FWN/Issue189

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 189 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 189 for the week ending August 16, 2009.

In this week's issue, an update on the progress of Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha release gets us started in Announcements. Our Marketing beat is offered by a new beat writer, Chaitanya Mehandru, who reports on the latest happenings with the Marketing Team, including an update on zikula deployment for Fedora Insight. In Ambassador news, an announcement of the three winners of the Fedora 11 release events contest, from three different regions of the globe. Quality Assurance offers detail on several past and upcoming Test Days and weekly meetings, and updates on Fedora 12 bug blockers. In news from the Translation Team this week, updates on the Fedora 12 release schedule as it pertains to translation and documentation, and announcement of the Translation Quick Start Guide in Russian, Polish, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. The Art/Design Team beat this week leads with a summary of discussion on the Fedora 12 theme meeting, followed by a report on the initial work in creating an Art Studio Fedora spin and rounds out with a discussion on the need for source control for Fedora Themes. Our issue rounds out with updates from the various virtualization communities and teams, including the availability of new Xen packages for Fedora for testing, and details on libguestfs 1.0.67 and libvirt 0.7.0 and their new features.

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

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora, called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

If anyone is interested in taking over this beat, please contact the Fedora News team.

Fedora 12 (Constantine)
The only major news this week was the slip of Fedora 12 Alpha by one week. Jesse Keating wrote, "This is due to remaining bugs on the F12Alpha tracker preventing creation of a release candidate and preventing testing of proposed fixes. We expect to be able to test/clear the list early this week, therefor only a week slip is needed at this time.  The new Alpha release date August 25th."

Upcoming Events
Consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!


 * North America (NA)
 * Central & South America (LATAM)
 * Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
 * India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Marketing
In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Chaitanya Mehandru

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-08-11
Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-08-11 Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

Marketing F12 schedule available
John Poelstra has integrated the final Marketing F12 schedule in both html and ics format.

The taskjuggler source is also available.

Deploying zikula for Fedora Insight
Work on Fedora Insight continues, with an instance of zikula going up on publictest6 this week.

In deploying this first, extremely simple instance, we hope to serve as a test group for other groups (such as Docs) who will be using zikula for their own projects.

A discussion on zikula deployment and workflow is ongoing at the Marketing list if you'd like to join in.

Welcome to our new contributors
Two new contributors joined us this week - Chaitanya Mehandru, who wrote this week's FWN marketing beat and Martin Duffy who has been preparing a "Fedora Fun Projects" rotation for the front page redesign.

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora 11 Release Events Contest winners announced
Francesco Ugolini recently announced the F11 Release Events Contest winners:


 * Kevin Higgins with the Vancouver, Washington (USA), release event;
 * Neville A. Cross with the Managua, Nicaragua, release event and;
 * Truong Anh Tuan with the Hanoi, Vietnam, release event.

Francesco outlined that for the Fedora 11 release, the Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee (FAmSCo) wants to give some of the Ambassadors who organized great release events an opportunity to attend a FUDCon or a FAD in their region, and to meet more of the community face to face.

The purpose of these events is to promote the new release of Fedora, to raise awareness among local communities, and to educate users and developers on the most important features of the release.

FAmSCo wants to thank all the participants for their amazing job, and asks them to remember that the committee will continue to encourage such actions.

If you are still planning a Fedora 11 event, please list it on the Release Party wiki here.

Get on the map
Want to find the nearest ambassador? How about one in Belarus? Now you can.

Susmit Shannigrahi reports that finding out the nearest ambassadors, which was once a tedious task, is now as simple as viewing a map. The map is at here and instructions on how to place yourself on the map can be found at here.

Get the word out about your F11 event
Fedora 11 was released recently and with it a variety of activities around the release will be forthcoming. As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 11, this is a reminder that posting 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.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's main track Test Day was on NetworkManager. There was a solid turnout of testers and developers, and several bugs were filed and fixed. A report on this Test Day is available.

Last weeks' Fit and Finish Test Day was on peripherals. Several people turned out to help test, and a variety of different bugs with different types of peripheral were reported.

Next week's main track Test Day will be on ABRT changes for Fedora 12. ABRT is the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool which helps users file bug reports automatically when applications fail, and it has been extensively improved for Fedora 12. It's an easy component to test and it will help improve the quality of future Fedora releases, so please come along and help out! The Test Day will be held on Thursday 2009-08-20 in IRC #fedora-qa.

