Got to FUDCon today after a nice semi-sleepy red-eye flight. I was surprisingly awake for a person who has had less than 3 hours of sleep in the last 24+ hours. As I arrived, following Max’s instructions to the Hyne’s Convention Center, an announcement. The spins hackfest was beginning.
I quickly grabbed some coffee and an apple and headed in after Max. Little did I know how great this fest was going to be, all 4+ hours of it. After a good list of goals, Max handed control over to Mo and off we went.
Discussion surrounded three main stories, one for a user wanting to download a spin, one desiring to submit a spin and one for reviewers of spins. As it turns out, developing stories for the first two were pretty easy, and just before 11, we had a good idea of how to implement applications for these two users.
However, the third story, the one for reviewing. Yeah, that one. Well, I guess I just need to ask one hard question. The question I had was a simple one, but the answer is apparently much more complex, including both technical and legal questions about third-party distributions. And while it seems like a simple distinction, I brought this upon myself, uncovering a discussion that has been going on for 2+ years now.
The biggest problem is for those spins that include software not in the fedora repositories. How do we treat these spins? The discussion ended up being that while hosting these spins might not be feasible, we’d like to have a way to market the spins as built on Fedora or something similar. It seems that this is a good choice, but it needs to go through legal.
After an hour long discussion about these details (which I caused), we tabled it and came up with a good list of tasks to get the project started. Thanks to Ian Weller, there’s a good wiki page covering much of this discussion. In fact, I have a couple of tasks to complete this week.
At the end of the day, I ended up with some Red Hat folks at Legal Sea Foods, good wine, great company. If I wasn’t so tired, I’d have stayed much longer. Good times…
Tomorrow’s FUDCon barcamp looks to be pretty interesting. I plan to attend the video tools, the getting contributors and bug triage. In addition, there will probably be a couple that will come up tomorrow morning, so we’ll se how it goes.
Cheers,
Herlo