fidzu : Fedora

This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infratructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.

Week: 15 - 19 December 2025

Forgejo

This team is working on deployment of forge.fedoraproject.org.
Ticket tracker

• [Ansible] Attachments redirect config changes merged - Now being tested in staging
• [Design] Design and Translation floating migration from GitLab to Forgejo in progress
• [Upstream] Extended support for milestones to support YYYY-MM-DD on QE request
• [FOSDEM] "Forging Fedora Project's Future with Forgejo" selected for Distro Devroom
• Staging forgejo distgit deployment complete but for a netapp volume. Waiting on access to the netapp to get this created.
• Forgejo runner to be added to the Infra org on production.
• Private Issues: Refactoring of internal APIs (ongoing)

Fedora Infrastructure

This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure.
It's responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure.
Ticket tracker

• DC Move (rdu-cc to rdu3/rdu3-iso) outage completed.
  • Some hosts still having issues, see ticket
• Zabbix moving forward as our main monitoring tool.
• Updates+uptimes tool now removes hosts as they are removed from ansible inventory.
• Dealt with HW warranties that need/not-need renewing for next year.
• Docs are now migrated to https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/docs

CentOS Infra including CentOS CI

This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure.
It's responsible for services running in CentOS Infratrusture and CentOS Stream.
CentOS ticket tracker
CentOS Stream ticket tracker

• Reconfigure machines moved to RDU3
• CBS tagBuild tasks stuck in open state
• Prepared hardware that will move to RDU3 (dc-move)

Release Engineering

This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora releases.
It's responsible for releases, retirement process of packages and package builds.
Ticket tracker

• Fedora 41 is now END OF LIFE.

QE

This team is working on day to day business regarding Fedora CI and testing.

• Kernel 6.18 test days and GRUB Out of Memory Verification test days are now in progress
• Fedora QE is now blocked on broken attachments in migrated tickets, paused migrations for now
• Lruzicka rewrote the new basic networking test case to be simpler and more human-friendly
• Caught a significant bug in passt (podman networking component): "Thanks a lot for all the support. This was an actual and serious issue that was prevented" (maintainer)
• Revitalized maintenance of testdays webapp with help from new member jgroman
• Multiple issues in Firefox 146 update: crashed on aarch64 (that was fixed), breaks Cockpit Services page (not yet fixed)
• Set up a test day at request of bootloader folks to get broad testing on a specific change
• Quarterly connections and reward zone nominations

If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #admin:fedoraproject.org channel on matrix.

The post Community Update - Week 51 2025 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

19 Dec 2025 10:00am GMT

RPMs of PHP version 8.5.1 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 41 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.4.16 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 41 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.3.29 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 41 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.2.30 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 41 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.1.34 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 41 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

ℹ️ These versions are also available as Software Collections in the remi-safe repository.

ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

🛡️ These Versions fix 4 security bugs (CVE-2025-14177, CVE-2025-14178, CVE-2025-14180), so the update is strongly recommended.

Version announcements:

• PHP 8.5.1 Release Annoucement
• PHP 8.4.16 Release Annoucement
• PHP 8.3.29 Release Annoucement
• PHP 8.2.30 Release Annoucement
• PHP 8.1.34 is not yet officially announced

ℹ️ Installation: Use the Configuration Wizard and choose your version and installation mode.

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.5 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.5/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.5
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.5 as Software Collection

yum install php85

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.4 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.4/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.4
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.4 as Software Collection

yum install php84

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.3 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.3/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.3
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.3 as Software Collection

yum install php83

And soon in the official updates:

• Fedora Rawhide now has PHP version 8.5.1
• Fedora 43 - PHP 8.4.16
• Fedora 42 - PHP 8.4.16

⚠️ To be noticed :

• EL-10 RPMs are built using RHEL-10.1
• EL-9 RPMs are built using RHEL-9.7
• EL-8 RPMs are built using RHEL-8.10
• intl extension now uses libicu74 (version 74.2)
• mbstring extension (EL builds) now uses oniguruma5php (version 6.9.10, instead of the outdated system library)
• oci8 extension now uses the RPM of Oracle Instant Client version 23.9 on x86_64 and aarch64
• A lot of extensions are also available; see the PHP extensions RPM status (from PECL and other sources) page

ℹ️ Information:

• Migrating from PHP 8.2.x to PHP 8.3.x
• Migrating from PHP 8.3.x to PHP 8.4.x
• Migrating from PHP 8.4.x to PHP 8.5.x

Base packages (php)

Software Collections (php83 / php84 / php85)

19 Dec 2025 9:39am GMT

18 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Most open source maintainers know the pain of dealing with invalid bugs. These are bugs that are already listed as known issues, that are intended behaviors, that aren't reproducible, unsupported versions, or any number of other explanations. They waste time on the maintainer side in the triage, investigation, and response. And they waste submitter time, too. Everyone loses. While it's frustrating to deal with invalid bug reports, almost no one files them on purpose.

