FWN/Issue262

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 262 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 262 for the week ending February 9, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We begin the issue with announcements, including opening bids for the next FUDCon EMEA, notification of some changes to the packaging guidelines, and a call for ideas for the next Google Summer of Code. I news from the Fedora Planet, a summary of blog postings around FUDCon Tempe, FOSDEM and linux.conf.au, community discussion around Fedora's user focus, and coverage of general topics over the past week. Fedora In the News has two articles this week, including coverage of FUDCon Tempe in Linux Pro Magazine. Lots of great news from the Ambassador Team, with a summary of discussion from both the Ambassador and FAmSCo lists. In Quality Assurance, details on the first two Fedora 15 Test Days, on networking device naming changes and Gnome 3 desktop, and also the next two Test Days, which will be on FreeIPA v2 and Xfce 4.8, as well as much more news from the QA Team. In Translation news, details on a proposal to move the Fedora Localization Project to Transifex.net, and news of new members to the FLP for French, Spanish, and Bengali Indian. Our issue wraps up with a few security patches released in the past week for Fedora 13 and 14. Read on!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

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 EMEA Bidding now open
Fedora Project Leader Jared K. Smith on Fri Feb 4 13:49:31 UTC 2011 announced ,

"Now that FUDCon Tempe has successfully finished, it's time to open the bidding process for FUDCon EMEA 2011.

The bidding process is described at. Any interested parties are invited to submit their bids. Once you have prepared a bid, please send an email to the fudcon-planning list. Bids will be accepted up until the end of the day on March 15th, 2011.

We look forward to seeing your proposals!"

[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines
Tom Callaway on Fri Feb 4 17:18:07 UTC 2011 announced ,

"Here are the latest set of changes to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

--- The rules for substituting dots with dashes in package names have been clarified to make explicit that they apply to python modules and that they do not apply to version numbers in compat libraries.

--- Many implementations of md5 originate in a program and then end up copied to other programs with compatible license terms. These implementations have been granted a bundling exception. The usual requirement to set a Virtual Provides: if bundling are in effect and have some special notes due to the many implementations out there. Note that copying the implementation from a library is not covered under this exception.

--- rpm and yum treat a dependency on a package of the form Requires: foo as being fulfilled by any available package foo, regardless of arch. On multilib architectures, this means that there are often two packages with the same name: one for each of the multilib arches. When yum is asked to satisfy a dependency for that package name it could pull in the package for the wrong arch. This happens when the correct architecture is not available to yum. That might be the case if, due to some malfunction, the Fedora repositories are out of synch. It can also happen if a user has installed a package that is treated as "newer" than the corresponding package in the currently enabled set of repositories; in attempting to resolve otherwise-unresolvable dependency chains, yum may decide to pull in the dependency chain for a different arch.

In some situations, this is not a problem, but there are some situations where it does matter:


 * A library that is explicitly Required (example a dlopen'd library)
 * The dependency from one -devel packages that is not noarch to another -devel package.
 * A non-noarch subpackage's dependency on its main package or another subpackage (e.g., libfoo-devel depends on libfoo, or fooapp-plugins depends on foo-app).

The Packaging Guidelines (and Naming Guidelines) have been amended to reflect that %{?_isa} must be used for Explicit Requires and Provides that match those situations.

---

Previously, there was a change made to the Documentation guidelines which stated that:

If a package includes something as %doc, it must not affect the runtime of the application. To summarize: If it is in %doc, the program must run properly if it is not present.

In addition, %doc files must not have executable permissions.

This has been revised to:

Files marked as documentation must not cause the package to pull in more dependencies than it would without the documentation. One simple way to ensure this is to remove all executable permissions from %doc files (chmod -x).

Also, if a package includes something as %doc, it must not affect the runtime of the packaged application(s). To summarize: If it is in %doc, the included programs must run properly if it is not present.

--- A new section has been added to the Packaging Guidelines concerning test suites included with source code:

If the source code of the package provides a test suite, it should be executed in the %check section, whenever it is practical to do so.

--- A new section has been added to the Packaging Guidelines concerning the proper packaging of tmpfiles.d configurations and directories:

--- These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to Jochen Schmitt and all of the members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here: "

Updating SSL keys on fedorahosted.org
Stephen Smoogen on Tue Feb 8 20:27:24 UTC 2011 announced ,

"Various SSL keys are aging out so we will be updating them before anyone gets a  page.

The first server to be updated will be fedorahosted.org.

The old certificate came from Equifax, was a 1024 bit key and had the fingerprint:

SHA1 Fingerprint=CC:64:67:BE:90:50:79:ED:23:E8:C1:18:02:AB:AC:83:88:FC:6C:D8

The new certificate is issued by GeoTrust, Inc and is a 4096 bit key with the fingerprint:

SHA1 Fingerprint=D1:54:82:77:77:F9:11:DF:E0:B1:14:37:B9:36:E2:09:20:B6:54:1D

Please report any problems with these certificates to admin at fedoraproject.org"

GSoC 2011 Ideas Needed!
Ryan Rix on Tue Feb 8 23:17:49 UTC 2011 ,

"Hey guys gals and other hackerfolk!

