FWN/Issue164

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 164 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 164 for the week ending February 22nd, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue164

This week Announcements showcases Fedora Unity respins of Fedora 10, PlanetFedora selects some great blog entries on how to tag audio streams in PulseAudio and use func, QualityAssurance explains how to participate in test days, Developments covers the "Fedora 11 Mass Rebuild", Translations describes the new "L10n Infrastructure Team", Artwork covers some pretty "Evolving Fedora 11 Artwork" and Virtualization examines attempts to bridge the gap between libvirt and host network interface configuration.

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

BuildRequires are added automatically. Ralf suggested the problem could be solved by "[...] checking which packages in current rawhide contain *.pc's but do not Provide nor Require pkgconfig(foo) and to rebuild them (in manually presorted order) in advance to the mass rebuild."

Jon Masters appreciated Jesse's work and worried that the rebuild might leave some statically built binaries using i386 instead of the promised i586 (see FWN#162 ). Subsequent rebuilds were suggested as a means to work around the problem but Jesse preferred to identify specific problems and stated : "I think the most I'd be willing to do would be a second build pass across the static packages. IMHO everything else should be left up to testing discovery and fixing the assumptions rather than hiding them."

Another approach was suggested by Conrad Meyer based on using. When Ralf replied that this would not work because many packagers who had not used static subpackages Conrad pointed to the guidelines. Nicolas Mailhot ruefully responded that his experience with the fonts guidelines suggested that enforcement was necessary. Later discussion with Jakub Jelínek about the presence of  in   suggested that it will not be simple to apply this particular guideline to   without   ceasing to behave as expected.

login-manager Chris Lumens suggested that "[...] all packages containing a login manager include a special Provides: that we can query on." This would allow  to determine whether a login-manager is installed without the difficulties of curating a list.

Patrice Dumas, and others, provided a good deal of feedback which seems to have led to a consensus that  will be added to all packages which provide a login manager.

An interesting sub-thread developed in which Colin Walters argued that adding display managers (other than  and   should be strongly discouraged. This was met with a good deal of disagreement from Tom Callaway and Seth Vidal.

Colin explained that the ramifications of changing such an integral part of the OS were complex and that while anyone should be free to add such software it should also be "[...] within the rights of the people working on the desktop to close any bugs filed by people using something else WONTFIX." Jesse Keating and Seth Vidal seemed to agree that it should be possible for the Fedora Project do define specs to which login managers should conform.

The thread blossomed into several discussions. One focused on the technical challenges occasioned by the interaction of,  ,  ,   and. Another saw Toshio Kuratomi and Colin debating the strategic merits of making it more or less easy for interested parties to add their software to the Fedora Project ecosystem.

which was configurable via.

Matthew Saltzman reported some experiences with  setting the charge-threshold to 85% which is supposed to lengthen the battery life. Callum Lerwick referenced a Wikipedia article which claimes that the "[...] optimal storage charge for a Li-Ion is %40. Also, heat causes Li-Ion batteries to degenerate much faster, so if you're really worried about preserving your battery, don't leave it in the laptop while it's running. Yet another argument for less power usage. Less power, less heat, longer battery service life. Fewer toxic batteries going in to the land fill if you like that angle."

script from  no longer reported "redhat" as the manufacturer part of the configuration triplet. Panu referenced the documentation which suggests that "[...] the manufacturer part of the configuration name is the manufacturer of the CPU, not `OS vendor' so the former `redhat' was always incorrect. I don't know the history behind the decision to stomp `redhat' in there to begin with nor why it was then dropped later on. But having gotten used to it, people occasionally think the `unknown' (or `pc' for that matter) is a bug."

While Jakub Jelínek thought that providing the "redhat" string provided more information than "pc" or "unknown" Stepan Kaspal argued strongly that reverting to maintaining such a patch was wrong. He suggested that either upstream should be convinced to change the use of "manufacturer" or that the  macro in the specfile could be used to explicitly avoid calling. From here on the thread became too technically detailed to summarize although it is relatively brief as of going to press. Those learned in the lore of autotools and cross-compilation will find much to gladden their hearts.

and  and explained : "The whole reason I liked used $arch was that it meant when fedora stopped producing a 586 compatible tree, we didn't stop any one else from making a 586 compat tree and having it available like secondary arches are." Jesse Keating explained that "i386" was a misnomer for the  offering. Josh Boyer was unsure whether i586 would actually "go away" for Fedora 12. Dennis Gilmore was sure that it would and offered : "Anyone who wants to continue i586 support post F11 i look forward to talking to about setting up i586 as a secondary arch."

to "build a guest around an existing disk image, skipping the OS install step." Cole also posted a patch for  which allows for cloning from an XML file "rather than require the use of a guest defined on the current connection."

. Cole Robinson pointed out which is a collection of utilities for interrogating   guests. Tools included are ,,  , and.

" RPMs. These would be readily available to hosts on any architecture in the repository. Save for some "second class citizens" in the repo.

that allows it to create volumes that are snapshots of existing volumes?" Daniel P. Berrange pointed out this feature was recently added to 0.6.0. "Basically when creating a storage volume, you just need to pass information about the backing storage volume. It'll thus create a volume which is a snapshot of this backing store."

Mark McLoughlin complimented the work and updated the shared network interface feature page. The goal of this feature in development is to "Enable guest virtual machines to share a physical network interface (NIC) with other guests and the host operating system. This allows guests to independently appear on the same network as the host machine."