Flock 2025 Conference
Report from this years Flock
6/17/20253 min read
I attended the Flock 2025 conference in Prague, the annual event for the Fedora Project community. The conference served as a forum for discussing the current state and future of the Fedora operating system. My primary reason for attending was to present Log Detective[1], an AI-powered tool for analyzing RPM package build failures. The project was met with interest and feedback. My attendance at other sessions also provided insights into trends within the community, particularly regarding the Fedora desktop, software packaging, and support for new hardware.
Our goal at Flock was to introduce Log Detective to the Fedora community. Log Detective is a tool designed to assist in debugging RPM package build failures by using a Large Language Model (LLM) and the Drain template miner for log analysis.
Together with Tomas Tomecek, I gave a presentation on Log Detective which was followed by a short Q & A session. The reception was positive. One piece of feedback was a caution regarding the potential for our servers to be overloaded by requests, a consideration for us as we scale the project.
On the last day of the conference we hosted a workshop where I demonstrated our annotation tooling, which is used to create our dataset of failed builds, interesting build log messages, root causes found and proposed resolutions. The user interface was generally well-received, and attendees offered suggestions for improvement.
A question was raised about the availability of an API for submitting annotations. Tomas Tomecek confirmed that pull requests implementing this functionality had recently been merged.
The workshop transitioned into a longer Q&A session, where Tomas and I answered questions on topics including:
Server Architecture: The design of the Log Detective backend.
Dataset License: The use of the CDLA-Permissive-2.0[2] license for our dataset.
Integration with CentOS Gitlab: Providing commentary in merge requests.
Future Plans: Our strategy for using the dataset to train our own model.
Discussions with other attendees were also productive. They were receptive to the idea of adapting Log Detective for their own purposes and provided suggestions for improvements.
Sessions Attended and topics discussed
During the conference I have attended several sessions outlining current trends in the wider Fedora ecosystem. One topic in particular was recurring, further integration of containers into the OS, especially bootable containers, or bootc.
The Fedora Desktop and Gaming
A recurring topic was the effort to enhance Fedora's user experience. The "Fedora’s Gaming Renaissance: The Bazzite Effect" session showed how a gaming-focused OS based on the concept of Fedora Atomic Desktops is attracting new users and contributors.
One of the questions raised by the audience during the talk, centered on the relative lack of upstream contributions to Fedora from the Bazzite community. The following discussion emphasized radically different makeup of both communities, including their skillset as well as preferred mode of communication.
This is connected to the "Fedora Atomic Desktops: Are we the default yet?" talk about the current state of atomic desktops in Fedora ecosystem, or rather their rate of adoption. Somewhat surprising takeaway, given the title, was that atomic desktops are already the most common way Fedora is used today, provided you include Bazzite in the figures.
The session on "Multimedia in Fedora" addressed the challenges of codec licensing, which impacts the out-of-the-box user experience. Unfortunately, the issue is as contentious as ever, although there has been substantial improvement with ffmpeg. However codecs used by Apple products are still very much out of reach.
Packaging, Security, and Tooling
Another theme was the improvement of core contributor workflows. The "specfile library + norpm" talk introduced python based tooling for programmatically modifying RPM spec files. There was further emphasis on security implications of the package build. Since RPM spec file is not designed to be secure by default, and hypothetically allows for embedding and execution of arbitrary code during build.
This was complemented by the "Smarter package maintenance with Packit" workshop, which demonstrated tools for automating and simplifying the package maintenance cycle. On the security front, the "Malware hunt for fun and profit" session presented an experiment in scanning dependency chains to prevent malware from entering the distribution, when introduced as dependency of second or higher order.
Hardware compatibility
During the "RISC-V Software Ecosystem Status Update" session a stat and "ROCm on AMD GPUs in Fedora" highlighted the effort being put into these areas. The "Containers BoF by Dan Walsh" further showed the integration of container technology in the Fedora ecosystem, but mostly focused on the “how we got to this point” exposition.
Conclusion
Flock 2025 was certainly an interesting opportunity to learn about the world of Fedora particularly as well as Open Source and Free Software generally. We have successfully introduced Log Detective to the community and received useful feedback. The discussions have been useful in suggesting where we should focus our efforts next. The conference also showed ongoing development across the Fedora Project, with efforts to improve the desktop experience and the tools used by contributors.