The Fedora users and developers conference, called Flock , is our annual gathering to update everyone on the direction the distribution is going, to talk and hack together, and have fun together. This year it was held in Krakow, Poland. I had the chance to go there with most of the Fedora Infrastructure team, and gave a talk about the HyperKitty deployment we had this year.

The flight went well, I met other Fedora contributors at the airport and we took the bus(ses) together from the Krarow airport to the hotel. The week before was a worldwide catholic event in Krarow, where the Pope was. We passed by the very large field were I suppose the main gatherings were held, and it was huge. At the hotel, we learned that the whole restaurant had been booked for the goodbye dinner of the German delegation. 600 people, almost all teenagers. We ordered pizzas

The first day started with Matthew giving the traditional “State of Fedora” keynote . Our community is doing good, Red Hat is still a major player but there are about 2 external contributors for each Red Hatter continbuting to Fedora. The Fedora Magazine is also a huge success, I should read it more regularly.

Then I went to a talk by Christian Schaller about the future of the Fedora Workstation . Since I’m using it day-to-day, and have always been recommanding using Linux to friends (when it would be useful for them), I was happy to learn where it’s going, what are the hot topics that are being worked on, etc.

Then I went to the State of the Fedora Infra talk , because even if I’m on the team, it’s not easy to follow everything that’s going on. We do a lot

Then I went to the Python packaging in Fedora talk, because obviously I’m using a lot of Python and I’m interested in the latest evolution, as well as in the direction it’s going. On top of that, I had a couple questions on my current “Python3 in EPEL” packaging effort, and they got answered, so it’s all good (except I now have more work to do when I get back

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I went to the Containers in production talk, because I have a sysadmin background and I want to keep this card in my deck. But obviously the deployment world changed a lot these last years, with the cloud/virtualization/containers/etc, and I’d love to stay up-to-date. Unfortunately I realized that I need more background info before I can fully understand such a talk. Oh well, next time maybe.

And at the end of the afternoon, I gave my HyperKitty talk. There was much to report this time because we actually deployed Mailman3 & Postorius & HyperKitty to production this past year. You can find my slides here (PDF) . I got good feedback on HyperKitty, and even a person who wanted to contribute. Nice !

All in all it was a very productive day, I went to a lot of talks and had very interesting discussions. The Fedora community is really awesome, subjectively (those people are great) and objectively (we have a very nice code of conduct ).