Flock 2013 (and stuff)

Well hi there, strangers. I'm sitting in Robyn's keynote at Flock 2013, so obviously I need to do something other than listen to what happened to her this one time at band camp (yep, really)! Also, I need to write a blog post so Fedora Badges will pick it up. Fedora Badges is the awesome new gamification thing for Fedora which I told everyone who'd listen I was way too cool to get sucked into, so of course as soon as it went up I started refreshing the leaderboard every three seconds... Flock is looking like it'll be fun so far - all the usual suspects and more are here, there are going to be some good talks, and Charleston seems like a nice town. We're actually IN town as well, as opposed to a Businessman Hotel in the wasteland between the airport and the university, so that's great. I'm giving talk on Saturday about submitting updates the right way (for some reason - never drink with the talk submission page open), which I'm pretty sure will be awesome when I get around to writing it. You should totally come. If you're not at Flock, there's a live stream of the main auditorium, and I think there may be some form of streaming or IRC live reporting of other talks: Mo has two posts with info for those who want to follow the conference from afar. In the 'down time' between Fedora 19 release and Fedora 20 branching the QA elves have been working on various bits and pieces. We (by which I mean smart coders who are not me, like Tim) migrated AutoQA to run on Fedora 18 so it can stagger along for another half a year while we work on Taskbot. Our GSoC student Branislav has been kicking ass working on Gooey Karma, a GUI tool for sending Bodhi feedback on Fedora updates - check it out if you didn't yet, it's great (though still being worked on). We're also working on various updates and additions to the release criteria and release validation test cases to try and make sure we're actually running tests that cover all of the criteria, that everything is up to date with recent changes to anaconda, initial-setup and so on, and extend our test coverage to cover new functionality in the installer and the addition of ARM as a primary architecture and cloud images as prominent downloads. I also had an ARM day of my own last week, finally getting a Fedora (19) installation onto the hard disk of my Trimslice and updating my XO 1.75 to the latest upstream build. Once you get it running, Fedora ARM really is mostly just Fedora, but dealing with the bootloader is - as rwmj pointed out - lots of fun... I've been running Rawhide (so, F20) on my desktop since almost the day after F19 release, and trying to do my bit to do rebuilds and stuff to keep it usable. Kevin Fenzi has been writing a good series of posts on running Rawhide - my experience mostly matches his, although I run GNOME and we're going through the 3.9 unstable series at the moment, so there are a few more exciting bugs in that to deal with from time to time. It's definitely day-to-day usable, though. If you're at Flock, find me and say hi! I'll try and update a few times, but as usual I'll probably just drink instead. You know how it goes. Will has brought moonshine: this can only end well.