FWN/Issue208

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 208 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 208 for the week ending January 10, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Welcome to the first Fedora Weekly News of 2010! This issue kicks off with announcements, including a note on the final open seat on the Fedora Board being appointed with Colin Walters, upcoming deadline details for Fedora 13 new features and spins, and a Bugzilla upgrade and outage last week. In news from the Fedora Planet, new Chromium packages and SELinux tips, Fedora 13 marketing plans, and details on a class on Inkscape recently taught at a Boston middle school. In news from the Fedora Ambassadors, details on last week's Fedora Ambassador IRC class. In Quality Assurance news, many updates on the first weekly QA team meeting of 2010, details on a new test case for preupgrade, and details on an initial set of desktop validation test cases for Fedora. In Translation news, the very latest on Fedora 13 documentation and translation schedule, discussion with the Fedora QA Team for help with the Fedora Localization Project's testing events, and an announcement of new team members for French, Arabic and Russian translation teams. In news from the Design team, find out about the start of a new Fedora Design Spin, and graphic concepts for Fedora 13. This issue wraps with with security advisories for Fedora 11 and 12. Enjoy FWN 208 and welcome to 2010!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio format in OGG for the past few FWN issues that one of our contributors has begun. Find it on the Internet Archive and have a listen!

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, 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 AND IT'S WHOLE COMMUNITY WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010.

Final Board appointment, and IRC meeting reminder 2010-01-07 UTC 1700
Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, has appointed Colin Walters to fill the final open seat on the Fedora Board for the next two releases. Paul has also briefed, "Colin has spent several years developing technology and community in the GNOME Project and around the varied landscape of Fedora's desktop. He brings to the Board a constructive, positive spirit to solving problems in Fedora and upstream. His recent work on advancing ideas and code for a unique but highly usable personality for the free desktop is also very exciting.

After getting the chance to meet and talk with him at FUDCon, I am sure he will be an excellent addition to the Board. I hope the Fedora community will join me in welcoming Colin, where he joins Chris Tyler as our other new member for this cycle.

The new Board will meet for the first time tomorrow in a public IRC meeting, on Thursday 7 January 2010, at 1700 UTC (12:00 noon US-Eastern). Departing, current, and new Board members are all expected at the meeting. Details about joining the IRC meeting are found here:

As I've written before, the Board always welcomes community input.Please feel free to join the fedora-advisory-board mailing list to start a discussion if needed, or you may email us at any time with questions or issues. "

Outage notification - Fedora mailing list migration - Sat-Sun Jan 9-10, 2010
Jon Stanley announced, "There will be an outage starting at 2009-01-09, which will last approximately 48 hours. To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run:

date -d '2009-01-09 HH:MM UTC'


 * Affected Services:

Mailing Lists


 * Unaffected Services:

Buildsystem, CVS / Source Control, Database, DNS, Fedora Hosted, Fedora People, Fedora Talk, Mirror System, Torrent, Translation Services, Websites,

Ticket Link:

Reason for Outage: Migrate mailing lists from RHT infrastructure to Fedora infrastructure. Note that this outage will not be for the entire 48 hours, however, there will be times when mailing list traffic will be queued rather than immediately delivered. This will occur as large lists are migrated.

We will attempt to minimize any impact. Note that as the mailing lists are being renamed as well, therefore, the List-ID headers will change. You can find further information about the changes at https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00011.html

Thanks for your patience while we undertake this massive migration effort.

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage.

FUDCon Toronto Survey closes Friday night!
Robyn Bergeron announced that FUDCon Toronto Survey will be available though 11:59pm PST Friday, January 8, 2010 (that's 07:59 UTC on Saturday, January 9). R. Bergeron briefed, "FUDCon Toronto may be over, but we still want to hear your (anonymous, of course!) thoughts on how it went.  This is your friendly reminder that the FUDCon Toronto Survey will be available though 11:59pm PST Friday,January 8, 2010 (that's 07:59 UTC on Saturday, January 9).  5 minutes of your time to answer 29 quick questions can help us make future FUDCons better than ever!

If you...
 * attended FUDCon Toronto, either in-person or remotely via Fedora Live, please take this survey and tell us what you thought.
 * didn't attend FUDCon Toronto but wanted to, please take this survey and tell us how we can help you get to the next one.
 * didn't want to go to FUDCon Toronto, please take this survey and tell us why - it's anonymous.

