June 3, 2010

FAD Pune 2010

It all started with a discussion on having a FUDCON India this year. Someone suggested some agendas, others observed the agenda as more suited to a series of FADs, and we decided to have a FAD, off course in Pune as that would make the job of finding a venue, internet connectivity and people a piece of cake. More on that later.


FAD, which is the abbreviated form of "Fedora Activity Day", is an event where people meet up together and work towards getting things done. Everyone has some plans of how they want to spend their time during a FAD and so did all of us. Someone wanted to do some packaging, others aimed at some serious bug zapping and some just wanted to sit and hack on some tough piece of code. Mine was the simplest plan of getting stuffs packaged. I wanted to get some packages reviewed and review some in return. The next few lines shines some light on what I did in the two days.
I had a very start on the first day when I accidentally broke my specs. Wasn't really able to read stuffs and could not get much done. Still I tried to review rtnpro's python-keyring package as I had taken that up earlier. It was missing some dependency and wasn't really compiling. Tried to fix that for him, could not get it done. Even Kushal da tried his hand on it but in vain. Next was getting python-plwm reviewed which I had submitted earlier. Rahul happily took up the task and recommended a few changes which I did and submitted. In the afternoon had a great discussion on Open Hardware with Siddharth from BHASHA . He is a great guy with a barrage of ideas. tuxdna DNA got interested in the ARMStrongIDE project and took it up actively. In the evening, Rahul showed me how to start a different window manager by using .xinitrc . It was really fun. Thus the first day bode farewell.

After a good night sleep, all of us were back on Sunday, all charged up to get things done. Second day was a little more eventful for me. Got my specs repaired. Susmit da had already prepared a wishlist for Fedora Medical Spin. Started packaging one of those, GNUMed to be precise. Also helped Ankur in his glorious attempt tp package kufper which uses the waf build system that too an age old version. Sayamindu da's talk was the highlight of the day, "OLPC as a downstream of Fedora and problems faced". In the mean time rtnpro worked on his vocab building application and Ankur on Fedora tour. Harsh did some packaging for Medical spin as well. Runa spent the day working on Gnote help. By this time, it was evening and Rahul wanted to discuss what we achieved, what more could have been done, what went wrong. Everyone had different opinions but on one stream all agreed - "We need to have more specific agendas". An online version of this event ought to follow soon. The day was concluded with some FUDCON related discussions and so was the FAD.


This was the first FAD I ever attended and it was a great learning experience for me. It was lot more fun and productive and collaborative than any irc version can ever be. Hope to see atleast annual FADs in the years to come if not more.

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