Policy proposal: contributing to Fedora should be FUN

This may seem like a joke, but it is not I kindly ask of FESco to seriously take this under consideration.

I would like FESco to codify into a policy that contributing to Fedora should be Fun, and that to further that goal any existing and new procedures for Fedora should be balanced in how much they negatively impact Fun versus how much gain is expected from them to further the goals of Fedora.

This is going to become an interesting FESCo meeting on Tuesday i think…

… hilft auch kein Schokoriegel.

If I want KDE or LXDE, it should be part of the installer.

Actually Xfce and LXDE are already part of the installer, they are just not on the install media. But when you suggest to include them in the DVD, then the same person tells you that:

You’re only thinking about you and your images aren’t you? What happens when we put your stuff on the DVD?

As a spin maintainer, you can’t do right.

We arrived at 10:00 and doors were to open at 11:00, but when we built up our booth, the first visitors were already showing up. At 10:30, there were already a lot of visitors and at 11:00, the small exhibition room was overcrowded. It got a little better once the talks started, but the whole day there really was a lot of people. I guess nobody expected such a success, especially because the weather was really bad, still a lot of snow in Oldenburg.

Our Booth consisted of two tables with two laptops and two XOs. The XOs served as an eye catcher and attracted a lot of people. Fedora was also very interesting for them because we and Sidux were the only real distributions on the event. The rest was ether projects such as Cacert and OpenOffice or companies. We gave away round about 80 Fedora discs (Live media and installation DVDs), stickers and a few T-Shirts.

The event took place at KDO, (Communal Data processing Oldenburg), which is a joint-venture of Oldenburg and the surrounding counties that does all the IT services in the area in public administration, schools and so on. They are already using Linux a lot, but unfortunately only on servers. Only 2 of their employees run Linux on their workstations and I was glad to hear that one of them uses Fedora.

I was happy to meet our fellow contributor Robert Albrecht again, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. Robert did an interesting talk about Verinice. I did a talk too, and as you may have guessed already it was about Fedora, more precisely about our foundations and development model. The title was “Fedora – community driven development”. I originally prepared it for Chemnitz Linux Days, but it was rejected due to the large number of submissions (BTW: My LXDE talk was accepted). I will upload the slides later. Although I had one of the last slots at 17:00, the room was still full of people, not a single chair left. This and the interesting questions and discussions after the talk make me think that the audience really enjoyed my talk.

I also met Dr. Claudia Neumann again. She is really amazing: She is not only a medic but also a programmer and she ported APW Wiegand to Linux all by herself. We had a nice conversation on the social event that took place in the evening. We had dinner and some beers and altogether it was a really nice and successful event. Thanks everybody for making it happen, especially to Frank and the other guys from KDO and the sponsors, namely to LWsystems, Univention and bytemine. Three cool companies dedicated to Linux and FOSS. With their support we can make the 5. Linuxinformationstag next year even bigger. Looking forward to see you there!

FAD Niederrhein 2010
March 27 + 28
Mönchengladbach, DRK-Begegnungsstätte Wickrath

You don’t have to be a Fedora user or contributor to attend (Enrico isn’t ether). Instead, Fedora Activity Days are supposed to bring benefit to the upstream projects that we support, in this case Geany, LXDE and the OLPC. And maybe even your project, you just need to join us.

If you would like to attend, please add yourself on the wikipage. More workshops, hack sessions or talks are highly welcome. Lets make this event a truly successful one!

Via: Mether’s Fedora Blog

But we felt like we could make things better. Currently most decisions are made by the maintainers (Kevin, Adam and me) ether on IRC or by mail. Of course we listen to feedback we get from users, but we want decision-making to be more transparent. That’s why we now have a mailing list of our own: The Fedora Xfce List, a place where users and developers meet.

We also want to revive the Xfce SIG IRC meetings. We did that in the past but somehow we didn’t find the time to do it regularly. In order to find a time that fits everyone, I started a poll. If you are interested in joining our meetings, please respond here.

So if you are using Fedora and are interested in Xfce

• subscribe to the mailing list
• attend our IRC meetings
• join the SIG
• have fun!

I will continue to work on improving Fedora and I hope to succeed in that together with the other Fesco members. I will focus on improving cross-desktop interoperability and on simplifying the feature process and the workflow for co-maintainership of upstream developers. I’m looking forward to serve the Fedora Project as a Fesco member. Let’s get to work!

a lot of my customers have workflows that involve different people. Some of them have checklists, but this is a lot of paper work, it’s not searchable, not reliable and it’s just so 1987. To make these processes more transparent and traceable I am looking for a issue tracker/ticketing system/CRM.

A typical workflow looks like this:

1. Customer orders goods, services, whatever. There are several ways to order: Via website, telephone, fax or reseller.
2. Employee receives order. If there are open questions, employee sorts them out with customer or reseller.
3. Employee confirms the order and sends out a bill.
4. Customer/reseller makes a depsit.
5. Employee confirms deposit and sends out another mail with more info on product or service.
6. Customer/reseller pays the outstanding sum of money.
7. The deal takes place.

The thing I’m looking for should be lightweight because there already are dedicated systems for booking, accounting and so on that we cannot replace, but there is nothing that brings all these systems together. I only what to track the process and to do this, I’d like to have the following features:

• Web interface: I don’t want to install additional client software.
• Custom statuses: If possible, employees should be able to define them via web interfacel, but that’s not high priority
• Custom Workflows: If possible, the system should be able to define custom actions such as sending out an email when state X is reached
• Custom fields: I’d like to be able to add different fields to the tickes,
• Attachments: I’d like to attach files to tickets.
• Localization: If possible, because “… Es ist Deutschland hier.”

So far I have looked at Mantis, OTRS, Redmine (all nice and powerful bug trackers, but not really what I’m looking for need and lack some features need), Drupal with plugins (I haven’t found the right plugin and I don’t want to carry the cruft of a complete CMS when I just need a tracker) and the well known trac (currently my favorite although it was definitely designed for other purposes).

Dear Lazyweb, do you know any other systems that offer what I’m looking for?