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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

mastodon 4.7.3

* CI/Devops/Infra Engineer, worked on RHEL & CentOS Stream
* Product Owner of Anaconda installer and Cockpit teams in Red Hat
* Fedora Ambassador, FESCo and Fedora Council member
* PhD in Geometry and Topology
* she/her

Matrix: @bookwar@floss.social:fedora.im

I use this account for FOSS debates.

For more personal stuff see @bookwar@nrw.social

Feel free to follow one or the other, both or none.

--
I am not a native speaker, and I appreciate private notes correcting my English or German.

844 Followers

303 Following

39 Posts

Joined April 25, 2025

Fedora:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Bookwar

Codeberg:

https://codeberg.org/bookwar/

Blog:

https://blog.bookwar.info

Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@inthehands@hachyderm.io I like the article, but not the "liberal arts against STEM" comments it triggers :) I think it might be not about _what_ you teach but _how_ you do it. Because the Mathematics I studied was a liberal art in this framework. There is much more in Mathematics and STEM as a whole than the calculus needed for the industry. And I believe one can and should teach STEM as an art, not as a "how to get employed as fast as possible" discipline. @puercomal@sfba.social @pattykimura@beige.party

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@LonM@social.vivaldi.net To be fair, I applied the same method to study Calculus at the uni once. Literally rewriting, with pen and paper, the course materials from the notes I wrote during the course into the new notebook sentence by sentence trying to understand it as I go. It helps to keep the focus and prevents you from skimming through the content too fast. It might be not the most effective way, And we had better handled courses after that one, but it is a working approach in some cases. @sushee@ohai.social

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@b0rk It is a good article. But as a distro developer I am quite sad that such developer conversations neglect the role and the purpose of distribution projects. Distributions do in fact represent a middle ground between going self-hosted and over-relying on a bit tech third-party. They are made to solve the dependencies issues, to help with discovery, to serve as archives and as places to ask for help and collaboration. Come to us, we have cookies :)

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 10mo ago

How I became a Fedora Contributor:

I was a Fedora user for some years, we had a local user group where we talked about Linux and so on.

And one day I went to the Linux Tag in Berlin. There were many project booths, including Fedora.

So I came to the booth and said "hi, I am a Fedora user, can I get stickers for my LUG?"

And one of the folks said - want to join us at the booth and help here?

I said "of course!" and went on the other side of the table. And this is how it all started :)

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@b0rk RIght. Distributions have social, infra and coordination functions. They essentially allow FOSS developers to unionize and try to solve the shared problems together. They also provide the supporting structure which turns the single XKCD-dependency guy into a part of a larger platform https://floss.social/@bookwar/115082628376476848 We tend to over-emphasize the packaging (as in creating a specific package format) as the major function of a distribution, but it is not the goal rather the means.

Aleksandra Fedorova :fedora:: "My take on the modern classics https://xkcd.com/…" - FLOSS.social

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 13mo ago

Somehow our #Fedora booth also works as #Forgejo booth today, but I am not complaining.

There is no better time than now to aim for federated self-hosted Git forges.

FLOSS.social

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 3mo ago

Does anyone run a public blocklist of "fake news aggregator" sites, i.e. AI-generated sites which publish the articles they scraped impersonating the original authors? Is there already some firefox extension, search setting, whatever tool to block them or show a big red banner when browsing them? I got fooled by one just recently, and don't want it to happen again. --- Also need to add one of my old domains there, which I let go a couple of years ago.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 13mo ago

My take on the modern classics

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Dependency

Dependency

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

And yes, it means governments should stop trying to develop code - a thing which they never ever done well. They should do what they actually know how to do - build public institutions, shared standards and requirements. They should invest in free education, knowledge sharing, and communication infrastructure.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 2mo ago

Fun fact: I was introduced to the concept of meritocracy in my local russian-speaking community. Which means I had no prior knowledge of the term, nor I did any reading on it. I just trusted what a fellow Fedora contributor told me. And they told me that meritocracy means that "those who _do_ things, should decide _how_ to do them". Not those who are most clever, not those who are the most right, but those who _do_. Only a decade later I learned that people may think about merit differently.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@b0rk There are shared tech problems: like 32-bit to 64-bit, or Wayland, or ipv6, or post quantum crypto, or coreutils in rust... When we try to collaborate on cross-project issues we need a forum and distros become the places to go. There are also a political and social topics. Which I admit are much harder, see FSF-controversy, Code of Conduct topics, AI-policies.. Distros make statements, endorse (or not) licenses and rules, and generally try to represent the voice of its community.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

One of my most memorable early experiences as a DevOps/CI engineer on the dev team was the Release Day.

Essentially the team must do the release by a deadline. The closer they are to it, the harder it gets, they try to make it, put a lot of effort into a final sprint to the goal...

And hooray!, by the end of the day, just about an hour past the 18:00, they made it, and the QA folks sign off the release.

The team celebrates the successful release, and opens an actual whiskey bottle..

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Local farmer market for artisanal IT goods, when?

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

The one improvement in Thunderbird which would help me quite a lot would be to add an easy visual hint in which order the mailbox is sorted.

Should I scroll down to newer messages, or up?

I guess the issue is of my own making, because i have the inconsistency in this behavior between different accounts and interfaces.

But I so often find myself doomscrolling through my seems-to-be-infinte inbox in the wrong direction..

FLOSS.social

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

I wish it would be a rule, so that for any senior enough manager to talk about pipelines, fully automated infrastructures and continuous delivery, they should show a successful Factorio run first.