The Fit and Finish Test Day track will be holding its own Test Day, on printing. This is a vital area for many users and has lots of potential quirks with different types of printer connected in different ways, so please come out and help make sure the printing user experience is as smooth as possible! Live images will be available before the Test Day. The Test Day will be held on Tuesday 2009-08-18 in IRC #fedora-fit-and-finish (note this is not the same channel where main track Test Days take place).

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 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 2009-08-10. The full log is available. James Laska asked for feedback on the quality of downloads of the Alpha test compose from the alt.fedoraproject.org server. Adam Williamson reported that his download had been fast and trouble-free. Kamil Paral's had been slower, but that was tracked down to bandwidth limitations on his end.

James Laska asked why Rawhide still contained anaconda 12.7, when later versions had been released and built. Jesse Keating stated that later versions of anaconda had been entirely broken and thus had not passed his critical path package checks. Adam Williamson asked why major regressions in anaconda seemed to be being introduced during an Alpha freeze. Jesse Keating explained that anaconda development was treated as an independent 'upstream project', like rpm, and so did not respect Fedora freezes. Adam suggested that, in that case, Fedora packaging of anaconda should not accept new upstream versions as a matter of course, especially during freezes, but cherry-pick appropriate fixes, due to the sensitivity of anaconda to changes and its position of fundamental importance in any Fedora release.

James Laska called for those who had filed or were monitoring critical bugs for the Alpha release to continue to work on verifying fixes for them and closing them where appropriate.

James Laska asked for a general overview of Rawhide's readiness for the Alpha release. The consensus was that anaconda was still not yet ready, but most other components were in decent shape. Adam Williamson noted that packages fixing the known major breakage in xorg-x11-server-1.6.99-25 had been tagged into Rawhide over the weekend. James also worried that many features on the Fedora 12 feature list did not seem to be complete in terms of development or have complete test plans yet, but no action was thought to be possible on this.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He had completed the automated installation tests, and refactored the pre-existing autoqa tests into the new autotest system. He also had some tests starting to send their results to a mailing list, and hoped to have this process available to the public soon.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-08-11. The full log is available. Adam Williamson admitted he had not found time to ask the desktop development team for their position on the new triage process, or check which Bugzilla changes generate an email by default.

The group wanted to take a final decision on the question of changing the process by which bugs are marked as triaged. After a long discussion, it was agreed to go ahead with a plan to switch to using the Triaged keyword rather than the ASSIGNED state, starting with bugs for Fedora 13. Adam Williamson agreed to send a wrap-up email to the mailing list.

Edward Kirk brought up the recent fedora-devel-list mail which had mentioned the need for triaging of XMMS bugs. However, several group members had looked over the list of bugs on XMMS that were still open or had been closed due to age, and found nothing that could be pursued.

Edward Kirk also worried that meetings were being planned only by himself and Richard June and were not being planned according to a defined policy. He intended to write a SOP for planning meetings, and encourage the use of the agenda item submission process to make sure no important issues were not making it to the meeting agenda.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-08-17 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-08-18 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 12 Alpha blocker bug reviews
James Laska reminded the group that several bugs blocking the Alpha release (as of Sunday 2009-08-09) were in MODIFIED state and required further testing. Later, he sent a follow-up with updated status on several of the bugs listed.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora 12 Schedule for Translation and Documentation Updated
Based upon the review held on 6th August 2009, John Poelstra has updated the Fedora 12 Schedule for the Translation and Documentation team. Besides the the individual task based schedule for each team, a combined and chronological schedule has also been put together by him. Noriko Mizumoto and Ankit Patel have further reviewed the schedule and requested some changes.

An important point raised during the review meeting and the ongoing conversation on the mailing list refers to the possibility of having 'Test builds' of packages to be created during the 'Software Translation' phase to allow 'Translation Review' on the user-interface. An official request has been sent by Noriko Mizumoto on behalf of FLSCo to the FESCo for 'Test builds' to be made available.

