FWN/Issue210

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 210 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 210 for the week ending January 24, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This issue kicks off with recent announcements from the Fedora Project, including a deadline tomorrow for Fedora 13 features, and links to Fedora events. In our Quality Assurance beat, detailed coverage of the many activities of the QA Team, including discussion and updates around AutoQA, improved freeze policy documentation, a proposed privilege escalation policy, and news of the first drop of Fedora 13 images. In The Art/Design Team beat, updates on Fedora 13 graphics and discussion of the new Firefox 3.6 personas theming. Our issue completes with the Security Advisories beat, bringing us up-to-date on security patches released in the past week for Fedora 12 and 11. Enjoy FWN 210!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for the past few 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

Outage Notification - 2010-01-21 11:00 UTC
Mike McGrath announced,

"There will be an outage starting at 2010-01-21 11:00 UTC, which will last approximately X hours. To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

or run: date -d '2010-01-21 11:00 UTC'

Affected Services: Websites, Buildsystem

Unaffected Services: Bodhi, CVS / Source Control, Database, DNS, Fedora Account System, Fedora Community, Fedora Hosted, Fedora Package Database, Fedora People, Fedora Talk, Mail, Mirror System, Torrent, Translation Services

Ticket Link:

Reason for Outage: Lost a switch blade this morning. A replacement is on the way.

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

Fedora 13 Feature Submission Deadline :: January 26th
John Poelstra announced,

"A friendly reminder that the deadline for *submitting new features and spins* for inclusion in Fedora 13 is coming soon!
 * Feature Submission: Tuesday, January 26, 2010
 * Feature Freeze: Tuesday, February 9, 2010

"At Feature Freeze all new features for the release should be substantially complete and in a testable state, including enabled by default if so specified by the feature. In the Fedora development process, all new feature work is completed by Feature Freeze and tested during the test releases: Alpha and Beta."

A summary of other important milestones in Fedora 13 is at this page:

p.s. Please let me know if there are other special milestones or tasks you would like to be reminded of.

p.s.s More information on these deadlines and freezes:
 * Feature Submission:
 * Spins:
 * Feature Freeze: "

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

 * 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

RHCE Loopback in Washington, DC
On Thursday, February 25, 2010, Red Hat will hold a free, informal conference for RHCEs, offering information sharing on a variety of topics at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street. Complimentary dinner will be served, and more details are available.

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team, as the QA group and the Fedora project in general awaken from its holiday slumber!

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
There was no Test Day last week, and no Test Day is currently planned for this week. 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.

Weekly meetings
The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2010-01-18. The full logs are available. James Laska noted that Adam Miller was not present to update on the Xfce test day planning. Jóhann Guðmundsson reported that he had created a ticket for the LXDE test day.

Adam Williamson reported on his and Rui He's progress with documenting installation testing as a QA group activity. They had created a draft page, and planned to have a short paragraph in the QA Joining page which would refer to it.

Christoph Wickert reported that an LXDE mailing list had been created by the infrastructure team.

Adam Williamson reported on the privilege escalation policy topic. He and Will Woods had discussed the topic at the most recent FESCo meeting, which had resulted in FESCo asking for the QA group to provide a draft policy for discussion at a future FESCo meeting. Adam said that he planned to write an initial draft policy and submit it to the QA group for discussion, then take a refined draft to a future FESCo meeting.

Will Woods observed that the change to making Rawhide repository definitions part of a package which is not installed by default may have an impact on QA's Rawhide testing procedures, and Wiki documentation. Kevin Fenzi said he was already planning to update the Rawhide wiki page to reflect the change.

Kamil Paral announced that he had started sending reports from automated rpmguard tests to the autoqa-results list. Reports from rpmlint were also enabled, primarily for comparison. He had also started a discussion within the AutoQA project on the possibility of creating a server which would collate AutoQA test results and provide an API for accessing them.

Will Woods reported that he had continued working with Luke Macken on the implementation of a post-bodhi-update trigger for AutoQA, and Luke would be adding the necessary API calls to the next Bodhi update. Will had been working on the logic of a dependency checking test, and was close to a solution. His current code is available in git. The test is designed to be run with a repository and set of new packages specified; it generates the set of changed dependencies in the new packages and then checks them for sanity and consistency. James Laska passed on the information that Liam Li had been working on a python script to automate a virtual installation from a DVD image, as a precursor to a full automated installation test. Kamil and Will suggested it could be committed into AutoQA git as a branch while Liam works on it.

James Laska reported that he was working on revising the autotest-client package based on feedback in the review ticket. He had also created a Wiki page to chart out the requirements for packaging Google web toolkit (gwt), a requirement for packaging autotest.

Will Woods asked when the first drop of Fedora 13 install images was scheduled. James Laska replied that this was planned for Thursday 2010-01-21, and the Rawhide acceptance test plan was scheduled to be run.

There was no BugZappers meeting during the week due to the absence of several members.

Improved freeze policy documentation
John Poelstra announced improved documentation of the Fedora freeze policy on the Wiki, and requested feedback. None was forthcoming, clearly indicating that the pages admit of no possible improvement.

Adam Williamson asked the group to make a special effort to test several new X.org and graphics-related candidate updates, due to the significant impact they could have if approved as stable updates. Many group members responded with valuable feedback, which helped the X developers promote the updates to stable status with confidence.

Localization testing update
Igor Pires Soares noted that Noriko Mizumoto was away on vacation, and so provided an update on the localization testing project. He had updated the wiki page to include a list of instructions for testing various packages.

Privilege escalation policy
Adam Williamson posted an initial draft for a proposed privilege escalation policy, as the group had been discussing for a while. The draft was based on Tom 'spot' Callaway's blog post on the topic. The draft provoked a lively discussion with criticisms and suggestions from many group members. Adam later provided a second draft which attempted to address some of the issues raised, and the revision process continued.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Progress With Fedora 13 Graphics
In the continual process for gathering idead for Fedora 13 graphics, JuanFranciscoFernández referenced a wallpaper design from Debian "I would try something abstract, as the Debian 5.0 default wallpaper", something which was inspirational for Máirín Duffy "It made me think about a potential treatment for the rocket trails idea that I might not have thought of otherwise!". Other ideas came from Brian Hurren who is trying to receive a rocket blueprint from the Marshall Space Flight Center "a Saturn 5 blueprint. it's clean, elegant, simple lines, represents cutting edge technology, a milestone in history" and Shreyank Gupta who is fascinated by the deep space "I was thinking how black holes would fit into the idea of Goddard theme."

Firefox Personas
With easy theming called 'Personas' available in the recently released Firefox 3.6, Max Spevack was wondering about creating such official designs "It might be cool for the Fedora Design Team to make some official ones for either different versions and/or spins of Fedora" and as a tool to attract new contributors "There might be some recruiting fodder in here, to invite some of these designers to join the team" and one of the people creating such graphics, Sébastien Natroll joined the team "I'm one of these artworkers, and I designed the Personas 'Fedora-fr'. I'll be glad to help the Fedora Artwork Team"

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 12 Security Advisories

 * kernel-2.6.31.12-174.2.3.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034166.html
 * bind-9.6.1-15.P3.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034202.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * bind-9.6.1-9.P3.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034196.html
 * kernel-2.6.30.10-105.2.4.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034250.html