And after a few whirlwind days, FUDCon Boston 2007 is over. I think that a good time was had by all and at the same time, I think that we got a lot of good work done. The facilities as provided by the folks over at Boston University were amazing as always. Pam Andrews, Matt Miller, Paul Stauffer and the rest of the BU gang (I'm sorry — I didn't get everyone's names to thank everyone by name… but everyone's help was much appreciated!)
Things started out as people started to get into town on Thursday. I headed into town and met up with folks where we headed to Uno's for dinner. There were probably about 25 of us there and a lot of discussions were had to help set the stage for the rest of the weekend. 's story of the E10K also helped to make sure everyone knew that there weren't any ideas crazier than what had already happened… 😉 Then, everyone split out on the early side so that we could get some rest and wake up early to start things off on Friday.
Friday morning, registration started off at about 8 am. By 8:30, the lobby was hopping with people and introductions. In addition to Red Hat employees and external Fedora contributors, there was a good showing from a number of local Fedora users. In what seemed to be true barcamp form, the session pitches and sign-up were a bit chaotic, but things worked themselves out. Over the course of the day, I saw and took part in discussions about Mugshot, release engineering tasks, live CDs, KVM, the Pepper Pad, and more. My KVM talk was well attended with a lot of good questions. People are getting more to the questions about what is virtualization good for rather than just “ooh, shiny” 🙂
After the sessions ended, we all headed over to Ana Tua Nua for FUDPub. Seth, David Lutterkort, jbowes, toshio and I had some pretty significant discussions around package management and some of the things which we really need to improve on to really make progress in getting more things than just the distro packaged up. And as I walked around, I had a variety of other good discussions as well.
On Saturday, we started off on the hacking. The number of people was much smaller and the energy was around getting various specific things done. Based on the people who were present, I ended up spending a lot of my time hacking on yum related bits. And pretty successfully. For the most part, I was focused on getting the lower level bits that are needed for supporting installs from “media” (CDs/DVDs). And the implementation actually feels like it should work pretty nicely. I need to now write the bits for pirut and anaconda to use this, but that should be pretty doable for this week. Saturday evening, most of the board went out to dinner together. We discussed a number of things that have been floating around on the Fedora lists and perhaps had a little too much fun based on the funny looks we were getting from the wait staff.
Sunday, we really started the day off with a board meeting. And it was a long one. But we discussed a lot of legal-y issues at some length as well as some things which should hopefully make life easier. More to come about some of those real real soon. The other thing we talked a lot about was the whole question of what spins make sense for Fedora 7. I don't know that we came to any final conclusions, but a lot of the discussions swirled along the same lines as the current discussions on fedora-test-list. I need to do a better write up on what we discussed and what we're now currently thinking so that we can get some feedback on how reasonable it is. Then, finished up some of the yum media bits and people started heading back to the airport.
So, awesome weekend with lots of positive stuff going on. Now, to keep the momentum going and getting a lot of good stuff done in time for test2.