Researchers (including Muhammad Laiq et al) have investigated invalid bug reports. One of the recommendations is to improve system documentation. This makes perfect sense. When there's a difference between the expected and actual behavior of software, that's a software bug. When there's a difference between the user-expected behavior and the developer-expected behavior, that's a documentation bug.

There will always be some people who don't read the documentation. But those who do will file better bugs if your documentation is accurate, easy to find, and understandable. As you notice patterns in invalid bug reports, look for places to improve your documentation. Just like the dirt trails through a grassy area can tell you where the sidewalks should have been, the invalid bugs can show you where your documentation needs to get better. (Note that this applies to process documentation as well as software documentation.

As with all interactions in your project, a little bit of grace goes a long way. It's frustrating to deal with invalid bug reports, but keep in mind that the person who filed it is trying to help make your project better. And often their bug report represents a real bug - just not the one they think.

This post's featured photo by Neringa Hünnefeld on Unsplash.

The post Invalid bug reports are sometimes documentation bugs appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

17 Dec 2025 9:24pm GMT

17 Dec 2025 5:06pm GMT

17 Dec 2025 1:01pm GMT

While I was at Flock 2025, I had the opportunity to share what Microsoft has been contributing to Fedora over the last year. I finally got a blog post written for the Microsoft Tech Community Linux and Open Source Blog.

Read the full blog over at the Microsoft Tech Community where this was originally posted.

17 Dec 2025 9:30am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Máirín Duffy

• FAS ID: duffy
• Matrix Rooms: My long-term home has been Fedora Design, but I also hang out in Podman, Fedora Marketing, and Fedora AI/ML.

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I have used Fedora as my daily driver since 2003 and have actively contributed to Fedora since 2004. (Example: I designed the current Fedora logo and website design.) I am very passionate about the open source approach to technology. I first started using Linux as a high school student (my first Linux was Red Hat 5.1) and being able to use free software tools like Gimp when I couldn't afford Photoshop made an outsized impact on my life. (I explain my background in Linux and open source in-depth in this interview with Malcolm Gladwell: https://youtu.be/SkXgG6ksKTA?si=RMXNzyzH9Tr6AuwN )

Technology has an increasingly large impact over society. We should have agency over the technology that impacts our lives. Open source is how we provide that agency. We're now in a time period with a new disruptive technology (generative AI) that - regardless if you think it is real or not, is having real impact on computing. Fedora and other open source projects need to be able to provide the benefits of this new technology, the open source way and using open source software. Small, local models that are easy for our users to deploy on their own systems using open source tooling will provide them the ability to benefit AI's strengths without having to sacrifice the privacy of their data.

There is a lot of hype around AI, and a lot of very legitimate concerns around its usage including the intellectual property concerns of the pre-trained data, not having enough visibility into what data is part of pre-trained data sets, the working conditions under which some of the data is labeled under, the environmental impact of the training process, the ethics of its usage. Open source projects in particular are getting pummeled by scraping bots hungry to feed coding models. There are folks in the tech industry who share these legitimate concerns that prefer to avoid AI and hope that it the bubble will just pop and it will go away. This strategy carries significant risks, however, and we need a more proactive approach. The technology has legitimate uses and the hype is masking them. When the hype dies down, and the real value of this new technology is more visible, it will be important for the type of community members we have in Fedora with their commitment to open source principles and genuinely helping people to have had a seat at the table to shape this technology.

(You can see a short video where I talk a bit more indepth about the pragmatic, privacy and open source-focused approach I take to AI here: https://youtu.be/oZ7EflyAPUw?si=HSbNhq_3NelXoX2J)

In the past I have been quite skeptical about generative AI and worried about its implications for open source. (I continue to be skeptical and annoyed by the hype surrounding it.) I've spent the past couple of years looking at open source licensed models and building open source generative AI tooling - getting hands on, deep experience to understand it - and as a result I have seen first hand the parts of this technology that have real value. I want FESCo to be able to make informed decisions when AI issues come up.

