FWN/Issue244

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 244 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 244 for the week ending September 22, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue kicks off with announcement of host bids for the next FUDCon LATAM 2011, accepted through September 30th. In development announcements, notice of Fedora 14 feature complete milestone and other items around Fedora 14 beta timing. In news from the Fedora Planet, how to properly (and improperly) distribute new PGP/GPG keys, details on Red Hat opening up the Fedora Students Contributing/Summer Coding program to greater involvement from the community, and coverage of the latest Fedora Board meetings. In Ambassador news, a summary of the discussion list traffic, including recent Test Days on the Anaconda Translation Keyboard and virtualization and a trip report from Ohio Linux Fest, and also coverage of discussion from the FAmSCo list. In Translation news, detail on some current stability issues with translate.fedoraproject.org, a new FLP representative for Fedora Websites team, and new members and sponsors for the Fedora Localization Project. Design team news provides a summary of Design Team work at the recent FUDCon in Zurich, and banner design work already in progress for the next FUDCon in Tempe, AZ. Our issue wraps up with security advisories from the past week for Fedora 12, 13 and 14. Thanks for reading!

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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 Announcement News
The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at

FUDCon LATAM 2011 bids
Paul W. Frields on Fri Sep 17 17:53:31 UTC 2010 announced ,

"The bid period for the next Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in the LATAM region is open, and will remain open for a few more weeks. The bid process for FUDCon is outlined here:

Two bids have already been received for FUDCon at this point, and the process will continue soon with an award, a budget, and an open and transparent planning process:

Bids will continue to be accepted until *September 30, 2010*. Bids must be published on the Fedora wiki, and a URL for the bid sent to the fudcon-planning list:

The majority budget holder, the Community Architecture team, will consult with the bid teams and regional Ambassador leadership, work with the Fedora Project Leader to decide on a location and date, and make an announcement of the next LATAM region FUDCon soon afterward. Decisions for a FUDCon location are made on the basis of many factors, including costs, quality and quantity of bid information provided, facilities available, bid team commitment, and the desire to move FUDCon around a given region where practical.

Once the venue and dates are decided, planning for the LATAM region FUDCon event is expected to happen on the general fudcon-planning list. Planning will include regular, weekly meetings and use of a publicly visible ticket queue. This transparency helps the Fedora community participate; community members can help organizers plan and execute the work that goes into the FUDCon event. That participation can produce a higher quality event that meets or exceeds attendee expectations.

'''FUDCon is held several times each year around the globe as part of Fedora's premier events strategy. You can read more about Fedora events here:

'''Please remove 'announce-list' from any replies to this message, since they'll be removed from its moderation queue. Thank you!'''"

Fedora Development News
The fedora development news list is intended to be a low traffic announce-only list for Fedora development.

- Policy or process changes that affect developers. - Infrastructure changes that affect developers. - Tools changes that affect developers. - Schedule changes - Freeze reminders
 * Acceptable Types of Announcements

- Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule) - Discussion - Anything else not mentioned above
 * Unacceptable Types of Announcements

By John Poelstra
John Poelstra on Wed Sep 15 22:46:50 UTC 2010 announced ,

"Thank you to all the feature owners and developers for all their hard work to make Fedora 14 the best Fedora release yet. We are almost to the end!

As a follow-up to last week's reminder

ALL feature pages are now expected to be at 100% completion. The following features are not listed at 100% complete and are being sent to FESCo for re-evaluation for inclusion in the Fedora 14 feature list if they remain incomplete:

(yes, a mere technicality at 99% done) "

David Malcolm
To continue the thread, David Malcolm David Malcolm dmalcolm at redhat.com ,

"On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 15:46 -0700, John Poelstra wrote: > Thank you to all the feature owners and developers for all their hard work to make Fedora 14 the best Fedora release yet. We are almost to the end! > > As a follow-up to last week's reminder > http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-September/000676.html > > ALL feature pages are now expected to be at 100% completion.  The following features are not listed at 100% complete and are being sent to FESCo (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/468) for re-evaluation for inclusion > in the Fedora 14 feature list if they remain incomplete:

> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MemoryDebuggingTools

I held off on saying "100%" there as I hoped to add C++ support to the "what is this RAM being used for" heuristics. Unfortunately that part of it needs some optimization work before it can be enabled. The rest of the feature works, but has bugs, so I've marked it as 100%; C++ support deferred; I've updated the feature page accordingly, and I'm working on improving the docs.

> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Python_2.7

This is essentially done (given the caveat in the release notes on that page), but a few stragglers are left to rebuild; some of them are fiddly. I believe that there's no significant risk to the release as a whole from those; I hope to look at them later tonight/tomorrow.

Sorry about this (got bogged down in RHEL work)"

Fedora 14 Beta Change Deadline Reached 2010-09-14
John Poelstra on Wed Sep 15 22:59:53 UTC 2010 announced ,

"As a reminder, we have reached the Beta Change Deadline for Fedora 14.