Google's Summer of Code is coming up ever so close. We have 20 days until the org application opens up, and we need a LOT more ideas if we are going to have any hope of being accepted. I know there are a lot of awesome ideas out there in the community, we just need folks to step up and tell us about them. It's free labour, and a great chance to attract new Fedora contributors.

So, folks, go add ideas to the Ideas page at: "

Fedora Development News
The development list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

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

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

Mass rebuild starting monday Feb 7
The two separate threat has been made for the announcement of Mass rebuild starting monday Feb 7.

Dennis Gilmore on Sat Feb 5 06:00:07 UTC 2011 announced ,

"for gcc-4.6, xz compression changes, and to a lesser extent we will be doing a mass rebuild starting monday. it will be done in a side tag with a lower than normal priority so that you can still submit builds and not have to wait for the mass rebuild to finish. we will then tag into rawhide the builds after unless you do a build in the meantime

Please note that mass branching will be occuring soon after the mass rebuild as the Alpha freeze is 2011-02-15"

Peter Robinson on Sun Feb 6 20:31:01 UTC 2011 announced ,

"Can we ensure that the fix for the NOPL issue on Geode processors gets in before the mass rebuild to ensure we don't have any issues with packages using that instruction in the XO-1."

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 (Dec 2010 - Feb 2011)

 * 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.

We haven't had a regular Planet Fedora beat for about six weeks, so I thought I'd provide some coverage this week. If anyone is interested in helping with the Planet Fedora beat, please let us know on the Fedora News Team list (news@lists.fedoraproject.org).

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

FUDCon Tempe 2011
There have been a lot of posts around FUDCon Tempe that took place two weeks ago. Here are the ones from the last few days.

Chris Lalancette provided a couple posts providing summaries of the sessions he attended, including talks on Asterisk Hacks, Matahari, GIMP as a Pro Photo Editing Tool, and more.

Juan Rodriguez blogged about the Fedora Trademarks session and Red Hat Legal discussion he attended, as well as Mel and Sebastian's "I'd like to continue hacking, but my hands hurt".

Dave Malcolm posted about his talk on "Different species of Python"

FOSDEM 2011
Nicu Buculei offered some photos from FOSDEM 2011, along with a full gallery of all of his photos.

Other Events
Steve Gordon summarized his and other activity at the Linux.conf.au that took place at the end of January, and pointed folks to more videos from the event.

Fedora Community
There has been a lot of discussion around whether Fedora is a distro for power users or for all. Juan "Nushio" Rodriguez suggested that we should "be excellent to all", invoking some of Jared Smith's comments during the FUDCon Tempe State of Fedora address

Mairin Duffy suggested a "Fedora: You Make It" logo, which was seen as a positive perspective on who owns Fedora. Tom "Spot" Callaway offered that constructive criticism involves providing at least one suggested solution to a given problem. Complaining for the sake of it is merely destructive. Adam Miller suggested that we "Ask not what your distro can do for you, ask what we can do for our distro" on move on with some real solutions.

Joerg Simon suggested that we use the opportunity to spur more solutions building and improve communication across the community.

General
Xenode Systems reviewed Calyphrox Webproxy 5.0 and "Top 10 favorite applications in Fedora" in their Spanish-language blog this week.

Bert Desmet encouraged more submissions and participation for next month's Whitespace hacker conf in Belgium.

Miroslav Grepl offered a three-part overview  on his upcoming Developer2011 talk on "Playing with SELinux."

Chris Tyler updated us on activity at Seneca in building a multi-PandaBoard Fedora ARM farm with eventually 15 connected boards.

Andrew Overholt requested some help with backing up the history for the Eclipse Linux Tools activity as it moves from subversion to git, and several suggestions were offered.

Truong Ahn Tuan announced the general availability of Zimbra 7, including feature highlights and distro packaging.

Fedora In the News
In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Beyond FUDCon: Faces, Features and Future of Fedora (Linux Pro Magazine)
Kara Schiltz forwarded posting in Linux Pro Magazine about the recent FUDCon meeting in Tempe, AZ:

"The North American Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) was held on Arizona State University campus in Tempe Arizona from January 29 -31, 2011 and proved to be the largest FUDCon to date with over 200 people pre-registered to attend and final attendance numbers estimated around 175 people.

[clip]

One interesting moment occurred while speaking to attendee, Randall Hinkley. Hinkley said he had only been using Fedora for about four months. He was from an area near Tempe and while researching setting up his own Fedora sever found the information about FUDCon on the internet and then decided to register and see what it was all about. When I attend events such as FUDCon, it is always encouraging and exciting to see those faces who are new to open source, new to a project, and or new to contribution when they finally meet the people with whom they interact with in an IRC channel or mailing list. While there are some exceptions for the most part these attendees already have a spark in the eye and a hunger for more knowledge about the project, but upon attending events and conferences like a FUDCon find themselves thirsting for ways to contribute as well and Hinkley was no different. He was excited to be there and his personal participation and contribution began to open as he spoke to the various Fedora leaders and community members throughout the event. He wasn’t the only one attending FUDCon for the first time; however, he was the only one I spoke to who was 1) New to the project, 2) Stumbled upon the FUDCon information “accidentally” and 3) Was not already contributing but decided to attend to see what it was all about."

