FWN/Issue177

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 177 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 177 for the week ending May 24th, 2009.

This week we offer a special collector's edition with the last ever Fedora Webcomic. PlanetFedora links Jeff Shelten's thoughts on "Why Students Should Get Involved in Open Source", Ambassadors reports on "Fedora en Mexico", Developments is getting "In a Flap Over Flags", QualityAssurance takes a look at a "Beagle/Tracker Blocker Bug Proposal", Artwork says goodbye to itself but welcomes Design. SecurityWeek examines the problems of "Cloudy Trust". Translations notes that "Sections of the Fedora User Guide Cannot be Translated". SecurityAdvisories includes an  update. Virtualization shares details on the "Rawhide Virtualization Repository".

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, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala

, "a command line tool that tells you what’s in a virtual machine. You just point it at a disk image or a libvirt domain" and it can discover a number of pieces of information about the installed VM.

Thomas Canniot posted a How-To about running a successful release event. "Fedora 11 is going to be released at the end of the month and very soon, our massive army of ambassadors will want to spread how proud they are of their Fedora 11 release to the masses."

Jef Spaleta calculated new Fedora usage statistics that combined the Smolt and MirrorManager logs to come up with some very interesting new numbers.

Paul W. Frields responded to the recent discussions about the new fedora-devel moderation policy. "There’s simply no place in free software, and certainly not in Fedora, for that kind of abuse. Of course harsh words aren’t the end of the world. When we let them become the noise that drowns out the signal, though, we’re putting the project at risk. If contributors feel their time in community discussions are wasted, they will either hold them elsewhere, or simply go away."

Jack Aboutboul interviewed Lennart Poettering ("Red Hat Desktop Team Engineer and resident audio guru") about Pulse Audio and audio in Fedora.

Susan Lauber wrote about "how can you - a Fedora contributor - assist in making the wiki more useful for everyone?" For anyone wondering how they can start contributing to Fedora, this is a great way to start, without any long-term commitments.

Nicu Buceli reported from eLiberatica 2009 in Bucharest, Romania.

Jeff Sheltren discussed "Why Students should get Involved in Open Source". Jeff says that "from my experience, open source experience has given our student employees an enormous boost when looking for their first jobs out of college."

Adam Williamson mentioned the Common F11 bugs wiki page, and how you can help: "It’s really easy - everything you need to know to add an issue to the Common Bugs page is right there in the page source, as a comment. If you edit the page you’ll see a few chunks of comments which explain how to add an issue (including a template entry), and what else to do when adding one..." James Laska also suggested that there are still some high priority defects that could use some extra testing in preparation for the imminent Fedora 11 release.

Thorsten Leemhuis explained that "There is one small change in Fedora 11 that I guess will confuse Fedora and RPM Fusion users with x86-32 (aka i386/ix86) systems quite a lot, but afaics did not get enough attention yet: By default, the PAE kernel will be used on 32-bit hardware, where appropriate."

plugins and a new entry in the  namespace might enable a technical solution.

Jesse Keating outlined the advantages of a "no flags" policy in gaining possible contributors from the PRC and also getting wider exposure for software in RHEL.

Denis Leroy was a persistent critic of the decision and called for most of FESCo to resign.

Patrice Dumas kicked off a fresh instance of the thread which recast the discussion in terms of two separate issues: legality and giving offense.

Christoph Wickert started a fresh instance of the thread because: "[t]he `Package Maintainers Flags policy" thread already counts more than 225 mails, but nobody bothered to answer 7 simple (?) questions I asked in my mail, although it was one of the very first three mails on the topic. So what did I do wrong? Was it that I mentioned the missing FESCo meeting minutes? If 8 out of 21 summaries are missing, IMHO this is a fact worth mentioning. I'm one of the few maintainers who directly is affected by the policy. Would somebody - preferably a FESCo member, who voted for the flags proposal - please be so kind to answer my questions. TIA!" Josh Boyer answered pretty thoroughly. He included the information that the policy would be revisited in the next meeting and an explanation that the FESCo meeting summaries were incomplete due to the failure of an attempt to rotate the onerous minute taking duties. Bill Nottingham added that the missing items should now be available.

Yet a further thread was started by Martin Sourada as a proposal to create icon-themes as a long-term support solution.

The policy, as currently formulated is posted on the wiki.

The 2009-05-22 FESCo meeting voted to overturn the flag policy and to start gathering information on the actual scope of the problem. Kevin Kofler started a thread to this end.

rather than. David referenced a suggestion that: "anaconda is cheating (ie running --nodeps installs). This would allow it to complete an upgrade where dependencies lead to unavailable packages that are not on the dvd, but are in the complete Fedora, and or non- fedora repositories, that are not available at upgrade time."

Seth Vidal replied that as  was running outside of the system experiencing the update it was free to use "--nodeps [without] a concern for not being able to complete the transaction." 's ability to use blacklists to exclude particular items from such transactions is now available to  as a   plugin.

Jeremy Katz added that: "It also means that we can do things like use a newer version of rpm or a new kernel with ext4 support to (eventually) allow for migrating from ext3->ext4[.]"

that we ship in F-10. in F-10 is based on  0.9, and doesn't include the vmchannel patch." But "ended up with a qemu which compiled, but kept segfaulting, and it was tricky to diagnose exactly why."

"Is it really a problem to use the and/or  packages from Fedora 11 builds?  You can grab the latest builds out of Koji." "This worked OK for me, although I have now moved to using Fedora 11-Preview, and have mostly abandoned Fedora 10."

Daniel B and Mark Mc concurred, Fedora 11 is the place to get .

."

"This is a tool based around libguestfs which can inspect a virtual machine disk image and tell you some interesting things about what's inside it."

Some of the things virt-inspector can tell you:
 * What operating system(s) are installed, and what distros and versions. It currently covers RHEL releases, Fedora releases, Debian releases, and has limited support for Windows.
 * How disk partitions are expected to be mounted (eg. /dev/sda1 -> /boot)
 * What applications are installed.
 * What kernel(s) are installed.
 * What kernel modules are installed.

developers.