Tap tap tap… is this on?

So the Fedora Council has approved my proposal of IoT as a Council Objective. I did a presentation on my IoT proposal to the council a few weeks ago and we had an interesting and wide ranging discussion on IoT and what it means to Fedora. I was actually expecting IoT to be a Spin with a SIG to cover it but the Council decided it would be best to go the whole way and make it an Official Edition with a Working Group to back it! Amazing! One of the side effects of IoT being an accepted Objective is that the Objective Lead has a seat on the Council.

So I would say the real work starts now, but the reality is that there’s been no small amount of work I’ve been doing to get to this point, but there is also now a lot of work to do to get us to a release. We’re going to aim this initially for Fedora 29, with the intention to have a lightweight spin style process to get things up to speed as quick as possible between now and then.

So what will be happening over the coming weeks (and months)? We’ll be getting the working group in place, getting an initial monthly release process in place so that people can start to have something to kick the tires with and provide feedback and drive discussion. With those two big pieces in place we can start to grow the Fedora IoT community and work out the bits that work and bits that don’t work. Iterate early and iterate often as is often said!

So of course the big question is how do you get involved? We’ll be tracking all of the Working Group efforts in a number of places:

Fedora IoT Pagure Group: We’ll be using this for issue tracking, release milestones, and for git repositories to contain things like container recipes.

Fedora IoT mailing list: If you don’t have a FAS account you can subscribe by emailing (blank is fine) iot-subscribe AT lists.fedoraproject.org and the list server will reply with subscription options.

IRC on #fedora-iot

Fedora IoT Tracking bug: This will be primarily for tracking dependencies and component RFEs and issues.

The above list will change and evolve as we go, I expect the pagure group, mailing list and IRC to be the primary places of communication. There will of course be updates also on this blog, no doubt Fedora Magazine, FedoraIoT on twitter and elsewhere.

What will there be to do? Well lots, and that is still obviously in flux at the moment. The things that come to mind that we’ll definitely need to address will include, but certainly won’t be limited to, awesome docs, the actual OSTree Atomic host image which will be the key foundation, CI/CD pipelines to automate testing as much as possible, release processes including landing of features once they’re ready, containers and layers to add functionality, a selection of supported reference devices (see also CI/CD in this context too), various IoT frameworks, hardware enablement such as wireless standards and distinct from the supported reference HW, security (a single word can’t even begin to describe this iceberg!) and developer experience to name but a few but there’s so much more! Is everyone excited? Of course you are!