FWN/Issue196

Fedora Weekly News Issue 196

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 196 for the week ending October 4, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

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FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST

Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1600 UTC 2009-10-01

Paul W. Frields announced,"The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, October 1, 2009, at 1600 UTC on IRC Freenode.." A copy of the meeting minutes is also now available

FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Final Review of Incomplete Fedora 12 Features

John Poelstra announced,

"With the passing of Beta Freeze we are now at the point in our release process where we expect all features to be at 100% completion. After requesting status updates, including direct email to the feature owners, the following feature pages do not have a current status.

In accordance with our recorded policy of requiring that all features be at 100% at Beta Freeze, I am proposing these features for your review to determine what their disposition should be. "

Buyer Beware: A Major Change in NFS is about to happen

Steve Dickson announced on the fedora-devel-list an upcoming change to NFS in Fedora,

As part of the NFSv4 Default feature, I am one commit away from changing the default protocol version NFS will be using (or at least trying to use).

What does this means to you? Hopefully nothing! In theory this should be a very seamless transition but with all new technology there will be (and are) some rough spots.

Why are we making the change? See the NFSv4Default section on the wiki (noted above) for details, but in a nutshell: 1) better performance and 2) firewall friendly. Finally it enables us to use upcoming minor releases of the the protocol: NFS version 4.1 and pNFS.

FYI, V4 was introduced in Fedora Core 2 so it has been around for a while. I personally have been using it for my home directory for a few years now. For more detail see

That's the good news... Here is the bad....

Because the mount command will try NFS v4 first, if mounting to older Linux servers will start failing. This is due to a defect in the Linux server exporting code, which is fixed in F12, *but* there are a number of workarounds that Steve suggested in the message.

Fedora 12 Freeze at 0600~ 2009-09-30 UTC

Jesse Keating briefly announced, "Just a reminder that the Fedora 12 freeze will be happening tonight at 0600 2009-09-30 UTC, just prior to the rawhide compose tonight. The rawhide for 20090930 will be built from frozen content. You do not need to send tag requests until after that."

Re: CVS Outage Notification - 2009-09-29 04:25 UTC

"It was pointed out to me that many of the packages starting with "a" were not properly branched. I've restarted the branch run for the "a" packages, however this time email will go out for the branch events, and this won't incur another outage. The branching of "a" packages should be done in 10 or 15 minutes. ", replied Jesse Keating.

FEDORA EVENTS

Mark your agenda with the following events. Please, consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!

Upcoming Events

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM)
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Josh Bressers noted that Coverity has scanned a number of Open Source projects for vulnerabilities for a third year running, and they are claiming "that there is a 16 percent reduction is flaws found". Josh noted that it is too early to draw conclusions on what this actually means for OSS.

Michael Tiemann spoke "at Open World Forum in Paris on the subject of open source and the digital (economic) recovery".

James Morris posted a roundup from the SELinux Developers Summit (which immediately preceded LinuxCon and the Linux Plumbers Conference) in Portland, Oregon. Mmm, donuts. Daniel Walsh presented on "how sandbox -X works" at the conference. Daniel also mentioned that Fedora 12 will include a command-line interface to polgengui (which "is a template based policy framework, that ask the user a few questions, and then generate initial policy files to allow the policy writer to get started").

Richard W.M. Jones continued, adding tools that can introspect virtual machines from a host system, this time a graphical df (virt-df), virt-uname, virt-update and virt-ping.

Rahul Sundaram talked about the problems, dangers, and potential preventions for dependency breakage (you know, when you run "yum update" and it tells you that it can't continue because 1 out of the 146 packages that need to be updated doesn't have all of its dependencies satisfied).

According to Matt Domsch, MirrorManager now has the ability to automatically select a local Fedora mirror by netblock, ASN and a number of other factors.

Mel Chua is working on a scholarship/fellowship program for middle to high school students and wants your input.

Separately, Mel also asked "How can we make it easier for people to send patches?"

Konstantin Ryabitsev scripted NetworkManager and Postfix to automatically select a different relay SMTP server, depending on what network the system has connected to.

Peter Hutterer announced that "MPX has been released as part of XI2 in the new X Server 1.7". I suppose this would be the first step in letting desktop Linux act like the iPhone UI.

