I finally got to Flock on Wednesday afternoon, shortly after 2pm. Since the afternoon sessions had already started, I sat down on one of them ("Git forge replacement" by Tomáš Hrčka). Once the afternoon sessions were done, I was able to say hi to a few other attendees before going to my room and getting settled in.
On Thursday, I met Maxwell G and talked about the packaging guidelines for Ansible collections he had written. Because I didn't know these guidelines existed, I need to check that my source-rpm of the robertdebock roles conform to them before submitting it to Fedora for review.
I then had the opportunity to talk to Neal Gompa about the linux-system-roles package, which contains a number of roles that are important to the Fedora Server SIG. Neal explained that he only owned the package because it had been orphaned and that he did not want to see it be retired. He told me he would much prefer a member of the SIG be one of the packagers so we ended up giving me the commit bit on the packager.
At one point in the day, I noticed that a young man was wearing a badge on which his last name matched mowest's. I introduced myself and he told me that mowest would be back in a few minutes. I sat down near him and, once the current talk was finished, got to meet mowest. Due to circumstances beyond his control, Peter Boy was unable to come to Flock so mowest and I were the only Server WG members present. We decided that it would be a shame for there not to be a talk related to Fedora Server so mowest suggested that we do a BoF talk to gather Fedora Server users and listen to their use cases. We found Justin Flory and were able to get a room and a place in the schedule later that day.
Mowest and I then spent some time getting to know each other better since we never have a chance to talk informally during the Fedora Server weekly meetings. As we talked, we realized that we had a lot more in common than we suspected. Flying to a different continent to go to Flock may be a chore but it is worth it to meet people we engage with online frequently. For me, the act of meeting mowest made going to the US worth by itself.
The talk/discussion went pretty much as expected. Because it had being thrown together at the last minute, we only had a few attendees but we were still able to discuss the usecase of Fedora as a NAS server, what filesystem we should use and how each one of us handles upgrading from one version of Fedora to the next. Since ths was one of the last talks of the day, we then went to the "Q&A with Mike McGrarth" talk and were somewhat surprised to get a shoutout from Mike, who told the audience that he tought we should have had more of an audience.
I then had a chance to talk with Adam W. and we sat down together for a few minutes to discuss how we could have more AutoQA testing for Fedora Server. I explained that the Server WG is discussing whether to promote Ansible roles/playbooks or setting things up manually. Adam detailed that we had more or less the same issue with regards to AutoQA testing. He would rather we test running Ansible playbooks or doing things by hand but not both.
