FWN/Issue282

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 282 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 282 for the week ending July 20, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In this week's issue, we begin with changes in packaging guidelines and a call for Fedora 16 Test Days in Announcements. Fedora In The News offers two pointers to articles about Fedora, including a German Fedora 16 preview and Linux.com's Top 5 distros of 2011. In Ambassador news this week, news from EMEA and APAC Ambassadors, planning for FUDCon Pune, India and FAmSCo updates. In Quality Assurance news, draft standard operating procedures for QA meetings, validation testing updates and more. FWN 282 finishes off this week with a few security advisories released for Fedora 14 and 15. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

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: Pascal Calarco

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines
Tom Callaway announced :

"Here are the latest changes to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

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Some rpm versions pass pathnames to the automatic filtering macros, so a section has been added to the guidelines to help packagers deal with it

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For a while, Fedora considered mono packages to be architecture-specific, and installed assemblies to %{_libdir}. However, after discussions with upstream, we now consider mono packages to be architecture (and platform) independent. This means that mono packages should be correctly installed into the GAC in /usr/lib or installed into /usr/lib/PACKAGENAME.

As a notable exception, any ELF binary libraries generated in a mono package must be correctly installed into %{_libdir}, because these files are architecture-specific.

Also, even though we consider mono packages to be architecture independent, they must not be marked as "noarch". Although the assemblies are the same, the files may differ due to strings referring to the build architecture.

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It was decided that gnome shell extension packages should have the prefix gnome-shell-extension (with no "s" on the end).

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The section in the Fedora Packaging Guidelines concerning libexecdir has been improved and expanded.

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The Fedora Java Packaging Guidelines have been updated to reflect the latest macros for Maven 3.

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These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to Christian Krause, Aleksandar Kurtakov, Petr Pisar, Stanislav Ochotnicky, and all of the members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here.

Thanks,

~spot"

Fedora Development News
The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements
 * Policy or process changes that affect developers.
 * Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
 * Tools changes that affect developers.
 * Schedule changes
 * Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements
 * Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
 * Discussion
 * Anything else not mentioned above

Call for Test Days for Fedora 16
Adam Williamson announced :

"Hi, folks. The Test Day cycle for Fedora 16 will open shortly, and we're putting out the call for anyone who has an idea for a Test Day. There are many open slots on the schedule - and if they all fill up or you would like to run a set of Test Days on related topics, we can organize events outside of the scheduled Thursday windows too.

It's often a good idea to have a Test Day for a major change or new feature you're introducing to the distribution, but we can run a Test Day on just about any topic. There is a full guide to organizing Test Days available - and the QA team is happy both to help you run a Test Day and to butt out and let you run it yourself, whichever you prefer! If you're interested in running a Test Day, please contact QA via the test mailing list, file a ticket in QA trac and/or pencil in your event on the schedule, create a Wiki page based on the template (see the SOP for details), and get down to work. Thanks!

-- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw http://www.happyassassin.net"

Fedora Events
The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, Fedora events are the exclusive and 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 (June - August 2011)

 * 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

Additional information

 * Reimbursements -- reimbursement guidelines.
 * Budget -- budget for the current quarter (as distributed by FAMSCo).
 * Sponsorship -- how decisions are made to subsidize travel by community members.
 * Organization -- event organization, budget information, and regional responsibility.
 * Event reports -- guidelines and suggestions.
 * LinuxEvents -- a collection of calendars of Linux events.

Fedora In the News
In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 16 planned to come with Systemd and Btrfs as default (German)
Vinzenz Vietzke forwarded :

"Hi,

German Linux Magazine and it's partner Site linux-community.de have a short feature summary of upcoming Fedora 16 including Systemd, Btrfs and many tools for virtualization:

"[...] Wie andere Distributionen soll Fedora 16 auf HAL verzichten und auf Grub 2 als Bootloader umsteigen. Systemd wird zum Standard-Init-System, Btrfs zum Standard-Dateisystem. Als Desktopumgebungen sind Gnome 3.2 und KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.7 vorgesehen. [...]"