Greg DeKoenigsberg says: "If you live in the United States, go find your two senators and tell them that you support the Open College Textbook Act of 2009."

Tom Callaway was interviewed about "some of the intricacies of licensing and ensuring that a software package included in Fedora and Red Hat is actually verified to be open source." (Video)

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's Test Day was on the installer's (Anaconda) storage system. Unfortunately not a huge number of testers were present for this test day, but those who did come managed to test a range of scenarios and file several important bug reports. Thanks to all testers.

Next week's Test Day on 2009-10-08 will be specifically on the use of software RAID arrays with Anaconda. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. This is a nice tightly focused topic with clear test cases, and an important feature for many users, so please come out to the Test Day and help us ensure softward RAID is tested on a wide range of storage hardware and configurations.

No Fit and Finish track Test Day is planned for next week.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-28. The full log is available. Adam Williamson noted that follow-up on the development issues discussed the previous week was impossible with Jesse Keating and David Pravec absent, so left the topic for the following week.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. The major achievement was a working prototype of the planned israwhidebroken.com site, of which Will provided a screenshot. The source code for the web application which controls the page is also available. The app allows results for manual-only tests to be provided by users authenticated via FAS. Will is planning to extend the app to provide links to logs for the automated tests, and the ability to add bug report links for failed tests. Two new tests had been added to cover the later stages of Anaconda installation (beyond disk partitioning).

Adam Williamson summarized upcoming events, and James Laska pointed out the relevant calendar page. The beta freeze and beta candidate build process was imminent, and the fourth beta blocker review meeting was due Friday 2009-10-02. Denise Dumas pointed out that some important bugs required testing to confirm prospective fixes, and Adam pointed to the beta blocker bug list as a reference for these.

James Laska started a discussion regarding plans for the then-upcoming Anaconda storage filtering Test Day. Denise Dumas was in favour of cancelling it as the storage filtering changes had been delayed until Fedora 13. James and Adam Williamson suggested converting it into a more general test day on Anaconda storage issues, and this path was agreed upon. James and Denise agreed to work to ensure Anaconda would be in a testable state for the Test Day.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-29. The full log is available. Edward Kirk reported that he had started work on moving action items from previous meetings into Trac, as had been discussed the previous week, and would continue to work on it. Adam Williamson encouraged him to ask for help if he felt it was too much work to complete on his own.

Edward Kirk also provided a draft of the meeting organization SOP that he had begun work on. The group felt it was a good start. Edward wondered where the page should end up, and Adam Williamson suggested it should be a page of its own, linked from the main Meetings page, as other SOP pages are. Edward promised to work on finalizing the page for the next meeting.

Edward Kirk said that he had emailed Brennan Ashton for an update on the triage metrics project, but had not received a reply. He said he was working on a plan to move the project forward given Brennan's erratic availability.

Edward Kirk asked if it was yet time to implement the previously discussed change to triage policy, which was intended to begin when Fedora 13 became active. Adam Williamson noted that branching had occurred on the development side, but Rawhide was still tracking Fedora 12 rather than Fedora 13, and the policy change should take effect when Rawhide began tracking Fedora 13.

Edward Kirk reminded the group that housekeeping tasks for the Fedora 13 release would be due soon. He and John Poelstra already had planned to divide the tasks up between themselves.

Sergey Rudchenko asked about what to do with Fedora 10 bugs as the end of support for Fedora 10 approached. Edward Kirk and Adam Williamson suggested that he ask the reporters of Fedora 10 bugs to see if they could be reproduced on Fedora 11 or 12, and move the bugs to one of those releases if they could.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-10-05 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-10-06 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Blocker bug criteria

Alexey Torkhov asked about the Wiki page on release criteria, asking 'If I've found a bug that (I think) breaks MUST rule should I add it to both F12Beta and F12Blocker trackers? And if it breaks SHOULD rule, it should be added only to F12Blocker tracker?' Adam Williamson replied that Alexey's interpretation was correct as far as the criteria defined on that page went, but in practice bugs outside of those criteria were still considered Beta and final release blockers, as it was very hard comprehensively to codify all possible release criteria.

Beta test compose Delta ISOs

Andre Robatino reported that he had been unable to generate Delta ISOs from the Alpha release to the Beta test compose due to some technical problems.