And not on a peaceful mode.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net I think one skill we need to (re)learn is that we don't have to perfectly align to collaborate. It is OK to have different but overlapping goals, it is OK to have different interests and priorities, And we can still collaborate with all that. The wide open Internet gave us the opportunity to reach to many like-minded people, which is really cool. But it also gave us the way to too easily escape the need to cooperate with people who are not as like-minded.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud The reality is - the moment you start distributing something - you become a distribution :) You have a choice to be a single person distribution or a community driven one. It can be a set of Flatpaks or a GNOME OS - it doesn't matter. Your users will ask you for support, CVE responses, code of conduct and lifecycle anyway. And if you want to build a new type of distro, with new policies and new packages - it is totally fine with me. As long as you respect others. @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud You are trying to put "random people" on one side and then "distros" on the other. But there are no sides. My point is - distribution is a form of organization which allows random people to collaborate more efficiently. When one random person discovers something, they have the distribution organization which helps them reach other random persons and then take a collective action on that discovery. @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

Yes, you are allowed to deploy 15 Jenkins side by side. That's ok. It's not a mistake, it is a good practice! It is a practice which works. You control them from one config repo using similar tools. Most importantly, you use the unified naming schema for jobs and artifacts across all of them, and that is enough integration.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

And by protocols i do not mean network protocols between services, or activity pub. Protocols means set of rules, agreements, processes and policies, which may be implemented through some different means: docs, linters on ansible playbooks, integration tests, writings on the wall.. whatever.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud It was literally reported through the distro security communication channels because the upstream was compromised and the "random person" relied on distro to handle it. "Given the apparent upstream involvement I have not reported an upstream bug. As I initially thought it was a debian specific issue, I sent a more preliminary report to security@...ian.org. Subsequently I reported the issue to distros@. CISA was notified by a distribution." https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4 @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

oss-security - backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@liw We need more forums. We need to revive and embrace the forum culture. And I am sad to say it but people sticking to mailing lists are partially responsible for this not happening. They have good intent. They defend the mailing list style of discourse, but they are not saving it, they gatekeep it. They do not let us move this style anywhere to a more accessible place. And it only can move *with* them. And this leads to social networks taking over that role in all the bad ways.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@codonell@fosstodon.org Also there is currently no visual hint when you look at the list whether you have already reached the top or are looking somewhere in the middle. The scroll bar disappears when you are idle. So basically whenever I switch to the Thunderbird UI window from somewhere else I am never confident that I am looking at the latest mail. Which I guess is the main issue here.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@tris@chaos.social Jokes aside, 1) The purpose of the distribution, among other things, is to be able to sustain the loss of (some of the) upstream. Sometimes by replacing it with the alternative, sometimes by making it possible for others to pick it up, sometimes at least by communicating the change to all impacted. 2) Distribution ISO image in the closet is what you have left once the "digital (cloud) infrastructure" collapses. And it is the thing which you will use to rebuild the rest of it. :)

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@liw Ok, proving your point, I guess.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

And while I am at it, I also found quite cool idea on making the timeline slider more usable. Right now it allows you to jump to a specific post number. But nothing in the UI actually tells you about the post number, so it is not usable on its own. The feature suggests adding breakpoints, so you can jump to a liked or a bookmarked post. I think it could be very usable when you are doing a first pass through a long thread and mark posts you want to reply to. https://meta.discourse.org/t/natural-breakpoints-or-chapters-for-long-topics/16461

meta.discourse.org

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@codonell@fosstodon.org In the Cards View even that tiny arrow is missing. I think a simple banner on top or at the bottom of the visible list of mails, which would say "Newer" or "Older", would work for me. Not a big banner, just a thin line with one word in the middle, always visible. I know people would complain about precious vertical space, but it would worth it for me :)

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud I think one of the big reasons why Flatpak conversations become so unnecessary heated is that somehow folks take that question too personally. No, we don't claim that all upstream developers are unreliable. But we need to build a system which survives when one of the upstreams becomes unreliable. It doesn't survive it by "packagers being better", it survives by the org structure being built for it. And "we" here - is "anyone who is distributing something" @jcm @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 17mo ago

Replying to

@osuosl@fosstodon.org Btw, the field for a phone number is completely broken for international contributors. Though I have no idea why you might need a phone number for accepting a donation.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

And it is exactly the core issue: we can not just create a perfect piece of the forum software somewhere on the side, prove that it works, then come to a mailing list and say - hey, we made it, migrate all. Because the presence of those people sitting on the mailing list in that forum is the main thing which makes a forum good. Not the technology.

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud I realize you are on a crusade against Fedora. And I am sad that your previous interactions with the project had such an impact. But my intent is not to advertise it. My intent is to explain that FOSS is much more than a pile of source code published in some Git repos. FOSS is people, org structures, policies, processes and politics around them. It is sometimes (often) frustrating, but it is how we solve the problem of a single isolated upstream developer. @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@codonell@fosstodon.org Good thing I never reply to mine.. :)

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud Working with the reliable trusted upstream is always nice. And it is not a big problem for any form of the distribution. Packaging a well-designed, well-licensed and well-versioned app into a rpm or deb is a no brainer too. And upstream first policy in Fedora specifically discourages any changes to such upstream code because there is no justification for them. But this thread started with a question, what happens when upstream fails in some way. @jcm @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

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Aleksandra Fedorova

@bookwar@floss.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud Well, I can not claim to know every user or contributor's heart, but as an elected Fedora Council member, aggregating the community sentiment into some sort of shared vision is part of my job :) And I think the question is not "who is more reliable". The question is - _what_ can we do to increase the mutual trust and reliability. 1/ @jcm @vwbusguy@mastodon.online

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