The survey is available at

Questions are previewable at. We will be analyzing and announcing results shortly after the close of the survey. If you're curious about the process, interested in helping us analyze the results, or have any questions in general, join the conversation on the Fedora Marketing mailing list. ".

Fedora 13 Feature & Spin Submission Deadline is Three Weeks Away :: 2010-01-26
John Poelstra announced that the deadline for submitting new features and spins for inclusion in Fedora 13 is Tuesday, January 26, 2010. John's full announcement is here, "A friendly reminder that the deadline for submitting new features and spins for inclusion in Fedora 13 is Tuesday, January 26, 2010.

Two weeks from the "Feature Submission Deadline" is "Feature Freeze"--Tuesday, February 9, 2010.

"At Feature Freeze all new features for the release should be substantially complete and in a testable state, including enabled by default if so specified by the feature. In the Fedora development process, all new feature work is completed by Feature Freeze and tested during the test releases: Alpha and Beta."

A summary of other important milestones in Fedora 13 is at this page"

Bugzilla Outage/Upgrade - 2010-01-09
Ricky Zhou announced, "There will be an outage starting at 2010-01-09 02:00 UTC, which will last approximately 3 hours." Ricky also mentioned, "To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

or run: date -d '2010-01-09 02:00 UTC'

Affected Services: bugzilla.redhat.com

Unaffected Services: Buildsystem, CVS / Source Control, Database, DNS, Fedora Hosted, Fedora People, Fedora Talk, Mail, Mirror System, Torrent, Translation Services, Websites

Ticket Link:

Reason for Outage: Red Hat IT will be performing a bugzilla upgrade from version 3.2 to 3.4.

Contact Information: Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage. Note that the Fedora Infrastructure team does not run bugzilla.redhat.com, though."

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. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Richard W.M. Jones shared tips for using shell redirection with arbitrary file descriptors. Some later tips include using libguestfs to examine VMWare guest images.

Tom Callaway has posted new Chromium packages, and some workarounds and fixes for running with SELinux enabled.

Mel Chua explained what the Fedora Marketing folks are up to for Fedora 13. Hint: A lot.

Greg DeKoenigsberg responded to criticism of the OLPC project, explaining that "OLPC is now, and has always been, a single piece of a very large puzzle" while there are many outgrowths from the OLPC work that have been incredibly successful, including the entire Netbook craze.

Julian Aloofi described the real problem with Free Software. "There is one real problem with Free Software, and it is very hard to fix. I would even say it is impossible." Read on for the awesome truth. More importantly, Julian discussed a potential new way of dealing with files and never having to press the "Save" button again.

Peter Hutterer wrote some useful advice for composing commit messages. "In the last few weeks, I've had a surprising number of discussions about commit messages. Many of them were with developers new to a project, trying to get them started. So here's a list of things you should do when committing, and why you should do it."

Peter also posted some information on how xorg will handle configuration files and hardware management in the upcoming 1.8 release, now that HAL is being deprecated.

Mike McGrath introduced SSHFP. "What is an SSHFP record? It's a ssh host key in DNS so you can verify it is correct."

Daniel Walsh has updated the SELinux Sandbox tool. "Every time I demonstrate sandbox to some one, they say, 'That's great, but can it do X, Y and Z?' I have taken those suggestions along with some great patches from Josh Cogliati, I have updated the sandbox tool."

Máirín Duffy taught a class on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school as part of Red Hat's community outreach program. Máirín has posted the introduction and exercises from the first day of the class, and hopes to make an additional post for each day of class.

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Ambassador IRC class held
Max Spevack held a Fedora Classroom session on IRC on Jan. 7 for any new -- and not-so-new -- ambassadors, covering what it means to be a Fedora Ambassador as well as some tips and tricks for how to be a good one. If you missed the class, many good suggestions were offered and you have a chance to review what was said at the class. The minutes and logs are below.


 * minutes: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-classroom/2010-01-07/fedora-classroom.2010-01-07-15.01.html
 * logs: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-classroom/2010-01-07/fedora-classroom.2010-01-07-15.01.log.html

Fedora 12 is here
With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of 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, as the QA group and the Fedora project in general awaken from its holiday slumber!

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
There was no Test Day last week, and no Test Day is currently planned for this week. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 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 2010-01-04. The full logs are available. James Laska reported that had finished his list of recommendations based on the Fedora 12 retrospective, and it was available on the wiki.