Xfce Test Day recap

Kevin Fenzi provided a recap of the previous week's Xfce Test Day, thanking participants and providing a list of bugs which had been filed.

Wiki Test Results name space

James Laska forwarded a ticket about the creation of a Test_Results wiki namespace for the purpose of filing test results separately from Test Day events (the name space will allow people who have not signed the CLA to file results, as they currently are able to on Test Day pages). Adam Williamson replied worrying about the implied suggestion that the Test_Day namespace be removed and all Test Day pages moved to the Test_Results namespace, which he thought would be a bad change. Jóhann Guðmundsson agreed.

Proposed removal of Anaconda from Test Day CDs

Kamil Paral proposed the removal of Anaconda from the standard build configuration for Test Day live images, on the basis that it is rarely used as part of Test Day testing and dependency problems with the anaconda package sometimes cause problems in the generation of the images. Several replies felt the change was unnecessary, and the availability of Anaconda on the Test Day CDs probably helped get more people testing Rawhide installation. In the end it was agreed that adding instructions for removing anaconda from the build to the Test Day live CD creation instructions page would be sufficient to address the problem.

Installation testing results

Liam Li provided a report on testing conducted by his team of Red Hat testers on installation using the pre-Beta and Beta test compose images. He summarized the bugs they had encountered, and asked for help in completing the test cases listed on the test matrix which the team had not been able to cover.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Beta Artwork

At the suggestion of Paul Fields, the design team requested a small delay to properly include the artwork for the Fedora 12 Beta release "Rather than require anyone to pull a late night, why don't we simply hit the rel-eng list for an up-front exception to the freeze?" and the time was enough for Máirín Duffy to come with a polished wallpaper, which was packaged with help from Martin Sourada and Michael Beckwith. Máirín also advanced a set of splashes to complete the release artwork.

After the release graphics were integrated, Máirín Duffy reminded about the upcoming scheduled tasks "We still need to take care of a few things though. Not only do we have to keep our eyes and ears open for feedback on the beta artwork to improve in the final release, but we also have other tasks to complete as well", consisting on website banners, media art and posters. Nicu Buculei replied with some pointers and invited fresh blood to the task "As we have a number of new contributors asking for an opportunity to get their feet wet with some contributions, I want to point this is a very good opportunity".

Wallpapers Extras

Samuele Storari reiterated the goal to provide a set of additional wallpapers, from which the users have an option to chose and proposed a copule of competing images "I've worked on 2 proposal for the Women Extra Themes". Nicu Buculei praised them and pleaded for finding a way to make all available "But no matter what is our final choice, you put a lot of work and skill on them, I think it would be a real shame if we don't manage to find a way to make all of them available somehow (an additional package, a web gallery, something)" and Martin Sourada completed with some instructions about packaging wallpapers but opting to wait until a general decision "I'd wait with the packaging after the final decision on extras is done, as your blue 4flowers design is a hot candidate ;-)"

A New Notification Theme

After in the previous week Matthias Clasen announced a new and controversial notification theme, Christoph Wickert, maintainer of the Xfce Spin, protested about the look, "After I have seen them now I can say I think they are horrible" and the practice "I think such changes shouldn't been done as a solo action without previous notice." John Poelstra showed his worries regarding a change late in the release cycle " Why are we making this change now (right before the final freeze) when Feature freeze was almost two months ago. Why can't this wait for Fedora 13?" and Paul Fields pointed to inconsistency with the rest of the desktop, making it a non-trivial change "It does seem like a pretty minor change and very low risk. But all black? Really? OK, it does get my attention faster, so I'll give you that one. However, the interactive bits (buttons in a bubble) are inconsistent", a point of view shared by Bill Nottingham "So, looking at this now, it looks like it integrates well with the gnome-shell sort of desktop/palette, but not the current gnome defaults.[...] I'm also concerned about the timing of this... I take it this wasn't ready at feature freeze?". As a reply, William Jon McCann, Matthias' colleague from the Red Hat Desktop Team invited complainers to use an competing operating system "By the way have you tried the latest Ubuntu nightly? It isn't half bad. Snow Leopard? Doesn't suck. Windows 7 - yeah I could use that."

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce. Note: for this issue, we cover released packages from Sept. 19 - Oct.3, 2009.

