FWN/Issue198

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 198 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 198 for the week ending October 18, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue begins with some updates on lodging for December's Fedora User and Developer Conference in Toronto. If you plan to attend or are considering it, be sure to read this. News from the Fedora Planet presents news and views from Fedora community members. In Quality Assurance news, details from the latest upcoming Test Days on SELinux and power management, and an invitation for Test Day proposals for Fedora 12 and 13 cycles, in addition to wonderful detail on the weekly QA meetings and team activities, and updates towards Fedora 12 beta. In translation news, details from last week's Fedora 12 beta readiness meeting, a query about the Russian translation of Fedora 12 virt-manager, and details of new Fedora Localization Project members. From the Art/Design team, details on Constantine (Fedora 12) wallpapers. Our issue wraps up this week with details on last week's security patches for Fedora 10 and 11. Enjoy FWN!

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. We plan to have the next issue of Fedora Weekly News in Fedora Insight, next week. We welcome your feedback as we migrate FWN to this new content platform!

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

FUDCon Lodging -- IMPORTANT
Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, announced exclusively about the FUDCon Lodging. On his brief, he mentioned, "We've added an extra "hotel" field to the FUDCon wiki pre-registration table, on the far right.

If you have already booked at the hotel, please visit the wiki.If you do not need lodging, please visit the wiki. Use the following codes for the hotel booking field: Y == HAVE booked lodging NA == Not applicable, don't need/want

If you have not booked, but need lodging, you don't need to do anything at this time.

The FUDCon planning team will get initial roomsharing set up for people based on the responses, so please be courteous to your fellow Fedora community members by promptly responding [1][2]. Thanks.

[1] If your lodging is not being funded by the Fedora Project, and you don't want to room share, that's perfectly OK. :-) Please mark the wiki comments to say "not roomsharing" in that case.

[2] If you have already found a roommate, please indicate that on the wiki in your "Comments" field.

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

Planet Fedora
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Richard W.M. Jones described a "Poor man's P2V":

"What happens when you have an old server sitting in the corner — the hardware is flaky and you need to set up a virtual equivalent ASAP, but no one can remember how that old server is configured? People will sell you very expensive software to solve this problem for you.

But if you have some time and patience you can do P2V conversions by hand for free, and it’s not too hard. Here’s how."

Rahul Sundaram found that the recent major changes to Thunderbird's user interface (that had suddenly appeared after a routine Fedora 11 update) have been fixed/reverted.

Michael DeHaan tried to define all of the possible meanings of the word "Cloud".

Seth Vidal wondered about the growth of Fedora (for example, number of packages and size of Yum repository metadata) and how to sustain future growth.

Jose M Manimala introduced Entente, a web services framework for Python "which requires minimal configuration and can be deployed based on Generated classes or user defined classes."

Máirín Duffy demoed a new GTK font selector dialog box that may drastically improve usability. Máirín also posted the complete part list to the Fedora portable usability lab, with photos (including the giant carrying case).

James Antill addressed some of the issues affecting the installation of multiple versions of a single (RPM) package on a system, and how Python 3 in particular can be handled.

Martin Sourada looked at how lighting affects the Echo Icon Theme. "So, I wonder what do you folks reading the Fedora (Design) Planet think? It's still not too late to adjust the guidelines for Echo Perspective..."

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's planned Test Day on internationalization (i18n) was postponed to a yet-to-be-determined future date. Our apologies to anyone who made time to attend.

Two Test Days are scheduled for next week. The first is on the confined SELinux users feature. This feature involves assigning an SELinux role to a user. The role's policy controls the extent of the user's access to the system. The Test Day will focus on testing several scenarios to ensure the policy restrictions work as they should. As usual, there will be a live CD available for testing - there's no need to install Rawhide. The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2009-10-20 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

The second Test Day will be on power management, especially specific improvements made in Fedora 12. Some very specific but easy-to-run test cases which will greatly aid the development team in refining power management have been developed for the Test Day: there's even a helpful script which runs the tests and generates the need results automatically. As usual, there will be a live CD available for testing - there's no need to install Rawhide. This Test Day will be very easy to participate in, and the information you can generate will be very helpful, so please come along and help out! The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2009-10-22 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

No Fit and Finish track Test Day is planned for next week.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 or 13 cycles, 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 2009-10-12. The full log is available. James Laska reported that the new hardware which would be used to host the israwhidebroken.com project and other parts of the AutoQA project is in transit.

James Laska had contacted the Anaconda development team to check if the recent installer test days had identified any Beta blocker bugs. He found that the first test day had resulted in three blockers being added to the list. Jesse Keating worried that too much testing was being done after the Beta freeze, which made resolving identified bugs very difficult. James felt that extensive testing was being done both before and after the freeze. Jesse believed some of the blocker bugs that were found after the freeze date could have been found earlier. James agreed to investigate the bugs in question to see when they were introduced and when they were identified.

James Laska reviewed the status of the first Beta release candidate build, and noted status on the last remaining beta blocker bug was unclear. Denise Dumas said that Dave Lehman would investigate and report whether the bug was fixed in the release candidate build, and hence whether a second release candidate build would be required. James, Liam Li and Rui He had already started validation testing on the release candidate build.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He had been working on backlinking from the test status information on israwhidebroken.com to the actual test result in the autotest front end, but had not yet found a satisfactory solution. He had also been looking at auto-generating a Wiki page to list the critical path packages (as the set of critical path packages can change unpredictably, a manually-maintained static page is not a good solution). His plan for this is blocked by the Python interface to the Wiki using JSON, which cannot create or edit pages. Will and James Laska agreed that James would work on creating a package of the israwhidebroken.com code to be used for the production instance of the site. Kamil Paral reported steady progress on his packagediff test for identifying major changes between package versions. He had initial implementations of most important tests, and was working to generate fake packages so he can test the script and isolate any bugs in it. The group agreed that in the long term it would make sense to integrate Kamil's work as extensions to the existing rpmdiff tool, but in the short term it could be hosted as part of the AutoQA project.

