FWN/Issue218

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 218 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 218 for the week ending March 21, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

First off, Fedora Weekly News will be changing our release schedule. Look for availability of new issues coming out on Wednesday each week, instead of Monday. This is to allow our beat writers to cover weekend happenings and news to a better degree, and accommodate schedules for writers. On to FWN 218! We start this issue off with announcements including the shiny new Fedora 12 re-spin, which offers updates on this version through March 3, 2010. If you're just starting out with a new install, this will save you at least 550MB in updates over the default install! In Fedora Development announcements, notification to feature owners of the 3/23/10 Beta Freeze for Fedora 13. In news from the Fedora Planet, some outcomes from the recent Marketing Fedora Activity Day (FAD), availability of a new version of Eclipse Linux Tools, and musings on how not to run a community. In Marketing news, many pointers to the recent Marketing FAD activity and outcomes. In Ambassador news, several reports from last week's Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010, in Chemnitz, Germany. The Quality Assurance beat brings a fresh approach, with coverage on the most recent Test Day, on Fedora 13 changes to disk management, via the udisks (previously DeviceKit-disks) backend and the Palimpsest front end. Also details on Fedora 13 acceptance testing and planning, and details on the new release process wiki documentation. This issue rounds out with Fedora security advisories released in the last week. Please enjoy FWN 218!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for a few past FWN issues that one of our contributors has begun. Find it on the Internet Archive and have a listen!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

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 Unity Fedora Re-spin 20100303 released
Ben Williams announced on Friday, March 19, 2010 at 13:10:44 UTC 2010, "The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora 12.

These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 12 installation media and include all updates released as of March 3, 2010. The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64, architectures via Jigdo or Torrent starting Thursday, March 19th, 2010. Despite problems in this Re-Spin we, Fedora Unity, have decided to release this Re-Spin with the following side-note:

issues we found while testing the CD images. We are working hard to fix these issues, the CD images will be in future releases.
 * We regrettably release this as a DVD only Re-Spin due to

Testing Results A full test matrix can be found at our Test Matrix.

Please Notice the missing packages stated in the Gold vs Re-Spin Comments. Most of these are caused by packages being replaced or no longer needed by other packages over the lifespan of the release, some are missing because of changes to comps.xml.

We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this Re-Spin:


 * vwbusguy Scott Williams
 * Southern_Gentleman Ben Williams
 * kanarip Jeroen van Meeuwen
 * fenrus2 Dennis Johnson
 * BobLfoot Bob Lightfoot
 * Sonar_Guy Scott Glaser
 * EvilBob Robert 'Bob' Jensen

About Fedora Unity Re-Spins

Fedora Unity has taken up the Re-Spin task to provide the community with the chance to install Fedora with recent updates already included. This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process.

Go to to get the bits!

Assistance Needed

If you are interested in helping with the testing or mirroring efforts, please contact the Fedora Unity team.

Contact information is available at or the #fedora-unity channel on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net).

To report bugs in the Re-Spins please use

GSoC 2010 : Better iptables management
Zubin Mithra announced, "GSoC 2010 : Better iptables management". Zubin also announced, "My name is Zubin Mithra and I am aspiring to get into GSoC on behalf of Fedora. I wish to work on making a library for better iptables management. Details can be viewed in the proposal which I have attached along with the email.

I would love to hear your views on it.".

Feature Owners: Beta Freeze is 2010-03-23 :: Features must be at 100% complete
John Poelstra announced ,"According to our schedule, six days from today is Beta Freeze for Fedora 13.

At Beta Freeze it is expected that all features are 100% complete.Features that are not at 100% complete at Beta Freeze will be sent to FESCo for further review. Please take time now to update your feature page to reflect all of the work completed for Fedora 13. Unfinished items can be rolled forward to a new page for Fedora 14.

A friendly reminder that the feature pages list below are not at 100% complete: "

Outage: fedorahosted.org - 2010-03-21 08:00:00 UTC
Mike McGrath announced ,"There is an outage going on that started at 2010-03-21 08:00:00 UTC, which will last an unknown amount of time.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run: date -d '2010-03-21 08:00:00 UTC'

Reason for outage: Serverbeach4, which hosts *.fedorahosted.org is hanging shortly after boot. The hosting provider has been notified and are looking into it.

Affected Services: Fedora Hosted -

Unaffected Services:
 * BFO -
 * Bodhi -
 * Buildsystem -
 * CVS / Source Control
 * DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
 * Docs -
 * Email system
 * Fedora Account System -
 * Fedora Community -
 * Fedora People -
 * Fedora Talk -
 * Main Website -
 * Mirror List -
 * Mirror Manager -
 * Package Database -
 * Smolt -
 * Spins -
 * Start -
 * Torrent -
 * Translation Services -
 * Wiki -

Ticket Link: N/A since fedorahosted.org is down...

Contact Information: Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage.

Fedora 13 is (almost) Feature Complete
John Poelstra announced, "Thank you to all the feature owners and developers for all their hard work to make Fedora 13 the best Fedora release yet. We are almost to the end!