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

• bugzilla-3.2.5-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00627.html
• drupal-6.14-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00633.html
• drupal-date-6.x.2.4-0.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00645.html
• xmp-2.7.1-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00726.html
• cyrus-imapd-2.3.15-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00760.html
• rubygem-actionpack-2.3.3-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00789.html
• rubygem-activesupport-2.3.3-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00790.html
• gnutls-2.6.6-3.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00792.html
• asterisk-1.6.1.6-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00803.html
• backintime-0.9.26-3.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00821.html
• newt-0.52.10-4.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00834.html
• samba-3.4.2-0.42.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00095.html

Fedora 10 Security Advisories

• bugzilla-3.2.5-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00650.html
• drupal-6.14-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00656.html
• drupal-date-6.x.2.4-0.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00658.html
• rubygem-activesupport-2.1.1-2.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00684.html
• rubygem-actionpack-2.1.1-3.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00685.html
• cyrus-imapd-2.3.15-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00737.html
• xmp-2.7.1-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00756.html
• proftpd-1.3.2a-5.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00775.html
• asterisk-1.6.0.15-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00783.html
• gnutls-2.4.2-5.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00805.html
• backintime-0.9.26-3.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00823.html
• newt-0.52.10-2.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-September/msg00829.html
• kernel-2.6.27.35-170.2.94.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00058.html
• samba-3.2.15-0.36.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00098.html

Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt and @fedora-xen-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Virtualization List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

Fedora virt status

The latest status report from Mark McLoughlin Prompts us all to help out as the Fedora 12 "Beta is on its way out the door and release candidate composes will begin in less than four weeks time." "Here are three ways you could help out with getting F12 into great shape." Continue reading in the archive to find out how you can help!

New Tools virt-rescue and virt-edit

Richard Jones announced two new tools in libguestfs-tools, virt-rescue and virt-edit.

The virt-rescue tool "lets you run a rescue shell against a virtual machine" while virt-edit lets you edit a file inside a VM". For example:

virt-edit mydomain /boot/grub/grub.conf

Fedora Xen List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

xen/master: pvops git trees rearranged

Pasi Kärkkäinen forwarded an announcement from Jeremy Fitzhardinge about reorganizing the Xen git tree with the dom0 kernel.

"The kernel tree is fairly featureful:"

• basic dom0 support
• blkback
• netback
• ACPI power management
• S3 suspend/resume (at least for some people)
• microcode update
• MSI support

"In other words, it has as much as it ever has. There are a few notable missing features:"

• blktap2
• netchannel2
• pci front/back
• upstream Linux support
• your pet feature

The Xensource wiki has instructions compiling.

KDE

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora KDE Special Interests Group.

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

Fedora 12 KDE Spin Not KDE3-less after all

Last week Rex Dieter blogged about the versions of KOffice and K3b being included in the Fedora 12 KDE live spin. "The reality is that the kde4 ports of both k3b and koffice aren't quite ready, and not recommended for use by either upstream," says Dieter, so the versions shipping with Fedora 11 are going to be KOffice 1.6 and k3b 1.0.

Unofficial builds of KDE4's Koffice and k3b will continue to be built in the unofficial kde-redhat/unstable repos

KDE-SIG steering committee formed

At Tuesday's KDE-SIG IRC meeting an official steering committee was formed so that the SIG has somewhere "to take contentious decisions [and] so we know who exactly should be voting in such cases," says Kevin Kofler. The KDE-SIG steering group is formed of seven members, Rex Dieter, Than Ngo, Lukáš Tinkl, Kevin Kofler, Steven Parrish, Jaroslav Řezník and Sebastian Vahl. Rex Dieter will summarize the exact rules for voting and management of the Steering Committee at next week's meeting.

Amarok 2.2 released

This week marked the release of Amarok 2.2 "Sunjammer." Rex Dieter has been faithfully providing the Amarok builds from the first 2.2 beta to this release, and the final 2.2 release is currently in the updates-testing repository. This release marks the first official release that has many features that Amarok users have been missing since the 1.4 series, including the ability to sort the playlist and rearrange the application's layout to your preferences. Amarok 2.2 will be the first release series that will "focus on improving what is there rather than adding major new features," says Amarok developer Lydia Pintscher.