Pavel Raiskup

Hacker, engineer, maintainer, designer, team leader, DevOps, CI/CD addict, DIY person.

I can appreciate perspective projects, good (SW) design, supportive automation, ambitious folks, no obfuscation, and natural knowledge sharing.

Current role: Principal Software Engineer, team/tech lead for the Community Packaging Tools team, Red Hat, Inc. (Brno office).

Key interests

GNU/Linux, cloud tech, containers/microservices, system programming, software compilation, integration and distribution, package maintenance, debugging and bug-fixing.

Python, Shell, C, Ansible, and others.

Languages

  • English (professional working proficiency)
  • Czech (native proficiency).

Actual projects

Copr build system (team lead, devel, admin). Package build system with users’ project hosting, oriented on ease of use and continuous integration. The team operates a public instance — 4 persistent infrastructure VMs and up to ~250 concurrent, dynamically spawned VMs across several clouds (AWS, OpenStack, IBM Cloud, on-premise hardware). We host >10 TB of data (SW packages, repositories, metadata, build logs). We also operate another Copr instance (Red Hat private). Related news.

Mock (RPM build tool) (main developer, maintainer). Tool for building RPMs in a reproducible environment. Used by Copr. Used also by Koji build system thus used for building all the Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc. packages.

Resalloc (author, maintainer). A client/server resource management and ticketing system. Used to take care of the wide range of dynamically spawned Copr builders (aka “resources”).

DistGit (maintainer). The place to (proxy-)store the RPM package sources, so build-systems can use them reproducibly. This is part of any Copr deployment.

Fedora project (package maintainer). A proven packager, and Fedora tooling contributor.

RPM Packaging for Beginners (lector). Periodic (3/year) course/workshop for Red Hat colleagues who start with RPM packaging.

Smaller projects/worth noting:

  • dnf diff, author, simple plugin to print the changes in locally installed RPMs
  • argparse-manpage, developer, tool for automatic building manual pages from Python default argument parser.
  • distgen, author, a Linux distribution-oriented templating system.
  • postgresql-setup, previous maintainer, I decoupled that scripting from several places (packages, SCLs, ..) so it can be maintained in one place.
  • one RPM building oriented patent pending

Previous projects

Red Hat Enterprise Linux package maintainer. I originally started (Y2012) with a small set of archivers (tar, cpio, pax, star, ncompress). Later I started maintaining Autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool). Later, when I moved to the databases team I took care of the PostgreSQL stack (its library bindings and plugins). I was also involved in database-related Software Collection development, and I also authored the PostgreSQL module (aka opt-in, alternative package version streams for PostgreSQL).

Red Hat container image developer. I contributed to CI/CD, build tooling, and several container images. I was responsible for a PostgreSQL container (development, design, automatic upgrades).

I originally started in Red Hat as an intern (and later continued as an associate) in a code scanning project (some public parts), where I basically analyzed the output from several static analyzers (Coverity, LLVM, ShellCheck, PyLint), reported back to Red Hat maintainers and contributed with fixes upstream. Provided fixes for the analysis tooling.

I several times helped with the Red Hat Brno office hiring events, Open House (mostly by working on the Bug Hunting sessions).

Courses or certifications

Red Hat Certified Engineer, Red Hat SELinux, Red Hat Virtualisation, Ansible, Red Hat OpenShift maintenance.

Links

Work history

Oct 2022 — present, Principal Software Engineer, team leader, Red Hat, Inc. Community Packaging Tools team — operating and developing two Copr build system instances with terabytes of RPM content, Mock development and maintenance (the underlying, low-level building tool used by Copr and Koji), and several other tools. Coordinating integration of Copr with Packit, and consulting the architecture.

Apr 2019 — Sep 2022, Senior Software Engineer, team leader, Red Hat, Inc. Completely moved to Copr team, later named Community Packaging Tools team. Giving up most of the package maintenance responsibilities and concentrating on Copr development. Became the Mock maintainer (mock is the underlying, low-level tool used by Copr). Still maintaining several packages in Fedora, to stay up to date with trends and to understand what package maintainers need. Improving the packaging/automation/CI experience, Becoming involved in Packit a bit.

Feb 2017 — Mar 2019, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat, Inc. Brno office. Continued with the package maintenance, with the focus on PostgreSQL stack, Autotools, archiving, compressing. DevOps for the Red Hat private Copr stack, service becomes internally popular, supported, installed on dedicated hardware.

Oct 2013 — Jan 2017, Software Engineer, Red Hat, Inc., Brno. Continued with the workload - but moved to the databases team, and continuously starting maintenance of the databases-related stuff, mainly the PostgreSQL stack. Software Collections. As a side/hobby project I deployed the Red Hat private Copr service.

Feb 2012 – Sep 2013, Associate Software Engineer, Red Hat, Inc. Full-timer since Sep 2012, after graduation. Got more archivers, some compressors, started maintaining Autotools suite (all Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

Jul 2011 – Jan 2012, Red Hat Intern, Brno. Part of a static analysis team. Later started with Fedora/RHEL package maintenance (archivers like tar, cpio, etc.). Proposing patches to upstream communities.

Education

Sep 2010 – Jul 2012, Master’s degree, BUT FIT, Intelligent Systems. Thesis: Improvement of live variable analysis using points-to analysis (I contributed to a GCC-based static analysis project Predator, by the implementation of Flow-Intensive Context-Sensitive algorithm, FIPS).

2nd half of 2010, one semester Erasmus, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, IT field.

Sep 2007 – Jul 2010, Bachelor’s degree, BUT FIT. Thesis: Extension of FTP Implementation within libcurl” (implementing a wild-card pattern matching downloads for the FTP-related part of curl library.