My background is in user experience engineering, and I am so excited about what this technology will mean for improving usability and accessibility for users of open source software. For example, we never have enough funding or interest to solve serious a11y problems; now we could generate text summaries of images & describe the screen out loud with high-quality audio from text-to-voice models for low vision users! I want open source to benefit from these and even more possibilities to reach and help more people so they can enjoy software freedom as well.

I have served in multiple governance roles in Fedora including time on the Fedora Council, the Mindshare Committee, lead of various Fedora Outreachy rounds (I have mentored dozens of interns in Fedora), and founder / lead of the Design team over many years. More importantly, I have deep Linux OS expertise, I have deep expertise in user experience, and I have a depth in AI technology to offer to FESCo. I believe my background and skills will enable FESCo to make responsible decisions in the best interest of open source and user agency, particularly around the usage of AI in Fedora and in the Fedora community. We will absolutely need to make decisions as a governing group in the AI space, and they should be informed by that specific expertise.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I founded and ran the Fedora Design Team for 17 years. It was the first major Linux distribution community-lead design team, and often as a team we've been asked by other distros and open source projects for help (so we expanded to call ourselves the "Community Design Team.") Over the years I've designed the user experience and user interfaces for many components in Fedora including our background wallpapers, anaconda, virt-manager, the GNOME font-chooser, and a bunch of other stuff. I moved on from the Fedora Design role to lead design for Podman Desktop and to work more with the Podman team (who are also part of the Fedora community) for a couple of years, and I also led the InstructLab open source LLM fine-tuning project and corresponding Linux product from Red Hat (RHEL AI.) For the past year or so I have returned to working on core Linux on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed team, and my focus is on building AI enhancements to the Linux user experience. My team is part of the Fedora AI/ML SIG and we're working on packaging user-facing components and tooling for AI/ML for Fedora, so folks who would like to work with LLMs can do so and the libraries and tools they need will be available. This includes building and packaging the linux-mcp-server and packaging goose, a popular open source AI agent, and all of their dependencies.

My career has focused on benefiting Fedora users by improving the user experience of using open source technology, and being collaborative and inclusive while doing so.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

Data is the best way to handle disagreements when working as part of a team. Opinions are wonderful and everyone has them, but decisions are based made with real data. Qualitative data is just as important as quantitative data, by the way. That can be gathered by talking directly to the people most impacted by the decision (not necessarily those who are loudest about it) and learning their perspective. Then informing the decision at hand with that perspective.

A methodology I like to follow in the face of disagreements is "disagree and let's see." (This was coined by Molly Graham, a leadership expert.) A decision has to be made, so let's treat it like an experiment. I'll agree to run an experiment, and track the results ("let's see") and advocate for a pivot if it turns out that the results point to another way (and quickly.) Being responsible to track the decision and its outcomes and bringing it back to the table, over time, helps build trust in teams like FESCo so folks who disagree know that if the decision ended up being the wrong one, that it can and will be revisited based on actual outcomes.

Another framework I like to use in disagreements is called 10-10-10, created by Suzy Welch. It involves thinking through: how will this decision matter in 10 minutes? How about 10 months? How about 10 years? This frame of thought can diffuse some of the chargedness of disagreement when all of the involved people realize the short or long term nature of the issue together at the same time.

Acknowledging legitimate concerns and facing them head on instead of questioning or sidelining others' lived experience and sincerely-held beliefs and perspectives is also incredibly important. Listening and building bridges between community members with different perspectives, and aligning them to the overall projects goals - which we all have in common as we work in this community - is really helpful to help folks look above the fray and be a little more open-minded.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

I understand there is a campaign against my running for FESCo because myself and a colleague wrote an article that walked through real, undoctored debugging sessions with a locally-hosted, open source model in order to demonstrate the linux-mcp-server project.

I want to make it clear that I believe any AI enhancements that are considered for Fedora need a simple opt-in button, and no AI-based solutions should be the default. (I've spoken about this before, recently on the Destination Linux Podcast: https://youtu.be/EJZkJi8qF-M?t=3020) The user base of Fedora and other open source operating systems come to their usage in part due to wanting agency over the technology they use and having ownership and control over their data. The privacy-focused aspects of Fedora have spanned the project's existence and that must be respected. We cannot ignore AI completely, but we must engage with it thoughtfully and in a way that is respectful of our contributors and user base.

