Hi,
I've got a very nice interview from Dan, which has very good contents
for my work. I've taken the liberty of attaching the full email
non-edited.
I've got enough information to pull a non-technical article. By merging
this with the already existent information of NetworkManager, this be
fun actually a very fun thingie.
I will report soon, with 24 hours as I said earlier, it's going to be
done. Right after we advertise it, please wait for my "go" as I would
like to give Dan the time to review and provide some editorial-cuts if
applicable.
Thanks in advance,
Nelson
--- Begin Message ---
On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 17:17 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:
> Dear Dan,
>
> I'm contacting you with some questions so I can finish up my Feature
> Profile around NetworkManager for Fedora 13.
> I've thought a lot on your reply and on your work on wiki regarding the
> features, so I've decided to do something different for this interview.
>
> I'm trying to focus more on the human factor. One of the understandings
> I got at a personal level is that potential contributors usually are
> "shy" on their approach to FOSS Communities such as Fedora. I would try
> to minimize that gap through this interview with a small set of
> questions.
>
> My questions are the following (I might understand some of this might
> sound strange, but they have a purpose):
>
> #.1 - How would you characterize your involvement with Fedora and FOSS
> Communities?
I've been working for Red Hat since 2003, originally on OpenOffice.org,
but since 2005 as the upstream project maintainer for NetworkManager,
ModemManager, and a few other things. I was also heavily involved in
OLPC from 2005 - 2007, helping plan and implement core features of Sugar
and OLPC wireless.
I act as an advocate for users by attending the various kernel wifi
summits and being involved on Linux wireless mailing lists
(hostap/wpa_supplicant, linux-wireless, etc). Through this capacity
we've been able to move Linux wireless forward quite a bit versus
2004/2005.
> #.2 - From your scope of view, what are the barriers that potential
> developers face when they try to join FOSS Projects?
Probably #1 is lack of upstream guidance; when a potential developer
shows up, often upstream developers don't have a ton of time to help
nurture that developer through some of the initial stages, because they
have so much to do. It's a very fine line; you can spend 75% of your
time helping new potential developers and then you don't hit your
feature targets because you didn't spend enough time coding.
What helps that is documentation; if you put beginning documentation up
somewhere then you can direct new developers to that instead of
repeating over and over each time one shows up. Or, if there are other
community members that can handle this duty while you concentrate on the
tougher questions.
Filling that role (called "developer relations" in larger companies) is
a great job for somebody who can't commit tons of time to the project,
but who is still willing to periodically build the source (even if they
don't fix core bugs) and answer emails.
> #.3 - What would be your personal advice for potential developers who
> would willing to help with NetworkManager?
Keep asking questions; no question is too stupid or embarrassing to ask.
Then, when you understand the solution to your question, tell us how to
improve the documentation so other people benefit too. Since we've been
involved in the project for a long time, we don't always know what the
initial roadblocks are to building the source, understanding the
architecture, etc.
> #.4 - In what fields would new developers get competencies (skill
> improvement) when developing for NetworkManager?
How to use D-Bus, GObject, and PolicyKit, how the whole networking
system interacts, how 3G modems are driven, netlink APIs, parsing system
network configuration files, etc. It really depends on what part of the
NM you're looking at since there are lots of things going on.
> #.5 - What would be your advice to normal users to contribute actively
> for FOSS in bug reporting? Could you profile the importance of such
> contributions?
Learn how to provide good bug reports. I've tried to put up a page here
describing what should be added to a good bug report for NetworkManager:
http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/Debugging
The #1 and #2 items missing from many bug reports is what package
version of NM you've experienced the bug with, and what hardware you're
using. As the Fedora project, we should work harder to automate the
collection of this information like Ubuntu has done with Launchpad.
This stuff should really be automatic, but for now we'll need users to
do it for us.
> #.6 - Could your tell us some of the major achievements achieved in the
> last 6 months on NetworkManager development?
We rolled out NetworkManager 0.8; I've written a blog post on it here:
http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2010/04/07/networkmanager-0-8-the-taste-of-a-new-generation/
Note that Fedora 13 is shipping stabilized snapshots of NM 0.8.1 that
include quite a bit more functionality than is listed in that post, like
DHCPv6, Bluetooth DUN, and Mobile Broadband status.
> #.7 - On a personal level, what are the features and benefits that your
> would highlight in NW 0.8.0?
>
> #.8 - What distribution/tools do you use for development of
> NetworkManager?
I develop mainly on Fedora, though occasionally I do a build on Ubuntu
when I need to dig into a problem there and the Ubuntu team hasn't been
able to debug it further.
I use gnome-terminal with multiple tabs for workflow (usually have
NetowrkManager's directory open in one tab, ModemManager's in another,
and network-manager-applet's in a third), and GEdit for actual coding.
No, I don't use emacs or vi, mainly because I started coding on Mac OS
long ago and all the tools there are GUI development environments.
GEdit does 95% of what most people really need from an editor, and I've
never been a fan modal editors like emacs/vi probably because I used
something else first.
> #.9 - In your opinions a FOSS developer should care for?
I don't quite understand the question, could you elaborate?
> #.10 - In your personal opinion how you define the 4 Foundations of
> Fedora (Freedom, Friends, Features, First).
Honestly, I didn't look at the Fedora web pages before I started writing
these up. I think these 4 foundations are pretty self-explanatory for
anyone that's been involved in free software for a while.
Freedom: it's about Free Software; we don't make compromises. If it's
not free, or it's patent encumbered, we don't ship it. You're
completely free to redistribute, remix, and modify anything we ship.
Friends: both working on Fedora and using Fedora should be fun; we
shouldn't discriminate or make users feel unwelcome. Our discussions
should be civilized, avoid personal attacks, and simply get to the
bottom of the issue. Obviously there will be disagreements, but these
need to be settled nicely.
Features: we build new features through the community. We don't develop
them behind closed doors, almost all of what we do is out there in git
repositories and on wiki pages. We have lots of different users, and we
try to add new features that help all these users out, not just one
particular group.
First: we're cutting-edge; we drive new features into Fedora before most
other distros get them, but we also try to ensure those features are
stable enough for our users. This is hard to get right, but we seem to
be doing it pretty well so far.
>
> Thanks for having time to answer this questions. Feel free to skip any
> if you don't feel like answering it. I would like also to express my
> personal thanks for taking some time to go through this.
>
> Relating the Article, I would to know also if you want me to display a
> small Biography? Do I have your permission to post also the full
> interview ?
Sure, you can post a bio, please run it by me first of course :)
I'm a Senior Software Engineer on the Red Hat Desktop team. I was an
early part of the Desktop team's ramp-up back in 2003 and was hired to
work on OpenOffice due to my involvement with the OOo Mac OS X port.
Around 2004 Havoc asked me to look at making networking not suck
(because it really, really did) so I started working on NetworkManager.
I was also part of the original Red Hat team working on OLPC along with
John Palmieri, Marco Pessenti-Gritti, Chris Blizzard, David Woodhouse,
Marcelo Tosatti, Seth Nickell, Bryan Clark, and others. It's been a
great ride over the last 7 years.
> Before going online, I will submit you the link on the wiki for this
> Article for your approval (or to correct anything that might be
> misleading).
Sounds good.
Cheers,
Dan
> Once more, thanks for your time,
>
> Kindest Regards,
> nelson marques
>
>
--- End Message ---
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