A Social Meeting Between French-Speaking Mageians

It was not necessarily planned, but we have decided to tell you of our return in 2023.

A number of MLO members, some of whom are French-speaking contributors to the Mageia project, wanted to get together in September 2023 to renew ties and revitalise our little community. After the release of Mageia 9, it is time to take a step back from MLO and the Mageia project.

Although the MLO IRC room is active, we wanted to talk to each other through live voice-chat. So Jybz installed the VOIP software Mumble on our Mageia 8 server, which hosts our forum.  

So myself, Papoteur, Neoclust, Squidf, Jybz, AmiAge, JCStiegler, Anonymous23, nic80 and David got together on Saturday, the 23rd of September, at 2.00PM, after setting the sound configuration of our respective Mumble clients. Admittedly, it was not easy. Our equipment was of different builds where even the most experienced Linux user could not always master the subtleties of the tool.

We started by doing a roundtable introduction of  ourselves. We realised that we were scattered all over France (Strasbourg, Lyon, Nantes, Paris, Bordeaux, etc.). Many of us are former Mandrake or Mandriva users, others RedHat users. Most of us work in the IT sector, but not just that. 

We then discussed our respective experiences of Mageia 9. Those in a hurry quickly took the plunge (Squidf, Neoclust, Vouf). Papoteur and jybz stayed with Mageia 8…… David is working on the rolling distro “Cauldron” 😉 . Most users are not having problems with this new version, which they consider stable and fast. Recent hardware seems to be well supported. Squidf has installed it on a latest-generation laptop and a Surface Pro 9, using an adapted kernel. 

Jybz and Papoteur then told us that they had succeeded in porting Mageia to a Raspberry Pi 4, but still had problems producing a quality image. There is a desire to have an installation method similar to what is done with the net-install ISO.

As far as MLO is concerned, we confirmed our migration from IRC to Matrix, which provides additional collaborative features (file sharing, audio, etc.). We also discussed our migration to PHPBoost 6 which will take place this month, the improvements to be made to our community repository, and the migration of our server to Mageia 9.

As contributors and users of Mageia, we discussed the project and the work ahead for the community.  Now that Mageia 9 has been delivered, the priority is to launch infrastructure investments and work to better meet the needs of developers. There is also the urgent need to migrate madb. Some of the current hardware is old and undersized, which is detrimental to the productivity of the packagers. The first steps have been taken and the sysadmins are going to be very busy over the next few months.

Naturally, some of us couldn’t help but mention the need to modernise the tools for managing sources, integrating and deploying project content, and to have tools for better sharing the work to be done. 

Ideas were also put forward for improving package maintenance, communication, decision-making processes and project governance. But these are all part of an ongoing discussion on the Mageia mailing lists by the various squads, the council and the board.

It was a great social occasion, much appreciated by the participants, and one that we will no doubt be holding again.  It is just a shame that it was held remotely and not over a beer. And of course, we would have liked to share this moment with all the members of this wonderful Mageia community to get to know each other and create ties.

Mageia yours,

Vouf

Original post: https://blog.mageia.org/fr/2023/10/09/un-moment-convivial-entre-magiciens-francophones/

Translated with DeepL, corrected by Marc Paré