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Docs workshop: Virtually writing together

At the Fedora Linux 38 release party, the Docs team suggested that we take advantage of a virtual meetup to bring teamwork into documentation writing. Documentation writing shouldn’t be a solitary pursuit.

An interactive session at Flock 2023 helped exchange ideas on a collaborative way to run meetings and invite more contributions for documentation.

After months of waiting for ideas to be finalized, the Docs team is pleased to announce the workshop will begin September 2023.

If you fancy coming along, just let us know your preferred timeslot in the When-is-good scheduler by September 15 2023.

But why and how?

The idea behind a virtual writing session is to combine the power of the Fedora Podcast with advocacy of writing and maintaining excellent user documentation. Here is why.

  • Documentation in any free and open source software project provides reasons for users and contributors to stay loyal to the project and software.
  • The Docs workshop aims to facilitate individual and collaborative work through a supportive community of documentarians.
  • Documentation is more than a fix of visual presentation. We’re writing, reviewing, and deploying docs.
  • In accordance with the Fedora project motto “First”, we like to try new things in toolset, automation, and UI improvement.

Building on feedback from each session, the Docs team wants to empower people to learn about templates, issue tickets, review processes, and tool chains to improve documentation for Fedora Linux users and contributors.

Program agenda

A monthly agenda will be posted in Fedocal and Fosstodon (@fedora@fosstodon.org).

Track 1: Introduction and onboarding (odd months)
– What the Docs team is all about. What role will interest you?
– The types of user documentation Fedora Linux publishes
– How you can help improve Fedora Documentation.

Track 2: Skill-based workshop (even months)
– Technical review, Git workshop, AsciiDoc template and attributes
– Use of local build and preview script
– Test documentation quality

Format of Track 2
– Demo
– Try it yourself
– Q&A

If you come along to the Track 2 workshop, all you need is a Fedora account and Pagure account with your computer, preferably with Git and Podman (or Docker) installed.

In the meantime, if you have questions, feel free to drop by our Discussion forum. I’m looking forward to saying hello at our first virtual docs workshop someday in late September (the exact date depends on the when-is-good responses)! Let’s do it!

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Enable remote collaboration with tmate.io on Fedora

Being able to collaborate on task remotely is an increasing need in today’s world. Contributing to Open Source project ? Working remotely ? tmate is a tmux fork that makes it easy to share a terminal session with others. It can save you hours of lonely debugging or programming.

tmate, being a tmux fork, supports all of tmux features and configuration. Also tmux and tmate can co-exist on the same system. To learn more about tmux, you can read the following article

Installing tmate on Fedora

tmate is available in the Fedora repository, making it really easy to install.

$ sudo dnf install tmate
$ tmate
Connecting to ssh.tmate.io… Note: clear your terminal before sharing readonly access web session read only: https://tmate.io/t/ro-F2aK7T ssh session read only: ssh ro-F2aK7TJsEj6b4T@l.tmate.io web session: https://tmate.io/t/H5rPw ssh session: ssh H5rPwR@l.tmate.io

After starting tmate, different ways to share your session will be available. You have the choice between ssh (read-only, read-write) or web (read-only, read-write).

The web client is known to have a few issues and is still work in progress, for example the tmux key bindings are not yet supported.

On the host running tmate, you start a new pane by hitting “Ctrl+b, c”. The new pane will then be available with anyone connected to your session.

You can easily keep track of how many clients are connected to your session, using the tmate control pane. To access it hit “Ctrl+b, 0 (zero)” you will then see something like this.

A mate has joined (109.95.145.251) -- 1 client currently connected
A mate has left (109.95.145.251) -- 0 client currently connected
A mate has joined (109.95.145.251) -- 1 client currently connected

To close a session you can simply close tmate “Ctrl+c, Ctrl+d“.

Running your own server

By default tmate is using a remote server hosted on tmate.io. If you prefer you have the possibility to run your own server. For convenience a container image is provided and instruction are available on tmate.io.

It is important to remember that sharing your terminal session in read-write mode will give full access to your system to the connected client. So make sure you trust the persons you sharing you session with or use the read-only mode.

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Fedora and CentOS Stream

From the desk of the Fedora Project Leader:

Hi everyone! You may have seen the announcement about changes over at the CentOS Project. (If not, please go ahead and take a few minutes and read it — I’ll wait!) And now you may be wondering: if CentOS is now upstream of RHEL, what happens to Fedora? Isn’t that Fedora’s role in the Red Hat ecosystem?

First, don’t worry. There are changes to the big picture, but they’re all for the better.

If you’ve been following the conference talks from Red Hat Enterprise Linux leadership about the relationship between Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL, you have heard about “the Penrose Triangle”. That’s a shape like something from an M. C. Escher drawing: it’s impossible in real life!

We’ve been thinking for a while that maybe impossible geometry is not actually the best model. 

For one thing, the imagined flow where contributions at the end would flow back into Fedora and grow in a “virtuous cycle” never actually worked that way. That’s a shame, because there’s a huge, awesome CentOS community and many great people working on it — and there’s a lot of overlap with the Fedora community too. We’re missing out.

But that gap isn’t the only one: there’s not really been a consistent flow between the projects and product at all. So far, the process has gone like this: 

  1. Some time after the previous RHEL release, Red Hat would suddenly turn more attention to Fedora than usual.
  2. A few months later, Red Hat would split off a new RHEL version, developed internally.
  3. After some months, that’d be put into the world, including all of the source — from which CentOS is built. 
  4. Source drops continue for updates, and sometimes those updates include patches that were in Fedora — but there’s no visible connection.

Each step here has its problems: intermittent attention, closed-door development, blind drops, and little ongoing transparency. But now Red Hat and CentOS Project are fixing that, and that’s good news for Fedora, too.

Fedora will remain the first upstream of RHEL. It’s where every RHEL came from, and is where RHEL 9 will come from, too. But after RHEL branches off, CentOS will be upstream for ongoing work on those RHEL versions. I like to call it “the midstream”, but the marketing folks somehow don’t, so that’s going to be called “CentOS Stream”.

We — Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat — still need to work out all of the technical details, but the idea is that these branches will live in the same package source repository. (The current plan is to make a “src.centos.org” with a  parallel view of the same data as src.fedoraproject.org). This change gives public visibility into ongoing work on released RHEL, and a place for developers and Red Hat’s partners to collaborate at that level.

CentOS SIGs — the special interest groups for virtualization, storage, config management and so on — will do their work in shared space right next to Fedora branches. This will allow much easier collaboration and sharing between the projects, and I’m hoping we’ll even be able to merge some of our similar SIGs to work together directly. Fixes from Fedora packages can be cherry-picked into the CentOS “midstream” ones — and where useful, vice versa.

Ultimately, Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL are part of the same big project family. This new, more natural flow opens possibilities for collaboration which were locked behind artificial (and extra-dimensional!) barriers. I’m very excited for what we can now do together!

— Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader