FWN/Issue242

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 242 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 242 for the week ending September 8, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue begins with Fedora Development announcements, including an opportunity to serve on the Fedora Packaging Committee, a reminder to update rawhide, a new Bugzilla URL for Fedora Review Requests, and details on the upcoming feature complete date for Fedora 14. In 'Fedora In the News', a call for pre-2007 Fedora swag to help protect the community trademarks, an article in PC World on Fedora and other distros, and availability of Ksplice in Fedora. Ambassadors is up next, with details on new Fedora Ambassadors from this past week, and wonderful summaries of both the Fedora Ambassadors and Ambassadors Steering Committee list discussions. In Quality Assurance news, details on the most recent and upcoming Test Days, and updates on the Proven Testers effort. In Translation news, details on Fedora 14 tasks and release notes drafts, libguestfs man pages translation, and details on a collaborative effort with the Docs team to define a process for making non-English documentation available for translation. Our issue finishes with security advisories over the past week for Fedora 12, 13 and 14. Enjoy FWN 242!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! 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

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

Open Seat on the Fedora Packaging Committee
Tom "spot" Callaway on Wed Sep 1 20:10:00 UTC 2010 announced ,

"The Fedora Packaging Committee has an open seat. Are you interested in helping to decide the packaging standards and guidelines for Fedora? Are you familiar with the inner workings of RPM and its spec file magic? Do you make the wiki cry? Does trac tremble in your wake? Are you clinically insane? (Well, the last one isn't mandatory, but it helps.)

Members of the Fedora Packaging Committee get:


 * My neverending gratitude
 * The ability to tell people "I'm on the Fedora Packaging Committee"
 * Good karma
 * Cake

The FPC meets weekly on IRC, Tuesdays at 1600 UTC

If you're interested in this seat, please email me."

Please remember to update rawhide
Kyle McMartin from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee on Thu Sep 2 01:02:43 UTC 2010 announced ,

"FESCo has heard a few complaints of cases where packages were newer (insome cases several versions newer) in F-14 than in rawhide. So this is just a friendly reminder that you should be updating rawhide (dist-f15) in addition to branched (dist-f14.) Inheritence from F-14 into rawhide isn't automatic if there's been a separate build in dist-f15 since the branching, so please keep in mind updating rawhide as well.

While I'm reminding, just another friendly reminder that you must submit update requests using bodhi for updates in F-14 as well, as there has been a bit of confusion about that as well."

Please remember to update rawhide
Tom Lane on Thu Sep 2 14:43:40 UTC 2010 announced ,

"Toshio Kuratomi  writes: > When you do an update in F-14 and rely on inheritance to get the package into rawhide, there is a problem. That package will not go to rawhide until it hits stable in F-14.

'''... um ... and why exactly is that the policy?

> That means, for the typical F-14 workflow of: > rawhide is left with an older inherited build until it is pushed to stable.
 * build for f14.
 * Push to testing in f14
 * Wait one to two weeks for the package to receive some testing
 * Push to stable

'''Which is why this shouldn't be the policy. Rawhide should inherit the latest completed build. It's rawhide, after all.'''"

New Bugzilla URL to create Fedora Review Requests coming
Till Maas on Sat Sep 4 20:54:32 UTC 2010 announced ,

"probably on 2010-09-09 the Bugzilla URL to create new Fedora Review Requests will change to remove one more relict of the former Fedora Core/ Extras split. The new URL will be:

Please remember to update your bookmarks. More information about this change can be found in Bug 246071:

If you know other locations than the Fedora wiki page about the Package Review Process , that link to the current URL, please tell me."

All Features 100% Complete by 2010-09-14
John Poelstra on Tue Sep 7 14:30:54 UTC 2010 announced ,

"Hello Feature People,

According to our schedule, seven days from today is Feature Complete for Fedora 14.

On September 14, 2010, all features must be 100% complete (not including bug fixes). Features that are not 100% complete  will be sent to FESCo for further review. Please take time now to update your feature page to reflect all of the work completed for Fedora 14. Unfinished items can be rolled forward to a new page for Fedora 15.

A friendly reminder that the feature pages list below are not at 100% complete:

p.s. All feature owners for the features listed above have been bcc'd on this email."

