FWN/Issue175

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 175 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 175 for the week ending May 10th, 2009.

In a small sample of this information-packed issue Announcements points to the "Fedora 11 Bug Blocker Review Day", PlanetFedora explores the relationship between cooking popcorn and releasing software, Ambassadors reports that Fedora is a star not only in Trenton,NJ but also in Jaipur,India. QualityAssurance covers the proposal to drop the production of Alpha releases by Fedora 12 and the "Fedora Bug Workflow". Developments quivers with "Presto A-Go-Go!" Translation takes a look at the "Long Release Notes". Artwork examines "Banners, Posters and T-shirts". The WebComic crowns Leonidas. SecurityAdvisories is short and sweet. Virtualization reports on "Experimental Dom0 on Fedora 11".

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FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala

that should clear up issues that some older ThinkPads have experienced with the volume controls and mixer levels.

Silas Sewell described how   can be used to manage large networks. "Puppet is an open source configuration management tool written in Ruby. It allows a systems administrator to define how a system should be configured using Puppet’s declarative language. Each Puppet client pulls its catalog at a regular interval and figures out how to make the catalog definitions true for the local operating system."

Silas also packaged, "a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers" (written by Facebook).

Venkatesh Hariharan quoted Andy Grove (former Chairman and CEO of Intel) "comparing how patents have become like the mortgage-backed securities that caused the current financial meltdown".

Adam Williamson updated the Fedora Bug Process wiki page. "One significant thing it formalizes was discussed at the QA meeting this morning: what happens when a Rawhide bug gets fixed." Adam also "re-arranged it in a more logical order, wikified it, and added a lot more detail on bits of the process, states, and resolutions that weren’t previously covered. It also now explicitly mentions which resolutions and states are valid for Fedora and which aren’t."

Jesse Keating mused about the similarities between cooking popcorn (mmm popcorn...) and releasing software.

Valent Turkovic wrote about installing, the Open Vulnerability Assessment System (a fork from   after it went closed-source) in Fedora.

Samuel Iglesias shared some basic  tips. Regardless of your preferred editor,  is generally installed everywhere so it is useful to know the basic.

Jeremy Katz followed-up from his previous post (mentioned in FWN Issue 174) on the relevance of PPC as a primary Fedora architecture. At this week's Fedora Board meeting, "the Board voted and decided that from the Board level, PPC is no longer required to be a primary arch." Jeremy added "That does not mean that PPC is now automatically a secondary arch... The next step is that I am proposing to FESCo that they consider a proposal to have PPC become a secondary arch for Fedora 12."

Josh Boyer announced that, contrary to previous reports of doom,  may in fact make it into Fedora 11.

will come Presto-enabled contrary to last week's gloomy forecast.

Paul W. Frields described the potential saved download bandwidth as "[t]ypically [...] in double digits, but I’ve heard of cases already (using our development branch Rawhide) where people were saving 90% or more of their download time."

will soon be able to retire packages.

had apparently not been processed and Kevin Kofler argued that the chances were high that packages which built succesfully on an earlier release would build on a later one. This was disputed by Jesse Keating. David Cantrell and Seth Vidal shared their experience of users not responding to requests to test and comment on updates provided in.

A debate over the problems caused between the mismatch between the rolling, continuous nature of development and the need to freeze packages in a known state to produce a release received substantial contributions from Ralf Corsepius, who argued that Release-Engineering should change the workflow considerably. Jesse Keating responded with a defense of the current system which emphasized the need of maintainers to adhere to the current workflow and "good development practices."

Richard W.M. Jones was in favor of rolling releases.

Michael Schwendt explained the problems arising when the  repository was not used as intended.

Michal Hlavinka proposed breaking the freeze solely for the updates-testing repository shortly before the GA release.

There's a lot more in this thread beyond the ability of your correspondent to summarize adequately. It's worth a read for anyone trying to understand how and why Fedora is produced.

was ready to provide  support. Adam referenced the Crypto Consolidation project (see also FWN#107 ).

Dan Winship confirmed that for the present  was best used directly with applications rather than by other libraries. Robert Relyea provided a detailed response to Adam including the hopeful sounding news that some of the issues around  may be fixed in a few months.

platform without much kudos or thanks continued. Questions were asked about why Intel was not providing code for the  graphics chipset (common in many netbooks) except via obscure repositories. The appearance of ex-Red Hatter Arjan van de Ven, who argued in defense of binary blobs in these drivers, occasioned some wry commentary.

When Adam Williamson pointed to a "huge new pile of crack [...] in the Ubuntu Mobile special-sauce repositories [...]" Dan Williams asked : "What makes the Poulsbo team so special that they are exempt from the upstreaming policy that every other part of Intel seems to follow so well these days?" Later discussion suggested that it ought to at least be possible to produce a "[...] basic native accelerated 2D driver which doesn't depend on all the horrible proprietary crack [.]"

on his platform but uncovered many bugs and asked, "is my goal reasonable, or am I better off sticking with my in-house solution for the time being?"

Richard Jones addressed several of the bugs and posted his "notes on building libguestfs and dependencies on RHEL 5 and derived distributions" followed with a blow by blow account of hammering  and its dependencies into submission. Finally, Richard announced RPMs for RHEL/CentOS 5.3.

Charles thanked him "kindly for going above and beyond on this one!".

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

Experimental Dom0 on Fedora 11
Pasi Kärkkäinen reports success with a dom0 kernel using Fedora 11 Rawhide. "I'm able to run Xen paravirtual (PV) domUs, install new domUs using virt-install and also install and manage domains with virt-manager."

The environment used was:
 * Fedora 11 (rawhide as of 2009-05-05)
 * Xen included in F11, no external patches (xen-3.3.1-11.fc11)
 * xen-tip/next pv_ops dom0 kernel as of 2009-05-06, Linux 2.6.30-rc3.
 * All the rest was standard stuff included in Fedora 11 as well

Michael Young continues to post experimental dom0 kernels to a yum repo.