To that end, should you elect to grant me the privilege of a seat to FESCo this term:

• I intend to vote in opposition to proposals that involve bundling proprietary model weights in Fedora.
• I intend to vote in opposition to proposals that involve sending Fedora user data to third party AI services.
• I intend to vote in opposition to proposals to turn AI-powered features on by default in any Fedora release.
• I intend to vote in favor of proposals to enact AI scraper mitigation strategies and to partner with other open source projects to fight this nuisance.

My core software engineering background is in user experience and usability, and I believe in the potential of small, local models to improve our experience with software without compromising our privacy and agency. I welcome ongoing community input on these principles and other boundaries you'd like to see around emerging technologies in Fedora.

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Máirín Duffy (duffy/mizmo) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:06am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Timothée Ravier

• FAS ID: siosm
• Matrix Rooms: Fedora Atomic Desktops, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora bootc, Fedora KDE, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Silverblue

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I want to be a member of FESCo to represent the interests of users, developers and maintainers of what we call Atomic, Bootable Container, Image Based or Immutable variants of Fedora (CoreOS, Atomic Desktops, IoT, bootc, etc.).

I think that what we can build around those variants of Fedora is the best path forward for broader adoption of Fedora and Linux in the general public and not just in developer circles.

I thus want to push for better consideration of the challenges specific to Atomic systems in all parts of Fedora: change process, infrastructure, release engineering, etc.

I also want to act as a bridge with other important communities built around this ecosystem such as Flathub, downstream projects such as Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, and other distributions such as Flatcar Linux, GNOME OS, KDE Linux, openSUSE MicroOS, Aeon or ParticleOS.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I primarily contribute to Fedora as a maintainer for the Fedora Atomic Desktops and Fedora CoreOS. I am also part of the KDE SIG and involved in the Bootable Containers (bootc) initiative.

My contributions are focused on making sure that those systems become the most reliable platform for users, developers and contributors. This includes both day to day maintenance work, development such as enabling safe bootloader updates or automatic system updates and coordination of changes across Fedora (switching to zstd compressed initrds as an example).

While my focus is on the Atomic variants of Fedora, I also make sure that the improvements I work on benefit the entire Fedora project as much as possible.

I've listed the Fedora Changes I contributed to on my Wiki profile: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Siosm.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

Disagreements are a normal part of the course of a discussion. It's important to give the time to everyone involved to express their positions and share their context. Limiting the scope of a change or splitting it into multiple phases may also help.

Reaching a consensus should always be the preferred route but sometimes this does not happen organically. Thus we have to be careful to not let disagreements linger on unresolved and a vote is often needed to reach a final decision. Not everyone may agree with the outcome of the vote but it's OK, we respect it and move on.

Most decisions are not set in stone indefinitely and it's possible to revisit one if the circumstances changed. A change being denied at one point may be accepted later when improved or clarified.

This is mostly how the current Fedora Change process works and I think it's one of the strength of the Fedora community.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

I've been a long time Fedora user. I started contributing more around 2018 and joined Red Hat in 2020 where I've been working on systems such as Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS as part of OpenShift. I am also part of other open source communities such as Flathub and KDE and I am committed to the upstream first, open source and community decided principles.

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Timothée Ravier (siosm/travier) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:05am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Daniel Mellado

• FAS ID: dmellado
• Matrix Rooms: #ebpf, #fedora-devel, #rust, #fedora-releng, and a lot of #fedora-*

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I accepted this nomination because I believe FESCo would benefit from fresh perspectives, and I think that these new perspectives will also help to lower the entrance barriers for Fedora.

Governance bodies stay healthy when they welcome new voices alongside experienced members, and I want to be part of that renewal.

Technologies like eBPF are redefining what's possible in Linux-observability, security, networking-but they also bring packaging challenges that we haven't fully solved, such as kernel version dependencies, CO-RE relocations, BTF requirements, and SELinux implications.

On FESCo, I want to help Fedora stay ahead of these challenges rather than merely reacting to them. I want to advocate for tooling and guidelines that will help make complex kernel-dependent software easier to package.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I founded and currently lead the Fedora eBPF Special Interest Group. Our goal is to make eBPF a first-class citizen in Fedora, improving the experience for the developers who are building observability, security, and networking tools and figuring out how to package software that has deep kernel dependencies.