Jóhann Guðmundsson explained his project to revise and standardize Wiki pages dealing with debugging and reporting bugs in various components. He had created a template for such pages and revised several existing pages to fit this new template. The group discussed a standard naming convention for such pages, and agreed on How_to_debug_(component name). Jóhann mentioned that he would welcome feedback on the usefulness of the existing pages, which would be the most important ones to revise, and what new pages of this type should be created.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-10-13. Adam Williamson commented on the QA group's discussion of Jóhann Guðmundsson's debugging page revision project, noting the agreement on the How_to_debug_(component name) naming convention.

Edward Kirk noted that housekeeping tasks, which would have been starting that week, had been delayed due to the overall release schedule delay occasioned by the delay of the Beta release.

Adam Williamson noted that Richard June was not present to give an update on the kernel triage project, nor was Brennan Ashton present to discuss the triage metrics project.

Sergey Rudchenko wanted to know if there was a way to have Bugzilla notify him of new bugs being filed on a particular component, but not of any change activity to existing bugs, as he found the volume of email with all the change messages included overwhelming. Edward Kirk suggested that he use the RSS feed search result feature for this. Any Bugzilla search can be used as an RSS feed in Red Hat's Bugzilla, so to achieve the desired result you can simply search for NEW bugs in any component and subscribe to the feed for the search result. New bugs for that component will then be shown on the feed.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-10-19 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-10-20 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

DeltaISO update
Andre Robatino reported that he was unable to generate DeltaISOs on Rawhide as a side-effect of the endianness issue in xz which had been previously discussed by the development group. Andre later announced DeltaISOs for Beta test compose -> Beta RC1 and Beta RC1 -> Beta RC2.

Fedora 12 Beta RC2 testing
Liam Li announced the formal testing process for the second release candidate build of Fedora 12 Beta. He noted that the test matrix was available and asked for the group's help in performing as many of the tests as possible. Cornel Panceac wondered why there were no live images available. Jesse Keating explained that he had had to delay building the live images until he was sure the regular installer images were OK due to resource constraints.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

FLP Representation at the Beta Release Readiness Meeting
FLSCo member Noriko Mizumoto represented the FLP in the Project Wise Fedora 12 Beta Readiness meeting held on 14th October 2009. In her report, she thanked the Package Maintainers for responding to the request from FLP to rebuild most of the packages for translation review. Additionally, a number of bugs were filed during the Translation Review and Noriko put forward a request to check the possibility for their correction in Fedora 12 GA. Paul Frields has taken responsibility to take this issue to  Bill Nottingham. Noriko also raised concern about the string freeze breaks that happened during this release.

Documentation, Banner, Website translation are scheduled for later dates and Noriko informed that FLP would be communicating with the respective teams accordingly.

The complete log for the meeting is also available.

Scheduled Translation Tasks for Fedora 12
The deadline for translation of Fedora 12 Beta Release Notes was scheduled for 12th October 2009 and the .rpm file built the next day. The next significant Translation milestone is the translation of all the Fedora Guides, which would start on 21st October 2009 and end on 5th November 2009.

Concern About Virt-manager Translation Submission
The maintainer of the Russian Translation Team, Yulia Poyarkova raised a concern about the submission of the virt-manager translations, since the bug accepting the translations has been closed in preparation for Fedora 12 GA. This module is currently not available for submission via translate.fedoraproject.org.

New Members in FLP
Alexey Matveichev (Russian), Enczel (Korean) , and Bruce Cowan (British English) joined the Fedora Localization Project last week.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Constantine Wallpaper Extras
Reaching the proposed deadline, Martin Sourada started the selection for the extra wallpapers to be included in Fedora 12 "originally the idea was to aim for 4, I think best would be to hear people's (from the design team) opinion on which ones would they include (aiming for 4 +/- 2) and base the final number on the discussion." In reply, Máirín Duffy opted for quality over quantity "My preference would be for fewer but higher-quality than more with varying quality". Nicu Buculei listed his preferences, including the 'educational' wallpaper made by Maria Leandro , which wasn't in the proposals list, and Martin Sourada followed with a lit of his own options.

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

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * perl-Net-OAuth-0.19-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00497.html
 * phpMyAdmin-3.2.2.1-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00490.html
 * Django-1.1.1-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00473.html
 * rubygem-rails-2.3.2-5.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00431.html
 * rubygem-activeresource-2.3.2-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00430.html
 * rubygem-activesupport-2.3.2-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00429.html
 * rubygem-activerecord-2.3.2-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00428.html
 * rubygem-actionpack-2.3.2-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00427.html
 * rubygem-actionmailer-2.3.2-3.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00426.html
 * drupal-service_links-6.x.1.0-5.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00399.html
 * dopewars-1.5.12-8.1033svn.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00370.html
 * deltarpm-3.4-18.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00363.html
 * dnsmasq-2.46-3.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00328.html

Fedora 10 Security Advisories

 * kernel-2.6.27.37-170.2.104.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00483.html
 * perl-Net-OAuth-0.19-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00476.html
 * Django-1.1.1-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00475.html
 * phpMyAdmin-3.2.2.1-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00467.html
 * dnsmasq-2.46-2.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00449.html
 * drupal-service_links-6.x.1.0-5.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00375.html
 * dopewars-1.5.12-8.1033svn.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00313.html