In this installment of the “What Did You Do in Mitaka” series, I’m speaking with Haïkel Guémar

(If the above player doesn’t work for you, you can download the audio HERE.)

Rich: Thanks for making time to speak with me.

Haïkel: Thank you.

R: So, tell me, what did you do in Mitaka?

H: I work on the RDO engineering team - the team that is responsible for the stewardship of RDO. For this cycle, I’ve been focusing on our new packaging work flow.

We were using, for a long time, a piece of infrastructure taken from Fedora, CentOS, and GitHub. This didn’t work very well, and was not providing a consistent experience for the contributors. So we’ve been working with another team at Red Hat to provide a more integrated platform, and one that mirrors the one that we have upstream, based on the same tools - meaning Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Nodepool, Zuul - that is called Software Factory. So we’ve been working with the Software Factory team to provide a specialization of that platform called RPMFactory.

RPMFactory is a platform specialized for producing RPMs in a continuous delivery fashion. It has all the advantages of the old tooling we have been using, but with more consistency. You don’t have to look in different places to find the source code, the packaging, and stuff like that. Everything is under a single portal.

That’s what I’ve been focusing on during this cycle, on top of my usual duties, which is producing packages and fixing it.

R: And looking forward to the Newton release, what do you think you’re going to be working on in that cycle?

H: While we’ve been working in the new workflow, we’ve been setting a new goal, that is to decrease the gap between upstream releases and RDO releases down to 2 weeks. Well, we did it on the very same day for Mitaka! So my goal would be for Newton to do as good as this time, or even better. Why not under 2 hours? Not putting on ourselves more pressure, but to try to release almost at the same time as upstream GA, RDO. And also with the same quality standards.

One of the few things that I was not happy with during the Mitaka cycle was mostly the fact that we didn’t manage to release some packages in time, so I’d like to do better. Soon enough I will be asking for people to fill in a wish list on packaging, so that we are able to work on that earlier. And so we could release them on time with GA.

R: Thanks again for taking the time to do this.

H: Thank you Rich, for the series.