On the packaging side, I maintain bpfman (an eBPF program manager) and several Rust crates that support eBPF and container tooling. I've also learned the hard way that Rust dependency vendoring is… an adventure.

Before Fedora, I spent years in the OpenStack community. I served as PTL (Project Team Lead) for the Kuryr project, the bridge between container and OpenStack networking and was active in the Kubernetes SIG. That experience taught me a lot about running open source projects: building consensus across companies, mentoring contributors, managing release cycles, and navigating the politics of large upstream communities.

I try to bring that same upstream, community-first mindset to Fedora. My hope is that the patterns we establish in the eBPF SIG become useful templates for other packagers facing similar challenges.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

I start by assuming good intent. If someone is in the discussion, it's because they do also care about the outcome, even though they may have another point of view.

I also try not to speculate about why someone holds a particular view. Assigning motives derails technical conversations fast. Instead, I focus on keeping things facts-driven: what does the code actually do, what do users need, what are the real constraints? Egos don't ship software, and sticking to concrete data keeps discussions productive.

When disagreements persist, I find it helps to identify what everyone does agree on and use that as a new starting point. You'd be surprised how often this unblocks a stalled conversation.

Also, I think that it's important to step back. It's tempting to want the final word, but that can drag things on forever without real progress. Miscommunication happens and not every discussion needs a winner.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

I believe in Fedora's Four Foundations: Freedom, Friends, Features, First. What draws me to this community is the "Friends" part: there's a place in Fedora for anyone who wants to help, regardless of background or technical skill level. Open source is at its best when it's genuinely welcoming, and I want FESCo to reflect that.

From my time in the OpenStack community, I learned that healthy projects focus on protecting, empowering, and promoting: protecting the open development process and the values that make the community work; empowering contributors to do great work without painful barriers; and promoting not just the software, but the people who build and use it. I try to bring that mindset to everything I do.

I also believe strongly in working upstream. The changes we make should benefit not just Fedora users, but the broader open source ecosystem. When we solve a hard problem here, that knowledge should flow back to upstream projects and other distributions.

I'll be at FOSDEM 2026. FOSDEM embodies what I love about open source: a non-commercial space where communities meet to share knowledge freely. If you're there, come say hi.

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Daniel Mellado (dmellado) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:04am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Kevin Fenzi

• FAS ID: kevin
• Matrix Rooms: I'm probibly most active in the following rooms. I'm available and answer notifications and watch many other channels as well, but those 3 are the most active for me:
  • noc -> day to day infra stuff, handling alerts, talking with other infra folks
  • admin -> answering questions, helping fix issues, some team discussions
  • releng -> release engineering team discussions, answering questions, handling issues, etc.

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I think I still provide useful historical information as well as being able to pull on that long history to know when things are good/bad/have been tried before and have lessons to teach us.

Based on the proposals we approve or reject we can steer things from FESCo. I do think we should be deliberate, try and reach consensus and accept any input we can get to try to come to good decisions. Sometimes things won't work out that way, but it should really be the exception instead of the rule.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I'm lucky to be paid by Red Hat to work on infrastucture, I like to hope it's useful to the community
In my spare time I work on packages, answering questions where I can, unblocking people, release engineering work, matrix and lists moderation.

I really hope my contributions contribute to a happier and more productive community.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

I try and reach consensus where possible. Sometimes that means taking more time or involving more people, but If it can be reached I think it's really the best way to go.

Sometimes of course you cannot reach a consensus and someone has to make a call. If thats something I am heavily involved in/in charge of, I do so. I'm happy that we have a council as a override of last resort in case folks want to appeal some particularly acromonious decision. Also, as part of a team you have to sometimes delegate something to someone and trust their judgement in how it's done.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

I think there's been a number of big debates recently and probibly more to come. We need to remember we are all friends and try and see things from other people's point of view.

