Thursday, August 15, 2019

Flock 2019 - Budapest, Hungery : Internationalization, Localization and Testing


I am one of the lucky person who has got an opportunity to consistently participate in amazing Fedora community to drive innovation in free and open source way. This was my 5th flock after 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018. Indeed, it's great to see how many things has been changed in technology space. Values of Fedora still remains the same, Freedom, Friends, Features and First !!

For me the highlight talks was Denise Dumas on "Fedora, Red Hat and IBM". She very well explained how Fedora and Fedora community is very very important to Red Hat and it will remain the same even after acquisition.

Other than that i also attended all talks from Brendan Conoboy. He nicely explained on RHEL-8 planning side stuff.

It is interesting to see How Silverblue is emerging as a default workstation for future. (Though there are many challenges as of now)

Mindshare also evolved from planning to inception and going well now. Jared Smith provided good review of it.

Many interesting talks were in parallel and has to skip one to attend other. Need to go through few talks videos soon.

Notes on internationalization side:

On the language side, this was one of the best flock. We had overall 5 sessions on l10n, i18n and qe side. All went very well.

  • The future of langpacks in Fedora :- Its interesting to see how langpacks has evolved over time in Fedora and not it looks perfect replacement for yum language groups. We are planning to add more test coverage on langpacks side.
  • Use cases for Transtats in the Fedora community :- I missed this talk, since wanted to attend mindshare. But I remember the time when many translators were talking about string freeze break problems and now we have a solution as a Transtats. We can also track particular package for its state in upstream, downstream.
  • Defining a Fedora Goal related to localization :- In this talk Jean-Baptiste presented many interesting stats about Fedora translation community health perspective. In many aspects we are going down from past 2 releases from translations perspectives.
  • Fedora translation platform: validating the migration plan  :- This talks come workshop was more from the expectations of Fedora translations community from new platform and also from few process perspectives.
  • Fedora Internationalization CI and Test cases :-   I was lead for this session. Jens started with his short talk on present CI and Test cases from i18n side. Our earlier plan was to meet and start working on writing test cases but we got good number of attendees, so rather that straight going to workshop, we thought lets do the brainstorming on things happening right now and what we should do.
    • At the end, we decided to automation test cases, we execute in Fedora i18n test days.
    • Notes from the session available at Wiki
Few other interesting talks I attended were CommunityShift, Fedora Security, Candy Swap, Video of different language speaking Fedora contributors and Fedora workstation roadmap.

Overall worth flock with lots of networking, fun activities and lots of work. !!