Fedora 20 Release Party Beijing Report

NOTE: For Chinese readers, there is a Chinese version of the report here.

Happy new year everyone!

The Fedora 20 Release Party in Beijing was successfully held at Turing Office last Wednesday (Dec 25). It was organized by Fedora Zhongwen User Group with the help of Beijing GNOME User Group. There were 22 registrants on site, which is comparatively fewer than previous due to the time arrangement.

The release party began at 6 pm. (I was late for about 10 minutes.) We conducted the registration on a computer: We opened a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet filled with pre-registrants’ information so that they can just type 1 to register. As for others we required them to type their names and email addresses. As usual, every attendee can pick a Live DVD and a sticker. We prepared 50 Fedora 20 DVDs. Each of them has a label with Fedora 10th anniversary icon, and is 64bit with either GNOME or KDE. The stickers are from Fedora, GitCafe, and CSDN CODE.

The party entered pizza time at around 6:30 pm. We had ordered seven pizzas, 5 large and 2 small. Along with drinks and snacks sponsored by CSDN, they more or less met the requirement of everyone’s supper. While supper we managed to collect four topics for the talk.

The talk session started from 7:30 pm. In the opening address, I welcomed everyone, and introduced the features (changes) of Fedora 20 and the 10 year history of Fedora project briefly. Then it came to the first talk, which was "systemd Introduction" by Robin Lee, an active Fedora packager, FZUG member, and skilled programmer. He talked about the origin, main concepts, and core implementation of systemd as well as its impact on application development. There were in depth discussions about the implementation details and comparison with other competitors in and after the talk.

systemd Introduction by Robin Lee

Then there were three short talks. The first one was "Open Source Strategies of CSDN" by Orson Zhai. He pointed out that CSDN has set open source as one focus, and CSDN CODE is striving to provide a better collaboration platform for open source projects in China. Then David Liang from SUSE talked about the state and progress of "Automatic Testing for GUI". Currently there is no mature tool for automatic GUI testing to increase the efficiency of desktop testing. Projects such as openQA aim at building such tools and are being developed. The last talk was an introduction to Fedora.next by Robin Lee. Fedora.next is a plan being carried to improve the current release practice of Fedora. Based on the reflections of the existing practice, Fedora.next tries to replace the single repository with four rings of packages. Each ring can has its packaging polices. Besides, multiple working groups with possibly different release strategies are formed to build multiple products. In summary Fedora.next aims at better integration of Fedora and the overall open source ecosystem, and more involvement and contribution from more people.

We prepared several GitCafe cups, and Turing generously provided some Linux books. They were distributed as gifts for questioners. CSDN brought gifts for speakers too. Then after all the talks, at around 9:30 pm, we took a group photo.

Group Photo

It is worth pointing out several issues for the event. The pizzas was sent earlier than the registration, without receipts. The number of attendees is small since it was arranged at weekday night. The discussions were more abroad than expected and led to overtime. So to avoid the issues:

• When ordering takeout, specify both the earliest and latest time.
• To attract more people, make the event happen on weekend day (afternoon) at easily findable venue.
• Prepare for overtime, and put the start time as early as possible.

The slides links is available on the wiki page. The photos can be found on G+. Don’t forget to take the post-event survey before Jan 11! You feedback is appreciated!