My hero these days seems to be treebeard: "Don't be hasty"

My matrix/email is always open for questions from anyone…

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Kevin Fenzi (kevin/nirik) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:03am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Fabio Alessandro Locati

• FAS ID: fale
• Matrix Rooms: I can be easily found in #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org, #bootc:fedoraproject.org, #coreos:fedoraproject.org, #devel:fedoraproject.org, #epel:fedoraproject.org, #event-devconf-cz:fedoraproject.org, #fedora:fedoraproject.org, #fedora-arm:matrix.org, #fedora-forgejo:fedoraproject.org, #fosdem:fedoraproject.org, #flock:fedoraproject.org, #golang:fedoraproject.org, #iot:fedoraproject.org, #meeting:fedoraproject.org, #meeting-1:fedoraproject.org, #mobility:fedoraproject.org, #python:fedoraproject.org, #rust:fedoraproject.org, #silverblue:fedoraproject.org, #sway:fedoraproject.org, #websites:fedoraproject.org

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I have been part of the Fedora community for many years now: my FAS account dates back to January 2010 (over 15 years ago!), and I've contributed in many different roles to the Fedora project. I started as an ambassador, then became a packager and packaging mentor, and joined multiple SIGs, including Golang, Sway, and Atomic Desktop. For many years, I've been interested in immutable Linux desktops, Mobile Linux, and packaging challenges for "new" languages (such as Go), which are also becoming more relevant in the Fedora community now. Having contributed to the Fedora Project for a long time in many different areas, and given my experience and interest in other projects, I can bring those perspectives to FESCo.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

Currently, many of my contributions fall in the packaging area: I keep updating the packages I administer and exploring different solutions for packaging new languages and maintaining the Sway artifacts.
My current contributions are important to keeping Fedora first, not only in terms of package versions but also in terms of best practices and ways to reach our users.

Additionally, I served for the last two cycles (F41/F42) as a FESCo member, steering the community toward engineering decisions that were both sensible in the short and long term.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

I think disagreements are normal in communities. I have a few beliefs that guide me in entering and during any disagreement:

1. I always separate the person from their argument: this allows me to discuss the topic without being influenced by the person making the points.
2. I always keep in mind during disagreements that all people involved probably have a lot of things they agree on and a few they don't agree on (otherwise, they would not be part of the conversation in the first place): this allows me to always see the two sides of the disagreement as having way more in common than in disagreement.
3. During a discussion, I always hold the belief that the people arguing on the opposite side of the disagreement are trying to make sure that what they believe is right becomes a reality: this allows me always to try to see if there are aspects in their point of view that I had not considered or not appropriately weighted.

Thanks to my beliefs, I always manage to keep disagreements civil and productive, which often leads to a consensus. It is not always possible to agree on everything, but it is always possible to disagree in a civil, productive way.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

Let's start with the fact that I'm a Red Hat employee, though what I do in my day job has nothing to do with Fedora (I'm an Ansible specialist, so I have nothing to do with RHEL either), so I have no ulterior motives for my contributions. I use Fedora on many devices (starting from my laptop) and have done so for many years. I contribute to the Fedora Project because I found in it and its community the best way to create the best operating system :).

I've been using Sway exclusively on my Fedora desktop since I brought it into Fedora in 2016. On the other systems, I use either Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, or Fedora IoT, even though lately, I prefer the latter for all new non-desktop systems.

I see the Fedora Community as one community within a sea of communities (upstream, downstream, similarly located ones, etc.). I think the only way for all those communities to be successful is to collaborate, creating a higher-level community where open-source communities collaborate for the greater good, which, in my opinion, would be a more open-source world.

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Fabio Alessandro Locati (fale) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:02am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Dave Cantrell

• FAS ID: dcantrell
• Matrix Rooms: Looking right now it appears Fedora Council, FRCL, Introductions, Announcements, Fedora Meeting, and Fedora Meeting 1. I tend to go to rooms that people ask me to join. I also use it a lot for DMs and people find me that way. For me primarily I rely on Matrix for our online meetings and DMs with people. Email continues to be the most reliable way to reach me and have a conversation.

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I have been a member of FESCo for a while now and enjoy doing it. Fedora is really good at bringing in new technologies and ensuring that we minimize disruption for users. I enjoy the technical discussions and working together to ensure that changes account for everything before we bring them in. Making and having a plan is often difficult and requires a lot of coordination.

I am also interested in mentoring people interested in running for FESCo and introducing some changes to how we staff FESCo. There are discussions going on right now for that, but an important thing for me is ensuring we have a succession plan for FESCo that keeps Fedora going without burning people out. If you are interested in being on FESCo, please reach out to me!