Fedora 14 Beta Change Deadline 2010-09-14
John Poelstra on Tue Sep 7 21:59:19 UTC 2010 announced ,

"In addition, to next Tuesday (2010-09-14) being the Feature Complete deadline for Fedora 14, it is also the Beta Change Deadline.

"At the change deadline, pushes to the branched development repository are suspended until the release candidate is accepted."

More about what this means is here: "

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.

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

Calling all Fedora packrats and swag collectors (networkworld.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a post regarding Fedora trademark protection:

"If you are still holding on to an old Fedora CD, T-shirt, logo-emblazoned mouse pad - or pretty much anything bearing the trademark - Red Hat would appreciate your assistance in asserting the Fedora community's legal rights."

The full post is available.

A Guide to Today's Top 10 Linux Distributions (PC World)
Kara Schiltz forwarded an article discussing innovations in Fedora 14 alpha:

"Fedora is the free version of Red Hat, whose RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has been a commercial product since 2003. Because of that close connection, Fedora is particularly strong on enterprise features, and it often offers them before RHEL does.

Fedora also offers a six-month release schedule, and its security features are excellent. While some have viewed it as a cutting-edge distro for the Linux "hobbyist," I think improvements over the years and widespread popularity have combined to make it a good choice for newer Linux users as well."

The full post is also available.

Ksplice for Fedora Linux now available for free (ZDNet UK)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article about Ksplice:

"Ksplice is being offered for free to users of Fedora, the free Linux distribution supported by Red Hat. There are future plans to have it integrated into the Fedora distribution as well. I'm not sure if this is a limited time offer or permanent for Fedora"

The full post is also available

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

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors
The Fedora Ambassadors Project saw a couple of new Ambassadors joining in after undergoing to mentoring process.

Aurelie Chreng joined The Fedora Ambassadors Project from the United Kingdom mentored by Mathieu Bridon

Ahmed Abdo Mohamed joined The Fedora Ambassadors Project from the United Kingdom mentored by Robert Scheck

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
Ankur Sinha asked about the need for the drop-down on the Ambassadors Map page. Susmit Shannigrahi replied explaining his initial goal and also provided link to the source requesting anyone to extend it. Máirín Duffy suggested the possibility of showing the full page by default and pointed out an example. Susmit responded saying that he would get to it if time permits

Jukka Palander reminded Ambassadors about the need for more votes to be able to obtain a Fedora Workshop at the Open Source World Conference

Ankur Sinha reported that Planet Fedora on identi.ca was not displaying updates and was possibly broken. Susmit Shannigrahi confirmed the fact and fixed it and requested that it be observed for any such incidents in the future

Edgar Rodolfo provided an update about the Fedora Community in Peru mentioning that Henry Anchante had decided to leave the Fedora Community. The update however did bring forward the issue of writing mails to the Ambassador list in English

David Ramsey posted meeting notes and side notes from the APAC meeting on 2010-09-05

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list
Sankarshan posted to the list asking whether FAmSCo and other Steering Committees introspect and discuss about the positive changes that they bring about.

David Nalley responded with his view on the question. He also copied the Ambassadors list as the discussion would be of interes

Joerg Simon mentioned that he had responded on the advisory board list

Joerg Simon posted about a violation of the Ambassadors Conduct by Luke Slater with specific mention of the content of the blog post.

Luke apologized about his post which he said that he had removed from the blog.

Joerg Simon informed that FAmSCo meeting 2010-09-06 was adjourned due to holidays in the US

Joerg Simon posted the minutes from the Fedora Ambassadors Mentors Meeting held on 2010-09-06

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
Last week's Test Day on 2010-09-02 was on preupgrade, the Fedora in-place upgrade system. There was a good turnout for the Test Day, and it exposed several serious bugs to be resolved for the Beta and final releases of Fedora 14. Rui He provided a recap of the event with a list of the bugs discovered.

This week's Test Day on systemd, the new initialization system being introduced in Fedora 14, has happened already, since it was moved up from the usual Thursday slot to Tuesday 2010-09-07. A great turnout of testers exercised systemd extensively and did a good job of discovering bugs to be fixed. Even though the test day itself is past, further testing of systemd would be valuable, so if you have some free time, do check out the page and contribute your results!

