lot of discussion about EPEL8 in the hallway track, but luckily we had a number of the people who knew how modularity works there to quash plans that wouldn’t work and to propose ones that would. At this point the plan is to make a EPEL8beta that is just the “ursine” packages and test that out while working on modular EPEL8. For modular EPEL8 we are going to look at something that takes the modular RHEL repos and splits them out into one repo per module. Then we can hopefully get mbs to use these external modules when it needs them as build requirements and we can also decide what modules we want in the ‘ursine’ buildroot. This is all handwavy and subject to change, but it is a plan. 🙂

Smooge and I gave our EPEL talk and I think it went pretty well. There were a lot of folks there at any rate and we used up the time no problem.

As always after a chance to meet up with my co-workers and see tons of interesting talks I’m really looking forward to the next few months. Lots and lots of work to do, but we will get it done!