Originally published at: EPEL Steering Committee Election: Interview with Robby Callicotte (rcallicotte) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, June 2 2025.
Interview with Robby Callicotte
Hello! My name is Robby Callicotte and my FAS ID is “rcallicotte”.
Questions
What is your background in EPEL? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?
I’ve been an EPEL user since the mid 2000s and a package maintainer since 2021. I am also a member of the CentOS Alternative Images SIG.
I brought Saltstack back into EPEL and added a nifty linter for salt states called salt-lint. I participated in the EPEL 10 Hackfest at Flock 2024 in Rochester and helped to marshal in loads of updated packages.
My current mission is to backport fixes for as many CVEs in the EPEL package ecosystem as I can. This improves our standing in the enterprise world and generally makes computing much safer.
I have longer term plans to bring incus (the next-generation system container manager) and minikube (the local kubernetes cluster) to EPEL.
Why are you running for EPEL Steering Committee member?
EPEL packages account for millions of downloads and are a vitally important part of the Enterprise Linux ecosystem.
I earnestly believe in the project’s mission and am eager to contribute my skills and insight to its success. I am excited about the opportunity to serve the EPEL community and help shape its future direction.