"At the change deadlines for Alpha and Beta, pushes to the branched development repository (e.g. /pub/fedora/linux/development/14), are suspended until the Release Candidate has been successfully tested and staging has started to the mirrors."

More details are located here: "

Fedora 14 Beta Release Date at Risk
John Poelstra on Thu Sep 16 22:31:14 UTC 2010 announced ,

"We have missed the Fedora 14 Beta RC compose scheduled today because of unresolved Fedora 14 Beta Blocker bugs.

(NEW or ASSIGNED)

As soon as these bugs are resolved with new packages we will request an RC compose from Release Engineering."

bodhi v0.7.9 deployed
Luke Macken on Mon Sep 20 18:19:06 UTC 2010 announced ,

"A new version of bodhi has just hit production. This release contains a number of bugfixes and enhancements.

Web UI Changes
- Only unpush edited updates when builds are altered - Make a note in the comments of which builds were added/removed
 * Improved editing functionality
 * Allow people to revert their karma vote more than once
 * Add mouseover tooltips to the update status with more details
 * Prevent different versions of a package from being added to the same update
 * Handle more types of bugzilla auto-linking in comments (ex: rhbz#1234)
 * Link to the newer update in the obsoleted ones
 * Link to gitweb instead of viewvc
 * Set default (un)stable karma values if re-enabled
 * Anonymous karma has never effected karma, so we now mark them as being ignored in the interface to make it obvious
 * Get the 'suggest reboot' flag working again
 * Allow non-critpath updates to be pushed to stable after meeting our critpath requirements
 * Allow maintainers to request that their update be pushed to stable before the automatic approval job runs, if it already meets the time-in-testing requirements.

Client Changes

 * Add --stablekarma, --unstablekarma, and --disable-autokarma client arguments
 * Fix a bug in using `bodhi --push-build=` on multi-build updates
 * Add a --bodhi-url command-line option
 * Instead of requiring only one argument with a comma separated list of updates, support several builds as several arguments.

API Changes

 * Remove our API pagination query limit of 1000
 * Add a new 'author_group' field to each comment in our JSON API

Backend Changes

 * Add the new 'dist-fN-updates{-testing,}-pending' tags to builds so AutoQA can start testing them before they get pushed
 * List security & critpath testing updates in our updates-testing digest emails
 * Download and inject the pkgtags sqlite db into our repodata from the pkgdb (which will be utilized by `yum search`)
 * Email the proventesters about stale unapproved critical path updates
 * Update the bug titles for all security updates before pushing (since security bug titles frequently change after the update is submitted to reflect the CVE id)
 * Improved sanity checking in the masher when resuming pushes
 * Properly capture & log stderr from our mash subprocess
 * Improved metrics report generator (soon to be integrated into the web interface)

Bugs & RFEs
Please file and bug reports or enhancement requests here: "

Fedora 14 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting Wednesday, September 22, 2010 @ 21:00 UTC
John Poelstra on Tue Sep 21 18:59:05 UTC 2010 announced ,

"Join us on irc.freenode.net #fedora-meeting for this important meeting.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 @ 21:00 UTC (17:00 EDT/14:00 PDT)

"Before each public release Development, QA, and Release Engineering meet to determine if the release criteria are met for a particular  release. This meeting is called the: Go/No-Go Meeting."

"Verifying that the Release criteria are met is the responsibility of the QA Team."

For more details about this meeting see:

In the meantime keep an eye on the Fedora 14 Beta Blocker list and help us get the testing matrix completed by testing.

"

Fedora Events
Fedora events are the exclusive and 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 (Sept 2010 - November 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.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Michael Tiemann reported on a victory for the Open Source Initiative. "This week, Google announced that Google Code was going to treat all OSI-approved licenses as equal. Which is great news."

Vincent Danen explained how to properly (and improperly) distribute new PGP/GPG keys. "It is ridiculous that an organization supposedly as secure as CERT can have such poor distribution mechanisms for alerting users of their new GPG keys. It is really important that, when you update GPG keys and distribute the public key that you can easily establish trust of the new key."

Matthew Garrett compared the "parallels between the Android/upstream scenario and Canonical's approach to upstream." Matthew continued:" Forking because you believe that your approach is better is a completely valid development model, but in the long run can cause problems if you don't have a long-term strategy for how to resolve that fork. For all we criticise Google's ability to get Android code into the mainline kernel, they've put orders of magnitude more effort into doing so than Canonical have in terms of getting Ayatana's code into mainline Gnome."

Kevin Fenzi looked back at the development around systemd, now that its inclusion has been pushed back, out of Fedora 14 (but Kevin thinks "systemd is on track to be very solid for Fedora 15").

Karsten Wade announced that Red Hat is opening up the Fedora Students Contributing/Summer Coding program to greater involvement from the community. "Rather than taking total control of this program forevermore for the Red Hat brand, we are convinced that applying the principles of the open source way to community events management is the right way to do such a program in the name of a community. In addition to inviting all Fedora users, enthusiasts, and participants to join in organizing this event, I want to specifically call out to the organizations – corporate, academic, non-profit, etc. – to join with some of their staff/members."

