Fedora Activity Day at Pune
We had a Fedora Activity Day at the Red Hat office today in Pune. The FUDCon at the College of Engineering, Pune was the last major Fedora event that I was part of in Pune, so I was looking forward to the FAD to finally reboot my active involvement in Fedora.
Most of the organizers were not very familiar with arranging Fedora events. Some of us had participated in them and even helped during FUDCon, but actually planning everything on our own seemed quite difficult. We also did not want an event where people came, attended talks and went away, which is why a FAD seemed like the best option. To make sure that we didn’t end up just meeting and getting to know each other, we decided on a single theme, which is testing the upcoming Fedora 21.
Given that we had no clue what to expect, we didn’t ask for any sponsorship, just a room and internet from the Red Hat Pune office. The other difference was that we also invited people to participate remotely over IRC and we got a decent response on that front too.
I had decided to run the F21 installer through the grinder, but changed my mind the previous day and decided to test glibc. On the day, I changed my mind again and started testing the KDE Live ISO. People started trickling in a little after 9 and soon we had almost everyone who had signed up to come. There were a lot of lively discussions over bugs and everyone cross-checking with each other on bugs before filing them. Prasad did a little session on DNSSEC to get more people to test DNSSEC on F21.
Lunch was ordered and as it turned out, I don’t have a clue how hungry hackers get after a session of serious testing. We ended up under-ordering thanks to my estimation skills and some of us had to supplement our diet with cup noodles. That wasn’t enough of a damper for anyone though, as people ploughed on after lunch. I managed to file 4 bugs, all against anaconda. Kashyap did a short session on virtual machine shapshots and had quite a few people actively trying it out, while others tested ON_QA bugs to give karma.
Towards the end of the day, I downloaded gnulib trunk to run its tests against F21 glibc. I found a few additional failures, but I couldn’t work through it because I had to leave for home. I need to close that one some day, hopefully sooner than later. In the end, we had a very fruitful day of testing with over 8 components covered and about 15 bugs filed, not including some that were already filed. I’m already looking forward to having another hackfest or bugfest.