Adam Williamson gave an update on the privilege escalation policy topic. He had escalated the issue to FESCo with a trac ticket. FESCo had not yet discussed the topic at a meeting or responded to the ticket.

James Laska reported that he, Adam Williamson, Liam Li, and Rui He had attended a sprint meeting the previous week to work on open tickets for improving Fedora 13 test plans. He referenced the list of tickets which still remained open. He also noted that he and Adam would be working on kicking off the Fedora 13 test day process soon. Jóhann Guðmundsson said he would be looking at the possibility of an LXDE test day, and Adam Miller said he would work on a proposal for the XFCE test day.

The group then discussed the list of recommendations James Laska had developed based on the feedback received from the Fedora 12 cycle. Adam Williamson volunteered to work with Rui He on adding installation testing to the wiki list of QA project activities. Jóhann Guðmundsson said he would look through the Fedora 13 feature list and see if useful debugging guides could be written for any of the new features, similar to the page he wrote for Dracut in the Fedora 12 cycle. Adam was in the middle of creating a desktop validation test plan (for confirming that releases meet the desktop release criteria). On the topic of creating an X.org test plan, Adam felt that a test plan was unnecessary as the question of what to test for X.org was a simple one, while all the complexity lay in getting enough testing done on a wide enough range of hardware. James, Will and Kamil Paral were working on the packaging necessary for the deployment of the israwhidebroken.com project. Will and Kamil were working on an initial implementation of automated package sanity testing. Liam Li and Rui He were working on automating as many of the installation validation tests as possible. James noted that he planned to bring the installation testing SOP and blocker bug meeting SOP out of draft status. He also suggested having an SOP to determine whether to document issues as common bugs, release notes, install guide items or in other ways.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-01-05. The full log is available. The group discussed Hamidou Dia's proposal to document the procedure for determining assignees for components where the correct assignee is not defined in Bugzilla's database. After much discussion, the group tentatively concluded that in cases where the choice of assignee is straightforward this should be fixed in Bugzilla's database, and in cases where it is not straightforward, the components wiki page is not well-suited to explaining the procedure.

Chris Campbell had suggested that the wiki page on capturing stack traces should be updated further to reflect the capabilities of abrt, which was introduced in Fedora 12. The group agreed that this was a good idea and agreed that Adam Williamson should contact Chris and ask him to make his proposed changes.

Chris Campbell had also proposed an agenda item about the handling by Bugzilla of bugs with many duplicates, but no-one present at the meeting was sure exactly what the issue was. The group agreed to table the item until Chris could explain the issue more clearly.

Juan P. Daza noted that the wiki's list of active triagers may be somewhat out of date, missing some new triagers and listing some who have become inactive. The group agreed that Juan could work on contacting apparently inactive triagers and proposing an update to the list.

Improved preupgrade test case
Rui He announced that he had created a new test case for preupgrade to better reflect the commonly-encountered real-world situation where multiple kernels are installed on the system to be upgraded, resulting in low space in the /boot partition. This test case should mean problems in this scenario, as encountered by many Fedora 11 users when trying to upgrade to Fedora 12, will be caught earlier in the testing process. Rui He asked for the group's help in reviewing the new test case.

Translation checking collaboration with localization team
Noriko Mizumoto informed the group of the localization team's plan to do periodic checks of its translations in a 'real-world' situation, by testing a current Rawhide live image and checking for translation problems. She asked the QA team to assist by providing the live images for testing. Adam Williamson thanked her for co-ordinating with the QA team, and pointed out that the already available nightly live images should be suitable for testing. He also suggested that QA team members with knowledge of languages other than English could help in the translation checking process.

Desktop validation test cases
Adam Williamson announced that he had completed an initial set of desktop validation test cases to be used in checking if Fedora releases and pre-releases meet the appropriate desktop release criteria. He welcomed the group's help in reviewing these test cases.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Updated Documentation and Translation Schedule for Fedora 13
Representatives of the Fedora Translation and Documentation Projects met with John Poelstra to discuss the Project Schedule for Fedora 13. Noriko Mizumoto represented the FLP. The highlights include the elimination of the Alpha and Beta freezes for Release Notes and Guides, which will allow the translators to continue working on the documents as they are being written.

