Archive for August, 2009
This post is brought to you by Gary C. Martin from the Sugar Labs project, a Fedora downstream that ships to over half a million schoolchildren worldwide. Seems like there’s some confusion on how the submit-a-bug-to-Fedora workflow should go.
I reported my first Fedora ticket yesterday! :-)
Comments/feedback before, but nothing from scratch. Now the tracker was a bit of a rough ride. Issue 1: “So, where does this component actually live, out of this page and a half of meta-packages and product I’ve never heard of before.” Followed by “I think this is the right section but its package list search feature crashes my browser (twice), so let me just try and scroll through the (rather long) alphabetical list manually and hope it has the name I think it might.” I was in luck!
After fumbling through, deciding which fields I should actually be filling in, I finally submitted. When I next checked email (maybe ~20min later), I had a reply! It turned out that the ticket report for some misc Fedora package went to, of all people, Tomeu [an incredibly active Sugar Labs developer]. Whose very email thread earlier in the day had triggered me to bump into the ‘issue’ and (at a suggestion from [Fedora's] Mathieu Bridon) file the ticket in the first place.
Embarrassingly, after all that, the ticket report was all based around my confusion (an upstream package using a python related compiler option that make little difference in the currently available package provided by F11, but the same option provides a potentially useful new Sugar feature in the not yet quite official version). Now closed by me as a WONTFIX.
So, after a day walking around in ‘the hall of mirrors’, I still ended up managing to talk mostly with Tomeu, even though I didn’t know it was him at the time :-)
Anyway, your email raised a perhaps actionable question. Digging through the track fields yesterday, with my Sugarite hat on, I didn’t see any reference to Sugar, or where one would likely go. I have a vague past recollection of some “master Sugar ticket” living somewhere in the bug tracker that I should have linked my new ticket too? What’s the best way to find it, perhaps documented somewhere in the SoaS distro wiki pages as it’s directly Fedora related? Going the other way seems easier (finding Fedora tickets entered in the SL tracker), as there’s a specific “Distribution/OS: Fedora” option to query for.
FWIW, I did some digging through my mail archives, the tracker I had vague past recollection of, was actually a “(FedoraOnXO) Tracker for supporting Fedora on the XO”, here’s the tracker bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461806
I guess maybe a tracker like this for “Sugar on Fedora”? Though I’m guessing most tickets may appear from SoaS the work, as that’s where the task of making Sugar run well on Fedora will first strike a road bump.
Gary’s not the only one wondering about ticket workflow, by the way. What should he – and other downstreams – do?
Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | fedora, sugar | 1 Comment »
Simon Wesp did the Fedora logo lasercutting (with no etching). It did turn out pretty sweet, though I wonder why he didn’t try the etching (maybe our suggestions didn’t make it in time).
Scallops are delicious. Chick-fil-a is tasty. I like the flavor of smoked meat. A lot. Even tuna, which I thought would be disgusting with smoke flavor.
Sleeping on a good mattress in a temperature-controlled room is so very much worth it.
My laptop is beginning to disintegrate – largely mechanically (plastic case cracking, hinge wobbling and flopping around, screen cracking) but probably in other ways as well (I should probably check disk integrity, since things seem to randomly just crash more these days and the total wipe/reinstall last week didn’t fix it). I wish I could describe the symptoms less vaguely, so I’ll start logging the next time something breaks. I think it’s mostly that I use my laptop constantly, lug it around, beat it up, toss it places – and once you pass the two-year mark, there’s only so much a piece of hardware can take. (I’m actually impressed my Thinkpad lasted this long without any Major Fail. I had to get my Dell’s parts swapped out every few months due to constant “Mel Has Too Much Energy” usage.)
It’s still usable, but I’m just waiting for it to catastrophically fail – so I’m now looking for my next computer. Suggestions very welcome. I’m rather tempted by netbooks these days, because they don’t cost quite so much when they disintegrate in two years – then again, small screen + constant travel = pain. Then again, they make palm-sized projectors now.
Friends who are willing to take the time to help me walk through my own insecurities (including role-playing practice, which is simultaneously educational and hilarious) are wonderful. Thank you, Andrew.
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
I’m writing this blogpost to simultaneously (1) inform the Fedora community about what’s up with Fedora Marketing, (2) display my thought processes from working through a non-CS way of contributing to OSS projects in the hopes that POSSE profs will get ideas on how to get their non-technical students involved, and (3) propose an answer to the Sugar Labs question “how do we clone Greg Smith?” (Greg == superstar product manager and fellow OLPC alumni.)
I wrote earlier about Fedora Marketing’s schedule for the F12 release, which has now been finalized; you can see it at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_F12_schedule (currently in extraordinarily nonchronological and ugly wiki formatting, soon to be replaced by a link to somewhere that won’t make you want to gouge your eyeballs out).
The F12 schedule was made by taking the generic Marketing schedule template and tweaking it to have the proper dates for the F12 cycle. Incidentally, we need someone to convert this file to taskjuggler format – see https://fedorahosted.org/marketing-team/ticket/1 – and we’re trying to create self-encapsulated starter tasks like this that newcomers can Just Pick Up (professors with marketing students, take note!) We’re using a ticketing system for tracking tasks now instead of Mediawiki table syntax, so that’s… a huge improvement. I’d also like to get the triagebot that was used for OLPC release management running on this as well – ping me if you know where to find the code.
