FWN/Issue176

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 176 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 176 for the week ending May 17th, 2009.

In this week's content-rich issue, announcements brings us Fedora Activity Day (FAD) updates from Maylasia and the upcoming Berlin and Porto Alegre FUDCons, and several upcoming Fedora related eventsin Romania and Brazil. A sampling of the Fedora Planet reveals changes in IcedTea, Eclipse Linux Tools, detail on transitioning from rawhide to Fedora 11, amongst other jewels. In QA news, details from the recent iBus test days and many weekly meeting updates. In Developments, a broken dependency brouhaha flavored the fedora-devel list this week along with discussion of emacs add-ons for the Fedora Electronic Lab spin, and details on being excellent to one another on the list. In translation news, updates to Fedora 11 and news of inclusion of the specspo package in the upcoming release. The artwork team muses about wallpaper gallery developments and needs and final media art prep for F11. Nicu's Fedora webcomic postulates on the F11 pre-release queue, and we complete this week's melange with much news on the virtualization front from the lib-virt list.

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FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala

is a new tool, designed to generate an initramfs and replace all of the different methods currently employed by various distros. Harald Hoyer appealed for anyone interested in helping contribute, noting that it is one of the Features slated for Fedora 12.

Paul W. Frields linked to a fedora-devel post by Jesse Keating explaining how to configure a system to ensure that a Fedora 11 pre-release properly transitions onto the stable Fedora 11 repositories once it has been released (or how to stay on rawhide if that is your plan).

Jesse Keating was interviewed for a podcast, about the upcoming Fedora 11 release. Jesse also announced some discussions that the Fedora Advisory Board has had about the hostility that sometimes surfaces on the fedora-devel list and ways that it might be dealt with. "This is the "warning shot". Our hopes is that folks will start to figure out what is and is not allowed to happen on the list and things will tone down a bit".

Adam Williamson noted a number of reasons that there can never be a common Linux Package format, but suggested that "what others want is something that would actually be achievable, which is a unified system to make it easier for third parties to independently provide self-contained software packages for various distributions...If you want to do it really snazzily, though, what you want to do is design the App Store for Linux, or Steam for Linux, or something like that." Jesse Keating responded that a potential complication might be "that user buy in is going to be hard when you take a software platform (such as RHEL or Fedora) that uses one tool to manage updates for the entirety of your software set (yum, PackageKit, whatever frontend) and suddenly add one or more tools to specifically manage one or two software bundles".

had been pushed by developer Richard W.M. Jones in the full knowledge that  users would need to import a     package. An anonymous comment on  situated the decision to release the update as an example of Richard not respecting the release process. Richard argued that as the  package was completely new only those aware of what they were doing would install it (and consequently would be aware that they needed the   from   or  .)

A strong reaction against "[c]reating broken deps when you know they won't be corrected[...]" ensued and led to Seth Vidal deciding to question Richard's suitability as a "provenpackager" on the basis that he lacked common sense.

A sidethread on the advantages of introducing dependency-checking was started by drago01. While Josh Boyer agreed that it would be useful he asked for help in solving the difficult problems which he listed.

The first of the 2009-05-15 FESCo meeting items resolved that Toshio Kuratomi and Richard W.M. Jones should draft a Packaging Guideline which prohibited introducing broken dependencies and submit it for approval by the Fedora Packaging Committee. For the second related meeting item it was decided that as Richard's introduction of a broken dependency was made in the absence of a clear prohibition against such actions, and as he was clear that it would not recur, then no sanction should be taken. The handling of similar requests to remove "provenpackager" status in the future were agreed to be best handled on a case-by-case basis.

Richard added that the necessary back-porting of changes to  in   were going to happen. Currently the update has been revoked. package was started by Jonathan.

Jerry James raised the issue of  also having its own version of the package, due to byte-code divergence between   and , and also some GPLv2 versus GPLv3 compatibility issues.

team should post their unstable  package: 1)to RPMFusion; 2) to a personal FedoraPeople page; 3) to the main Fedora repositories.

Lillian disliked the last option: "I am not keen on getting this package pushed into Fedora since java-1.6.0-openjdk already exists, and jdk7 will not be stable until sometime after Feb 2010 ."

Following several suggestions it was decided that a personal FedoraPeople repository was the best solution as there would be six or seven packages with no interdependencies.

or tweaking of  settings was responsible. Debugging using  to ensure that "pulsesink" or "autoaudiosink" was the default sink was recommended.

Lennart Poettering wanted a bug filed instead of posts to @fedora-devel and when Dimi explained that  was too slow and he had already spent a lot of time on the problem Rahul Sundaram suggested using   instead.

Criticism of the display of possibly thousands of "CLOSED" bugs by  led Tom Callaway to offer the hope that   will allow developers to "[...] show new/open packages only on a per package basis[.]" This occasioned some apparent criticism from Rahul Sundaram of a lack of openness "[...] it is a giant silo [...]" around the development of. Tom Callaway offered a list of resources to contradict this. When Rahul returned with the criticism that there "[...]is definitely a big lack of communication on this development with the rest of the Fedora community. There was a very brief mail to fedora-announce list but how much input are you getting input from Fedora maintainers whose job this is supposed to make easier?" there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for more aggressive marketing. Josh Boyer reaffirmed the involvement of several developers with large package lists and expressed a fear that bike-shedding would result from any more exposure. Paul W. Frields pointed to a useful interview with Luke Macken about the  web-application framework upon which   is being built.

is built on a collection of python-based web-frameworks and uses  instead of   to connect rich web applications to servers. Reportedly this is more responsive than AJAX techniques.

A test instance of  and   was reported by Tom Callaway to be up. He emphasized that it was a test instance, currently not to be relied upon at all and a disinclination "[...] to spend time wading through the `OMG THIS IS SLOWER THAN BUGZLILLA!!!1!'" reports.

files and Mathieu Bridon provided the information that this was an spec from freedesktop.org which resulted in replacing a plethora of   directories with only two:   to store configuration and   to store data.

Jaroslav Řezník pointed to work by the KWallet and gnome-keyring developers to develop a single-sign-on solution on top of a -based protocol. and secure migration patches in. It's likely not everything will make the release cut but we can try !"

"So far we have mostly a lot of bug fixes and VirtualBox driver updates commited since 0.6.3."

website yet, but Mark McLoughlin just wrote up some notes for the Fedora 11 virt test" day.

Daniel also noted "you need a machine supporting VT-D " (or IOMMU in general) "for this work - the vast majority of hosts with fullvirt support do *not* yet support VT-D passthrough, but perhaps you're lucky ..."

management."

Virtual Box Support Increases
Pritesh Kothari contributed patches improving the VirtualBox driver submitted just last month.


 * "support for vrdp/sdl/gui"
 * "support for "Host only" and "Internal" networks"

Support for Multi-headed Guests
Patches from Pritesh Kothari adding support for multiple graphics devices have been committed