The updated schedule has been put up by John Poelstra at the following place:

http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-13/f-13-trans-tasks.html

QA Testing for FLP
Noriko Mizumoto initiated a discussion with the Fedora Quality Assurance team regarding the Localization testing events that are planned during the Fedora 13 Release Schedule. This phase was introduced during Fedora 12 development, to allow translators to review their translations on the graphical user interface and to ensure that updated translations and their fixes were being included in the newer builds.

James Laska from the Fedora QA team has been providing guidance to  formalize a test plan and to draw up the reference documentation that can be used for the testing plan.

Domingo Becker and Igor Pires Soares highlighted the need for testing the Installation Program - Anaconda and the difficulty that a LiveCD installation poses while testing its interface.

Status of Transifex Upgrade
As an update to the earlier discussion about upgrading the Transifex instance for translate.fedoraproject.org, Paul Frields thanked the Fedora Project members who have been working to fix the issues preventing the upgrade. The work was temporarily suspended due to the holiday break. After the required packages were built by Rakesh Pandit and  Jens Petersen, presently  Toshio Kuratomi and  Ricky Zhou have been trying to set up a staging server.

CVS Submission Connection Broken
Iñigo Varela from the Asturian translation team reported a problem with submission of files on translate.fedoraproject.org. Piotr Drag identified a broken connection with cvs.fedoraproject.org as the cause for this problem.

Yum Translation Submissions on transifex.net
Translations for Yum can now be submitted via transifex.net.

New Members in FLP
Stephane (French), Muhammad AlFakhori (Arabic) , Alexey Morin (Russian) joined the FLP over the past two weeks.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Planning the Fedora Design Suite Spin
Following a FUDCon discussion, Sebastian Dziallas took the initiative with the creation of a Fedora Design Suite Spin "Having had some pretty cool discussion with Diana, Mel and Mo in the hackroo... hospitality suite at FUDCon, I've created and uploaded a first build." Mel Chua continued the effort by creating the wiki space and organizing information, while Nicu Buculei and Martin Sourada tried to define the spin target "I think before significant marketing we should clarify the vision and the target, go beyond the generic 'professional designers'. I bet even us, inside the Design Team, have various expectations from a 'perfect' spin." Sebastian worked on preparing the spin for official submission "I'll try to get everything ready by tomorrow to submit it to the wrangler, so that we can at least mention it at the Spin SIGs meeting already."

Graphic Concepts for Fedora 13
During the winter holidays a number of graphic concepts for the Fedora 13 theme were advanced: Máirín Duffy advanced a "Swirly Stars" concept, Brian Hurren proposed the "fedora galaxy" design , Luya Tshimbalanga came with a "Starlines" study and Samuele Storari sketched a "Goddard rocket" design. The images and their evolution should be found in the dedicated development wiki page.

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce. Note: This issue covers security packages released 2009-12-20 through 2010-01-10.

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * mysql-5.1.41-2.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01132.html
 * trac-0.11.6-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01169.html
 * asterisk-1.6.1.11-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01180.html
 * wireshark-1.2.5-3.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01248.html
 * PyXML-0.8.4-17.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01274.html
 * kernel-2.6.31.9-174.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01347.html
 * proftpd-1.3.2c-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01360.html
 * viewvc-1.1.3-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01421.html
 * libtool-2.2.6-17.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01506.html
 * gcc-4.4.2-20.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01512.html
 * slim-1.3.1-9.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00009.html
 * automake-1.11.1-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00012.html
 * stardict-3.0.1-20.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00121.html
 * cacti-0.8.7e-3.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00166.html
 * krb5-1.7-15.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00200.html
 * condor-7.4.1-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00220.html
 * pdns-recursor-3.1.7.2-1.fc12 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00228.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * libtool-2.2.6-11.fc11.3 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01090.html
 * asterisk-1.6.1.11-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01116.html
 * mysql-5.1.41-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01166.html
 * phpldapadmin-1.2.0.4-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01259.html
 * kernel-2.6.30.10-105.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01344.html
 * cacti-0.8.7e-3.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01390.html
 * proftpd-1.3.2c-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01418.html
 * viewvc-1.1.3-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-December/msg01464.html
 * slim-1.3.1-9.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00000.html
 * NetworkManager-0.7.2-2.git20091223.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00122.html
 * gimp-2.6.8-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00184.html
 * pdns-recursor-3.1.7.2-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00217.html
 * condor-7.4.1-1.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00227.html
 * ImageMagick-6.5.1.2-2.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2010-January/msg00317.html