Everyone should review the final feature list to make sure all the expected features are captured there:

As a follow-up to last week's reminder

ALL feature pages are now expected to be at 100% complete. The following features are not listed at 100% complete and will be sent to FESCo on 2010-03-28 for re-evaluation for inclusion in the Fedora 13 feature list if they remain incomplete:

John

p.s. All features owners have been blind copied on this email. "

Fedora Events
Fedora events are the source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Upcoming Events (March 2010 to May 2010)

 * 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

Additional information

 * Reimbursements -- reimbursement guidelines.
 *  Budget -- budget for the current quarter (as distributed by FAMSCo).
 *  Sponsorship -- how decisions are made to subsidize travel by community members.
 * Organization -- event organization, budget information, and regional responsibility.
 * Event reports -- guidelines and suggestions.
 * LinuxEvents -- a collection of calendars of Linux events.

Planet Fedora
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Robyn Bergeron described Fedora, in a word. "One of the recurring themes that we’ve been discussing (at the Fedora Marketing FAD) is how people outside the community – who are potential contributors, or even, potential users – perceive Fedora. How would they describe it, in one word?"

Stephen Gallagher provided an example of how NOT to run a community. "As you probably know, I am generally in favor of community-driven software development. I think being able to work alongside others of similar (or different!) goals can result in excellent progress in many different directions. It’s a great boon to development to not be forced to reinvent the wheel in order to move forward. However, sometimes the naysayers have it right. There are times when, no matter how much you try to be a good citizen of a community, they just won’t let you."

Stephen also explained why you should use talloc instead of raw malloc.

Máirín Duffy mocked up a new style of web interface for mailing lists. Luis Villa chimed in with agreement, adding "it seems like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people."

Richard W.M. Jones described how to "create a partitioned device from a collection of filesystems", gave a talk on libguestfs (using Techtalk PSE, since "Every time you use Powerpoint Edward Tufte kills a kitten") and mentioned that libguestfs now works on Mac OS X.

Andrew Overholt announced the 0.5.0 release of Eclipse Linux Tools, along with pretty screenshots.

Red Hat also announced that RHEL 5.3 has earned a new Common Criteria certification to EAL 4.

Marketing
In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-03-13 to 2010-03-19.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

The beats usually report mostly from mailing list, but this time it will be impossible to do so. Marketing FAD took place during this period, and so many important thing happened that mailing list did not reflect truth about the work done. The very first stop should be to look at Marketing FAD wiki which has been updated and ordered to be easily readable by Mel.

On the wiki you will find links to meeting logs, photos, videos and blogs that will allow you get an idea of those amazing four days at Raleigh. There will be more about Marketing FAD as there are ripples of task that will be seeing shortly and hopefully listed in the marketing beat.

One of the big outcomes of this meeting was the Marketing Plan, that will help us to prioritize activities that are related to Educate, Build Bridges, Spread the Brand and Build Ramps.

On another topic, there is a warm up for a press release about for Google Summer of Code. This is just a preparation as there is no answer yet to confirm that Fedora and JBoss are accepted as a umbrella organization. More information is avalible on the wiki

Finally, I think we have a trend in marketing team about Meta_Marketing, like having several how-to on writing how-to. This time we have a thread raising awareness on how important is for our activities to read Fedora Weekly News, and I am reporting this in the Fedora Weekly News.

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora at Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010
Gregory Zysk reports that Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010 was a very successful event. The event was held at the Technical University of Chemnitz in their modern building which was spacious and properly equipped. The purpose and focus of CLT 2010 was geared towards a user focus of curious people, newbies, and those contemplating on switching to Linux.

Reports on the event include the following


 * "Looking back at CLT 2010" by Christoph Wickert
 * Reports by JoergSimon, ,
 * Report by Gregory Zysk "After Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010"
 * Report by Yaakov Nemoy

Campus Ambassadors up and running
The Fedora Project's Campus Ambassadors program is up and running, and is looking for participants. If you're a high school or college student who wants to help promote Fedora on your campus, this is the place for you.

For more information, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Campus_Ambassadors

Fedora 12 is here
With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. This week, we are trying out a new topic-focused layout, without the topic-by-topic weekly meeting recaps. Please let me know if you particularly like or dislike the new layout!

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's Test Day was on Fedora 13 changes to disk management, via the udisks (previously DeviceKit-disks) backend and the Palimpsest front end. The turnout was solid and resulted in 12 bugs being filed, of which two have already been fixed. David Zeuthen was there to help with testing throughout the test day and will be working to fix the remaining bugs.

Next week's Test Day will be on printing, including the implementation of automatic print driver installation in Fedora 13. This is a nice mix of making sure the existing printer support is working well and testing out a shiny new feature. Printing is important to nearly everyone, so if you've got a printer, please come along and help test! As usual, you can test with an installed Fedora 13 or Rawhide system, or a live image which is available on the Test Day page. Tim Waugh has been working hard to arrange the test day, and he and Jiri Popelka, along with QA's Yulia Kopkova, will be on hand to help with any questions or problems. The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2010-03-25 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Fedora 13 testing
The first acceptance test plan run of the Beta period was performed on the Fedora 13 tree of 2010-03-15, resulting in a pass, with two incidental issues noted and reported.