TQSG Pushed for 4 Languages
Noriko Mizumoto the maintainer of the 'Translation Quick Start Guide' has announced the availability of the Guide in 4 new languages: Russian, Polish, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Meeting Summary
After an IRC meeting for selecting the Fedora 12 theme took place, Martin Sourada posted on @design-team the conversation log and a short summary: "We'll move Constantine Statue back to extras, also raised concern about it including a sword * The Constantine theme will be based on (perspective) mosaico with elements added from underwater mosaic * KDE Alpha (if the packages get tagged in time) will have slideshow like we have in GNOME, if it's not working reliably, it will have mosaico * For Friday we target, if it's not ready we'll go with * we haven't decided about alpha release banner design, but narrowed the selection to and.

The Art Studio Spin
With the increased interest for having a customized Fedora geared towards creative people, Kushal Das announced his preliminary work and asked for input "I started working on the spin, the initial size is around 1000MB, still all fonts need to be put in", something Máirín Duffy was also playing with "Coincidentally enough I tried several times to build an art studio spin last night but livecd-creator keeps failing". Kushal followed with a kickstart script and everyone started suggesting application for inclusion or removal. Martin Sourada questioned the spin name "I think it's good idea to rename the spin (in accordance with our move from Fedora Artwork to Fedora Design Team) to Fedora Design Live (or something like that)", something not considered an issue by Máirín Duffy "I don't think the spin needs to be named after our team, it just needs to attract the type of user we are seeking no?", a discussion which brought to attention the need to define the spin's target, with a possible answer from Máirín "We could do something where the whole enchilada is called the 'Fedora Creativity Suite' and then different 'slices' of that could be different studios eg vector gfx studio, 3d studio, audio studio, etc"

Source Control for Fedora Themes
Rex Dieter expressed the need for a source control system "but, it seems there is no source-control currently being used for fedora theming yet. I'd like to propose hosting what's used in stuff like constantine-backgrounds (and future fedora-related theming) in a git (or svn or whatever) repo", a request endorsed also by Martin Sourada "Yup, for my part a git repo would be really helpful. Spinning the source tarball by hand is not an exactly nice experience ;-)" and  Jaroslav Reznik "Indeed, it's really much more easier to use some repository, even in one person" so  Paul Frields pointed to the existing repository which can/should be used for the task: "There is actually a git repo, it just needs to be renamed to properly match the Trac issue system." An alias fixing later and everything was solved.

Virtualization
In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt, @fedora-xen-list, @libguestfs, @libvirt-list, @virt-tools-list, and @ovirt-devel-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Xen List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

New Upstream Xen Release
Pasi Kärkkäinen pointed out new upstream Xen 3.3.2 and 3.4.1 releases. Gerd Hoffmann built Fedora packages for testing.

Updated Dom0 Test Kernel
Michael Young posted a test build kernel-2.6.31-0.1.2.52.rc6.xendom0.fc12 found in his repository. "I have had trouble getting x86_64 kernels built over the last week or so to boot, but this one does work. I haven't tried i686."

Libguestfs List
This section contains the discussion happening on the libguestfs list.

New Release libguestfs 1.0.67
Richard Jones announced the release of 1.0.67.

New Features:
 * SELinux support, for guests that use it
 * inotify support
 * Allow swapon/swapoff from a swap file
 * New commands to make hard and symbolic links, readlink
 * New commands to grep files
 * New commands: fallocate, file-architecture, realpath
 * 'file' command can now look in compressed files automatically

Libvirt List
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

New Release libvirt 0.7.0
Daniel Veillard announced a new release, version 0.7.0.

"A couple days later than expected, but considering the current flow of fixes, that's not a bad thing. This is a huge release, this includes more than 250 commits in a month and many new functionalities or drivers, and a lot of improvements and bug fixes:"

New features:
 * Interface implementation based on netcf (Laine Stump Daniel Veillard)
 * Add new net filesystem glusterfs (Harshavardhana)
 * Initial VMWare ESX driver (Matthias Bolte)
 * Add support for VBox 3 and event callbacks on vbox (Pritesh Kothari)
 * First version of the Power Hypervisor driver (Eduardo Otubo)
 * Run QEMU guests as an unprivileged user (Daniel P. Berrange)
 * Support cgroups in QEMU driver (Daniel P. Berrange)
 * QEmu hotplug NIC support (Mark McLoughlin)
 * Storage cloning for LVM and Disk backends(Cole Robinson)
 * Switching to GIT (Jim Meyering)