Last Friday I handed in my Bachelor of Science diploma work, so I basically finished my studies! If all goes well (and it should), I’ll receive the title of “Bachelor of Science in media engineering, IT orientation” or something like that. I already got a proposition for a very nice job in the Open Source industry, but nothing is completely sure at the time. I really hope this turns out well 
Maybe you want to know what my diploma work was about? Well, it was about setting up an industrialization process to create custom Fedora-based Linux distributions on the fly. Basically, Fedora appliances targeted at video surveillance.
- The first part of the diploma is targeted at analysing the Fedora package build process, or how to get from source code to an RPM in a repository. It’s a good guide for SPEC files, rpmbuild, Koji, Bodhi etc…the whole build process is detailed. For the job I had to package motion, for which I’m now a contributor and RPM package maintainer. There is also a comparative analysis between the different composition tools available in Fedora.
- The second part of the diploma is targeted at streamlining the whole development process in the company I was working for. As a result they are now using a version control system (SVN) and Trac as a bug tracking system.
- The third part of the diploma is targeted at creating custom Fedora remixes which are auto-installable and auto-configured with heavy kickstart usage. The end result are a couple of scripts which create custom Fedora remixes with Revisor.
- The last part of the diploma is targeted at setting up quality assurance (QA) on the produced Fedora remix.
The final workflow allows the developers to automatically create custom Fedora distributions containing all their code in less than 15 minutes (compared to 1-2 days before). All the configuration files, GUI code, kickstart files etc…are directly extracted from SVN and passed to Revisor.
Now I have time again to catch up with Fedora Marketing stuff, and there is plenty of interesting work going on…