During the weekly QA meeting, James Laska noted that release engineering should be working on the first Beta test compose for 2010-03-18, but it did not arrive during the week. Rui He announced the installation and desktop acceptance testing matrices for the candidate in preparation for its expected arrival.

The second blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 13 Beta was held on 2010-03-19. All outstanding Beta blocker bugs were reviewed, and developers were consulted on the remaining open bugs to ensure fixes should be available in time for the release candidate process to begin the following week.

Robert P.J. Day and Felix Miata noted issues with the package customization choices in the Fedora 13 installation process. Robert noticed that the package group customization screen only allowed one major package group to be chosen, leading to a discussion on whether this was a sensible decision or whether it should be possible to select multiple high-level groups. David Cantrell explained that the Anaconda team had noticed that, in previous releases where multiple selections were allowed, "most users would either (a) leave the default choices in place and continue or (b) check them all for fear of missing something". However, he was still open to the possibility of changing to multiple selection after "look[ing] at the tasks as defined now [to] see if they should be changed, expanded, or reduced".

Felix noticed that the minimal installation option resulted in a non-working network connection on first boot. Jesse Keating explained that this is because the minimal install does not include NetworkManager, and the installer does not have code to detect when this is the case and enable the traditional-style network service instead. Some debate ensued over whether this feature should be implemented, and about whether minimal installations had had working network connections or not on earlier Fedora releases.

Several group members, including Jim Haynes, Tom Horsley and Robert Lightfoot , were engaged in testing Fedora 13 images and gave some valuable feedback on the issues they encountered.

Update acceptance testing
During the weekly QA meeting, James Laska noted that the group needed to make progress on defining a process for update acceptance testing. Packages intended for Fedora 13 were already being held in the updates-testing repository for testing, and FESCo had agreed to a policy requiring proposed updates for critical path packages in stable releases to be held for testing as well. The QA group had the responsibility to decide how the group of trusted testers whose feedback would be used to approve updates should be defined. Adam Miller had already provided an initial draft policy, but this was waiting on feedback from the rest of the group.

Privilege escalation testing
During the weekly QA meeting, Adam Williamson noted that, since the privilege escalation policy which the group had worked on had been accepted, no progress had yet been made on implementing testing. He felt that the logical next step would be to produce the planned script to identify packages which potentially perform privilege escalation; this would give an idea of the problem space and potentially allow basic manual testing during the Fedora 13 cycle. He planned to talk to Will Woods to see if this could be implemented quickly.

New release process Wiki documentation
During the weekly Bugzappers meeting, Christopher Beland announced that he had revised several pages on the Wiki to reflect the new, No Frozen Rawhide-based release process. He had updated the Rawhide and Fedora Release Life Cycle pages, and created a new Branched page to document the Branched release (which will always be the upcoming stable Fedora release, so is currently Fedora 13). James Laska noted that he had an older proposal to split the Rawhide page into several smaller pages. James, Christopher and Adam Williamson discussed whether this would be a good idea, and eventually agreed that the Rawhide and Branched pages could benefit from streamlining and possibly from splitting, but detailed proposals should be sent to the mailing list.

Target bug trackers
During the weekly Bugzappers meeting, Christopher Beland raised the question of what should be done with the Target bug trackers - F12Target, F13Target and so on. These are intended to track bugs which are not quite release blockers but are important and should receive greater developer attention in a best try to resolve them before release. However, the group felt that they are not serving this purpose, and are mostly ignored by developers. They also noted that there was significant overlap with the severity field, since the group had defined a policy for the use of that field and begun to implement it in triaging. As no-one had ideas for reviving the usefulness of the Target trackers, the group agreed that Adam Williamson should draft a proposal to drop them, to be forward to the development group.

Later in the week, at the blocker bug review meeting, Jesse Keating suggested the Target tracker could be used during tight freeze periods to track bugs which were not strictly release blockers, but which QA and release engineering would accept fixes for, through the freeze.

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * gnu-smalltalk-3.1-8.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037647.html
 * dpkg-1.15.5.6-4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037617.html
 * libpng-1.2.43-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037607.html
 * cpio-2.10-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037582.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * dpkg-1.15.5.6-4.fc12- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037646.html
 * gnu-smalltalk-3.1-8.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037576.html
 * esorex-3.7.2-5.fc12- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037570.html
 * cpio-2.10-5.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037401.html
 * tar-1.22-12.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037395.html
 * libpng10-1.0.53-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037355.html
 * viewvc-1.1.4-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037281.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * esorex-3.7.2-3.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037659.html
 * dpkg-1.15.5.6-4.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037592.html
 * gnu-smalltalk-3.1-8.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037654.html
 * libpng10-1.0.53-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037364.html
 * cronie-1.3-4.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037318.html
 * viewvc-1.1.4-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037289.html