Next week's Test Day on 2010-09-16 will be on translations and keyboard layout support in the Fedora installer. These features are key for Fedora users outside the United States, which is most of you! As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. You can help out with testing using a live image or a virtual machine, so there's no need to alter your main system, although some of the tests do require you to complete an installation and check the installed system. Please drop by and help make sure as many languages and keyboard layouts as possible will be correctly supported in Fedora 14!

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 14 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Proven testers
During the QA weekly meeting of 2010-08-30, James Laska asked what to do about an email from a proven tester asking to become a group sponsor so he could sponsor new proven testers members. Adam Williamson pointed out the proven tester wiki page already has a procedure for this, albeit a fairly casual one. He recommended simply accepting the request for now, and suggested that if anyone wanted to make the process more systematic, they should send a proposal to the mailing list. James also asked about the progress of proven tester metrics, and Adam pointed out that a ticket requesting support from the Bodhi team already existed, and promised to follow up on the ticket for the next meeting.

Outdated Firefox package in Fedora 14
David Boles pointed out that the Firefox package in Fedora 14 was somewhat old. Adam Williamson contacted the maintainers and passed on their explanation that they had forgotten that Fedora 14 updates now had to be submitted through Bodhi, and that they would soon submit a newer Firefox package.

Bugzilla voting disabled
Kamil Paral wondered why he had recieved a mail about votes being removed. Kevin Fenzi explained that this was due to the Bugzilla voting feature being disabled. FESCo had decided the system was so flawed it provided no useful data, and so should be disabled. They had not known Bugzilla would send out notification emails about this. He explained that FESCo was now looking at using CC lists or comment quantities to provide an indication of 'popular' bugs, but that this too was proving problematic, and pointed out a ticket where this was being tracked.

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, September 7th 2010 was the deadline for the software UI modules and Fedora 14 Release Notes translations is scheduled to be underway from September 14th 2010.

Fedora 14 Release Notes Draft Available
John J. McDonough announced the availablity of the Draft version of the Fedora 14 Release Notes. The POT files for the translation team would be regenerated nightly.

Due to a bug present in the currently available version of Publican (2.1) which affects generation and updation of POT and PO files, the POT files were generated using the new version of Publican, which is not yet available in the Fedora Repos. Translators have also been requested to report the presence of the apostrophe and quotes conversion signs in any documents.

Libguestfs Man Pages Ready for Translation
The Man pages for libguestfs have been made available for translation in .POT format via translate.fedoraproject.org (po-docs/libguestfs-docs.pot). The documentation .POT file has approximately 4000 strings and the developers have been advised to not merge the two POT files for UI and Documentaion modules as they had earlier planned for.

The POT files were generated using po4a.

Proposed Process to Make Non-English Documentation Available for Translation
The Spanish Translation team has been working with the Fedora Documentation team to prepare a process to make documents written in languages other than English to be available for translation. The need for the process arose when the Spanish team put forward a proposal to make available a document originally written in Spanish for the Fedora Documentation Project in English. The suggestions all indicate that generation of English POT files would be essential to allow other language teams to translate these documents to their language.

New Members and Sponsors in FLP
Laurin Novak (German) joined the Fedora Localization Project recently. Robert Antoni and Josep Sanchez are now sponsors for the Catalan team and would be sharing the duties of Team Coordinatorship.

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

 * libmikmod-3.2.0-11.beta2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047165.html
 * sssd-1.3.0-30.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046899.html
 * lvm2-2.02.73-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046866.html
 * xulrunner-1.9.2.7-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046862.html
 * firefox-3.6.7-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046863.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * python3-3.1.2-7.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047008.html
 * libHX-3.6-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047000.html
 * pam_mount-2.5-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046999.html
 * wireshark-1.2.10-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046957.html
 * sssd-1.2.2-21.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046955.html
 * rekonq-0.5.0-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046926.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * sblim-sfcb-1.3.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/047002.html
 * libHX-3.6-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046980.html
 * pam_mount-2.5-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046981.html
 * wireshark-1.2.10-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046962.html
 * kernel-2.6.32.21-166.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046947.html
 * sssd-1.2.2-20.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046946.html
 * rekonq-0.5.0-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046939.html
 * xorg-x11-xinit-1.0.9-18.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-September/046938.html