Máirín Duffy summarized the Fedora Board meetings of September 10 and 13, 2010. One of the items of business was trying to convince Jared Smith (Fedora Project Leader) to blog more, so hopefully we will have more posts to report on from Jared soon.

Stephen Smoogen called out for help compiling a list of statistics (such as number of source packages, kernel, glibc, gcc and X versions) from a number of Linux distributions. Any Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrive or SuSE historians out there?

Ambassadors
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors
This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project did not have any new members joining.

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
Colin Zwiebel posted about the Etherpad FAD at Olin College to be held on 2010-10-08 and invited anyone who is interested to participate.

David Ramsey reminded about a Test Day on 2010-09-16 around the Anaconda Translation Keyboard

David Ramsey reminded about a Test Day on 2010-09-23 around Virtualization

Thomas Canniot informed the list about the sad demise of Souleyman Douar an active Ambassador and a member for the French Fedora Community

Ahmed M. Araby informed Arabic speakers about a blog on Fedora

Scott Thistle (re)introduced himself and, Larry Cafiero picked up the thread to discuss about COSSFest

Scott McBrien reminded NA Ambassadors about the meeting on 2010-09-22

Ben Williams posted a report on the Ohio Linux Fest 2010

John Poelstra posted about upcoming tasks around Fedora 14 release

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list
Max Spevack followed up on his reminder for a meeting on 2010-09-20 and checked if a quorum would be available. Both María Leandro and David Nalley indicated that they would attend.

Translation
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project.

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora 14 Tasks
John Poelstra informed the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 14. As per the schedule, translation of Beta Release Notes and all guides is currently underway.

Stability Problems for translate.fedoraproject.org
Thomas Canniot from the French translation team put forward a query wanting to know the reasons that have been causing the transifex instance used by translate.fedoraproject.org to malfunction over the past few months. Dimitris Glezos suggested that in the absence of dedicated sysadmins to monitor translate.fedoraproject.org the Fedora translation platform could be moved to transifex.net. However, this suggestion was not well received especially since Fedora generally prefers to host its services within its own infrastructure.

Noriko Mizumoto filed a ticket with Fedora Infrastructure to investigate the matter. Kevin Raymond volunteered to understand the workings that may allow him to maintain the transifex RPM for Fedora.

Power Management Guide
The Power Management Guide for Fedora 14 is now available for translation via translate.fedoraproject.org.

FLP Representative for Fedora Websites
Kevin Raymond has taken up additional responsibility with the Fedora Websites team and has required permissions to modify .POT files to make corrections for bugs and other issues reported by the translators.

Anaconda Translation/Keyboard Test day
A Fedora Test Day dedicated to Translation and Keyboard issues in Anaconda was held on 16th September 2010. Members from numerous language teams participated in the Test Day and reported their findings.

New Members and Sponsors in FLP
Igor Oblachko (Russian), Jesus  Franco (Spanish)  Hedayat Vatankhah (Persian) joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

Design
In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Fedora Design Team at FUDCon
A several members of the Fedora Design Team participated last week at the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Zurich, where the team meet for a few tracks: in the first day Máirín Duffy delivered a presentation about creating digital art with GIMP and Inkscape in the main room in front of an interested audience "So I gave my Gimp & Inkscape tutorial session in the afternoon. For the hour that I had I went over by 30 minutes or so, but my very patient audience stuck around (thank you!)", in the second day Máirín organised a Design Team Workshop for the team members to meet and plan the activity and Papadeas Pierros held a workshop about the 'Design Suite' spin "think we managed to reach a consensus on that: Design Suite should focus on the Graphic tools and provide also basic functionality for Audio and Video editing". The third day the team meet again in a BarCamp session about creating 'awesome art stuff', also conducted by Máirín "We kind of left it open-ended, but since Milan from the Spacewalk team needed a hackergotchi and I had just taken some photos of him for it this morning, I offered a run through of making a hackergotchi in the Gimp as a demo we could do, and asked the audience if they had anything they’d be interested in."

Banners for the Next FUDCon
The Design Team is not only participating to FUDCons, it also help organizing them, Marc Stewart followed a ticket and created a set of banners for the next FUDCon in Tempe "I've made a set of banners by taking the logo from here: and then rearranging elements to fit the various banner shapes." Then, following a reqest by Robyn Bergeron, Marc consolidated them to the wiki "I've uploaded them to the wiki, along with archives of the complete collection and of the SVG sources, and created a page that shows/links to them all".

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 14 Security Advisories

 * fuse-encfs-1.7.2-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047825.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * couchdb-0.11.2-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047983.html
 * kernel-2.6.34.7-56.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047943.html
 * fuse-encfs-1.7.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047794.html
 * squid-3.1.8-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047787.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * webkitgtk-1.2.4-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047984.html
 * kernel-2.6.32.21-168.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047965.html
 * couchdb-0.11.2-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047951.html
 * squid-3.1.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047820.html
 * fuse-encfs-1.7.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047798.html