Lastly, I feel very strongly about open source software and the licenses we have around it. I believe that it has fundamentally changed our industry and made it a better place. We continue to see changes come in to Fedora that bring challenges to those ideas and I want to ensure that Fedora's position around open source, creator rights, and licensing are not lost or eroded.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

My job at Red Hat is working on the Software Management team. The two big projects on that team are dnf and rpm. But we also have a lot of dnf and rpm adjacent software. I am upstream for or contribute to numerous other projects. I also maintain a variety of packages in Fedora and EPEL as well as RHEL (and by extension CentOS Stream).

I am a sponsor for new contributors and I help mentor new developers in both the community and at Red Hat (that is, developers at Red Hat wanting to participate more in Fedora).

I am a member of the Fedora Council where I focus on engineering issues when we discuss large topics and strategy.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

Communication has always been a challenge in our industry and community. We have language differences, cultural differences, and communication medium differences. One thing I notice a lot is that some discussions lead to people taking things personally. Often the root cause of that is people feeling like they are not being heard. A solution I have found is to suggest changing the communication medium. I am perfectly fine communicating over email, or chat, or other online methods. But talking in person can go a long way. We know the value of having in-person events and a lot of people find that their interactions with people in the community improve simply because they finally met someone in person at an event. While that is not always possible, we do have video conference capabilities these days. I do use that in Fedora and it helps quite a bit.

For everyone, if you find yourself in a frustrating situation, I recommend first stepping away and collecting your thoughts. Then remind yourself why everyone is involved in the first place. We all want to achieve the same things, so let's try to work towards that and find common ground. And if necessary, suggest an alternate communication mechanism.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

Most people are surprised to learn that I support protons more than electrons. I like being positive in everything I pursue. It's ok for us to disagree. It's ok to have a position, learn something new, and then change that position. The important thing to me is that Fedora ultimately remains a fun project.

My favorite color is orange. I use an Android mobile phone. I do not use current Apple hardware, but I am a big fan of the Apple II series and 68k Macintosh series. If you corner me, I will likely talk your ear off about the Apple IIgs or any Macintosh Quadra (particularly the various crazy and horrible operating systems Apple made for the platform).

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Dave Cantrell (dcantrell) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:01am GMT

This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek

• FAS ID: zbyszek
• Matrix Rooms: #devel:fedoraproject.org, #reproducible-builds:fedora.im, #jenkins-coreos:fedoraproject.org, #coreos:fedoraproject.org, #quality:fedoraproject.org

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I think Fedora as a project is in a good place. Our core responsibility is to put out a new release every six months, and we are doing that on schedule and with high quality. But there are always new challenges and issues that need to be solved. As a member of FESCo, I take the Change process seriously, trying to work with submitters to improve their proposals before they are approved, and keeping track of what remains to be done. I do my best to move the things I'm personally working on in the right direction, and I try to help others move the things they are working on.

Most of the proposals that FESCo gets to vote on are obvious. But every once in a while there are proposals which are a mistake. The tough part of the job is to distinguish between something that is risky but will be good for the project if done correctly, and ideas that are a mistake and should be rejected. FESCo is in the position to push back, and needs to do that with enough strength and visiblity to be effective.

The part of being in FESCo that I (and everybody else) likes the least is the slow-as-molasses tickets that get stuck on infrastructure changes or other external constraints. FESCo should do a better job of regularly returning to those, pushing for updates, and figuring out how to finally solve the problem. I like the idea of introducing the limits on consecutive terms of FESCo members
to bring in new people and hopefully use this energy to tackle some long-standing issues.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I maintain systemd and a bunch of other packages in the python scientific stack,
a bunch of tools related to installing Linux (mkosi, pacman, archlinux-keyring), and
tooling for reproducibile builds (add-determinism).

I'm active in FESCo and I contribute to the Packaging Guidelines and in various other places that need help. Over the last year I worked on build reproducibility (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Package_builds_are_expected_to_be_reproducible), bin-sbin unification (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin), and helped with introduction of nix (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Nix_package_tool).

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

Discuss. Evaluate. Discuss again. Reach a compromise.

Rarely there is an issue where compromise is not possible. If the issue is worth fighting for, agree to disagree, try to convince everyone else.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

n/a

The post F43 FESCo Elections: Interview with Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek) appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

17 Dec 2025 8:00am GMT

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16 Dec 2025 12:00pm GMT