Anyhow. While I was working on getting all this together, NC Central professor Cameron Seay and I tossed around an idea for getting more project managers (PMs, or “People Like Greg Smith”) into OSS. Because we need more good cat-herders. Because student PMs need practice parachuting into a project they’re unfamiliar with and not in charge of and being able to get that house in order.
Do you think there might be a PM class that would be willing to act as PM coaches for OSS projects? A class with at least a few students who’d be interested in teaching someone(s) the stuff that they’ve just learned. It would be really awesome if, every week or every other week, I could pop into an IRC channel with PM students there, and say “hey, this is what’s happening, I’m really confused about X, can you help me figure out what ways to think about it, what frameworks and tools and tips you’re learning that we could use?”
So, questions for the metabrain:
- Anyone interested in getting PM classes to participate in OSS projects this way (holding office hours) or some other way (any ideas? I’d guess that assigning students to PM a project for the whole semester only works if the semester and release schedules align, which seems unlikely.)
- Is there a better way than (1) of solving the “we could use PM volunteers” problem?
- Anybody want to help out with the PM infrastructure of Fedora Marketing?
Note to self: it’s hard to write something that tries to simultaneously cater to three different audiences. Must experiment with different ways of doing that.
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | fedora, sugar, teaching open source | 3 Comments »
I’m going to start blogging thoughts on Fedora Marketing. It’ll force me to articulate my understanding of what’s going on; I started helping out almost exactly two months ago and have been learning at a tremendous clip ever since, thanks to the patience, tutelage, and support of the freakin’ incredible Marketing team.
One of the things I’ve been wrapping my head around is the Marketing F12 Schedule. Fedora has a time based release cycle, and Marketing has a calendar of milestones that fits into each 6-month journey towards a release. At the beginning of each release cycle, we should be making A; in the middle we should make B, at the end we should be doing C – that kind of thing. The fun part (for some value of “fun”) for me right now is making sure our schedule fits with the schedules of other teams – if Design plans on making banners based on a slogan from Marketing, we’ve got to make sure that our deadline for “give Slogan to Design” is before Design’s “work on the banner!” start date.
With a lot of help from John Poelstra, the schedule’s starting to take shape – both the F12-specific schedule and a general “Marketing usually does X for each release” template that’ll be (theoretically) reusable for future cycles. I’m acutely aware that this schedule coordination is not directly contributing to deliverables getting done – in other words, it’s “talking, not doing” – but it’s an one-time painful investment that’ll make life easier in releases to come. (That’s what I tell myself when I spend time on it, at least.) And I stand in total awe of John, who somehow manages to do this for all the teams. (Thank you, John!)
So here’s what’s going on with Marketing scheduling, in case anyone is interested in the process. The basic gist of it is that we’re separating milestone dates from tracking the tasks needed to achieve those milestones (and moving away from wikitable syntax for both, which makes me VERY VERY HAPPY).
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_F12_schedule will have our (lovely, wiki-editable) current combination of a tasklist-mashed-with-a-milestone-schedule until the end of today (Monday 8/3, schedule freeze day). At the end of schedule freeze day, that page will change to contain 3 things:
- a link to our frozen schedule (it’ll look like http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-design-tasks.html)
- a link to our task queue (https://fedorahosted.org/marketing-team/, which I’ll be filling with tasks today); the tickets here will have more detail on the work needed for milestones, and it’ll be here that we track our work.
- an explanation of both of the above and how they work together.
Over the next 12 hours, I’ll be making sure our schedule doesn’t block any other teams’ schedules. This is done for most teams, but I still need to follow up with Ambassadors, Docs, and News – and find a way to be less bottleneck-ish about this in the future.
In the meantime, life (and work) goes on. Steven Moix is positioning the News Distribution Network to take advantage of the impending Fedora Insight project – more on both of these soon. Paul Frields and Ian Weller (they’re everywhere!) are interfacing between the cross-team Zikula-is-awesome effort and the Marketing we’d-like-to-base-Fedora-Insight-on-Zikula effort, new contributors are coming in and being welcomed, Rahul Sundaram keeps us on top of what the media is saying about Fedora nowadays – and of course, as always, we could use more help. Scheduling is wrapping up, but one thing I’ll be puzzling over immediately afterwards is the Marketing Plan. Note the not-filled-in-ness of this outline!
We need folks with a marketing background to help us translate our schedule/milestones/roadmap/strategy thoughts into a more Marketing-ish framework to make sure that we’re covering the things we need to cover – if you know someone who’d be interested in talking with us for an hour or so this week and walking us through the Marketing Thought Process, show them the #fedora-mktg IRC channel in Freenode, ping mchua, and receive eternal gratitude.
Monday, August 3rd, 2009 | fedora | 1 Comment »
Argh. I’m looking for a 3G plan now, and a netbook as a backup laptop. My thinkpad is wonderful when it works, and I need a safety net for when it doesn’t; reliable connectivity anywhere, anytime is just going to be worth it.
But first I have some work to do. *rolls up sleeves*
Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
