Day One Part V - Flock To Fedora 2023

We then headed upstairs to the Harbour 8 room to attend the next talk in the CentOS Connect event area. At around 0430 pm Ireland Standard Time, the talk titled "State of Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" began and this was delivered by Carl George, who worked as a Principal Software Engineer in the Red Hat EPEL team and Troy Dawson, who worked as a Senior Software Engineer in Red Hat RHEL team. It was enlightening to see the trend of packages to packagers ratio changing through the years and the wide assortment of downstream distributions making use of the EPEL repositories to get their packages which even included those that do not necessarily use RPM-based packages.

As this was the last talk for the day that I attended, I headed back to my room for a brief respite at around 0515 pm Ireland Standard Time in the evening. This did not necessarily mean that the activities were over for the day as we had a bunch of those scheduled for later in the day including "Game Nights in Silver Springs", "International Candy Swap" and "Fedora Pub Quiz - Flock Edition". David, Michal and I got back to the area where we had lunch earlier that day for the first activity and David had brought his Steam Deck along with him for that. Sandro joined us soon after with his board game, which involved people taking chances with rotating arrows and consuming the candy of the said colour.

Of course, the game had a twist as the candy of the said colour had a 50-50 chance of tasting good or not. Our small group was soon joined by Dominik Mierzejewski, who used to work in Red Hat at the time of writing this article and it was fun to see people taking turns at the candies and making faces when they came across those that did not taste pleasant. While the first event was proceeding, our community friends came about and arranged the snacks and candies that they brought from their part of the world on the table to prepare for the staple event of the Flock To Fedora called International Candy Swap. By around 0630 pm Ireland Standard Time, the event was announced by Justin W. Flory.

The folks gathered around in a circle with them taking turns in introducing themselves, the country that they came from and the snacks or candy that they got at the event. It was fascinating to know about the community friends who came from across the world and the reason why they brought a certain part of their culture for others to taste. When it came to my turn, I, unfortunately, had to say that the sweets that I planned on bringing to the event could not make it due to the fact that those were in my checked-in luggage which was still missing then. Even the dinner was arranged by the hotel staff by then and people started satiating their sweet tooth by choosing their favorites from the table.

Not being a big fan of sweet-flavoured snacks, I decided to experiment a bit and look for snacks that tasted wildly different. This is where I came across the spicy snacks that Carl George brought from Texas and those that Alex Callejas brought from Mexico. Those spicy candies really gave me the challenge that I was looking for before I moved on to tasting something as mild as Root Beer-flavoured candies on Nick Bebout's recommendation. Nick mentioned that Root Beer is a flavour that people would either hate or love due to its acquired taste nature - but I found myself absolutely loving it as it reminded me of my favourite flavour from an Indian toothpaste brand named Meswak.