The full article is available

Sys-Con Media: Cloud.com Exec Mark Hinkle on Community, Infrastructure, and T-Shirts
Jonathan Nalley forwarded an excerpt from an interview in Sys-Con Media with Mark Hinkle's comments on Red Hat's "The Open Source Way":

"Mark: Yes, and so I've come to understand that communities thrive when they interact with and learn from other communities. I have tremendous respect for the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora project, for example, which published a book on open source community development and methodologies called "The Open Source Way." It's an excellent blueprint for developing open source communities. I hope that we can leverage their experience to build our own cloud computing community." The full post is available.

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

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors
This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had no new members joining.

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
Max Spevack welcomed the team from Fedora Tunisia at FOSDEM 2011

David Ramsey informed about the GNOME 3 pre-Alpha Test Day on 2011-02-03

Igor Pires Soares posted the FAmSCo Report for December 2010

Fabian Kanngießer wrote about the inability to meet Fedora stickers and CD requests from Michael Kappes

Ankur Sinha informed that Date-Time for the second Remote Mini Wiki Editing FAD

David Ramsey posted Meeting Notes

Nicu Buculei posted link to picture from FOSDEM 2011

Buddhika Kurera asked for orders on the APAC T-shirts/shirts

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list
Caius Chance posted LCA 2011 Open Day and FAD-Brisbane report

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list
Gerard Braad posted a link to a blog and, there was some discussion around the 'wish list'.

Pierros Papadeas posted the Agenda for the 2011-02-05 meeting of FAmSCo. Caius Chance mentioned some additional items to discuss during the meeting. However, due to "terrible" network infrastructure at FOSDEM, Pierros Papadeas was unable to attend

Minutes of the meeting were posted Gerard Braad and Caius Chance

Igor Pires Soares provided link to Monthly Report to Caius Chance

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Thursday 2011-01-27 saw the first Fedora 15 Test Day, on network device naming changes upcoming in Fedora 15. The event went successfully and exposed some bugs in the system. James Laska provided a wrap-up of the event.

Thursday 2011-02-03 was the first of three planned Test Days on the GNOME 3 desktop, which is landing in Fedora 15. With considerable help from the desktop team, the event was a great success, with a wide range of users providing some very good testing and unearthing many bugs. Adam Williamson provided a wrap-up of the event.

This Thursday, 2011-02-10, was due to be FreeIPA v2 Test Day, but the event has been postponed to Tuesday 2011-02-15 - update your calendars! IPA is an identity server, and 2.0 is a major revision due to land in Fedora 15. The Test Day will be checking that all the major changes work as intended. Existing IPA users are probably the most likely candidates for the event, but if you've been meaning to give IPA a try anyway, this might be the ideal time.

Thursday 2011-02-17 will be Xfce 4.8 Test Day, where we will be testing out all the new features of this major Xfce release and ensuring there are no regressions. If you're an Xfce user or just interested in alternative desktops, please come along and help test.

FUDCon Tempe
The QA team was out in force at FUDCon Tempe. James Laska gave an AutoQA Update presentation and Adam Williamson provided two wrap-up posts.

AutoQA
James Laska created a patch to transfer AutoQA config files from the test server to the client. Will Woods posted a revised version of his dependency check test. Josef Skladanka updated his new koji watcher code.

The team also worked on making AutoQA more accessible to new developers. Josef set up a trac milestone called Finger Food containing small tasks suitable for new developers, while Kamil Paral wrote a wiki page documenting AutoQA development.

Testing old Intel graphics in Fedora 15
Cornel Panceac reported several problems trying to load GNOME 3 in Fedora 15 on an old Intel graphics chipset, and wondered if this was expected behaviour. Adam Williamson explained that failure to support the GNOME Shell was normal, but the system should fall back smoothly to the 'classic' desktop mode, and failure to do that would be a bug. Cornel then reported the bug.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Proposal to Move FLP Infrastructure to Transifex.net
Members of the Fedora Infrastructure Team have proposed to move the Fedora translation infrastructure from http://translate.fedoraproject.org to http://transifex.net, due to nagging problems in the maintenance of the Transifex instance at http://translate.fedoraproject.org.

To help in assessing the proposal, the Fedora Infrastructure team has called for input from the FLP team members.

New Members and Teams in FLP
Claude Lecomte (French), Alberto José Rubert Escuder (Spanish) ,  Samrat Bhattacharjee (Bengali India) ,  and  Jose Pedro Salazar (Spanish) joined the FLP recently.

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

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

 * postgresql-8.4.7-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-February/053817.html
 * util-linux-ng-2.18-4.8.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-February/053792.html
 * asterisk-1.6.2.16.1-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-February/053689.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * asterisk-1.6.2.16.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-February/053713.html