The full articles are available

Regards, vinz. -- Vinzenz Vietzke Fedora Ambassador / Coordination German L10N Team"

The Five Best Linux Netbook Distributions: 2011 Edition
Jared K. Smith forwarded a review of current linux distributions suitable for netbooks, with the following comment on Fedora:

"Fedora and GNOME Shell make a pretty nifty netbook OS. Fedora, of course, has all the software you'd expect for a full-blown Linux distro."

The full post is available.

Ambassadors
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Editor: Richard A Vijay For days of the week starting from 13th July 2011 to 21th July 2011

Beat this week
Headlines from mailing lists

- EMEA Ambassadors 13th July Minutes

- APAC Wednesday meeting

- Graphics into our Ambassadors Joining Process

- FUDCon India Planning

- Design Team Joining Process

- Biweekly APAC Meeting 30 July 2011 Reminder

- FAD APAC Meeting and Survey

- Ambassador Survey Results on FAmSco

- Reminder for FAD APAC on 27th July

Welcome New Ambassadors
This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had a couple of new members joining.

Each and everyone of us in Fedora Community is happy to have you as part of our Ambassadors team. We wish you very best in your endeavors.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Karbafosss from Russia mentored by Robert Scheck

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Lovenemesis from China mentored by Caius 'kaio' Chance

Congrats and Wishes to all New members from Fedora Team. Thanks Joerg (kital) Simon for inviting them with welcome message.

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
EMEA Ambassadors 13th July Minutes

Minutes: Minutes (text): Log:

Buddhike Chandradeepa Kurera,Fedora Ambassador from Sri Lanka shared his ideas

Vinzenz Vietzke, Fedora Ambassador / Coordination German L10N Team shared his views on graphical approach for ambassadors join process S.Kemter, Christian Bryant, Vinzenz Vietzke, Joerg Simon,  Pierros Papadeas, Buddhika Kurera, Jukka Palander, Kaesar ALNIJRES, Gregory Fenton,  Zoltan Hoppar, S.Kemter,  María Leandro, inode0,  María Leandro,  Cheng-Chia Tseng Shared their views

Inode shared his points in a thread later

David Ramsey sent out a reminder for Meeting on 16th July at 4:00 UTC, Buddhika wrote to lists inviting discussions with FUDCon Pune organisers and FAms hosting FAD all around APAC.

FUDCon India Planning meeting reminder sent by Rahul pointing to channel on IRC for Planning

APAC bi-weekly meeting held on 16th July 2011. Please find the meeting notes from the below URLs.

Minutes: Minutes (text): Log:

Biweekly APAC Meeting reminder - 30th July 2011 Agenda Log: Log (text):

FAD APAC Meeting Notes and Survey Minutes: Minutes (text):

Survey

FAmSCo Meeting
FAmSco looked into understand better the view of ambassadors and here are the results:

Firts is the general responses: Second, if you want to see the comments: Then we have divided by regions: If you want to smash data in your own, here is a spread sheet with all the responses.

FAD APAC Meeting reminder on 27th July 2011 For any proposed changes to the draft agenda, then please update -

Events reported on Ambassadors mailing list
Events Ninja Task List from Vinz https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design/Events_Ninjas#Tasks

Campus Ambassadors mailing list-Summary of traffic
The mailing list did not have any traffic this week except a Linkedin invitation from Sara singh. Editor likes to know if someone is regulating/monitoring this list?

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
The Fedora 15 Test Day track is now finished, and the main Fedora 16 Test Day track has not yet started. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 16 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac. Noriko Mizumoto proposed a localization Test Day for 2011-08-22.

Release criteria and validation testing
Rui He worked on adding new release validation tests and extending existing ones in response to the results of the Beta release criteria / validation test concordance survey Adam Williamson performed the previous week (see FWN 282).

Athmane Madjoudj put the security lab spin validation matrix he had been working on into production. Adam Williamson did the same with the base validation matrix he had been working on, and emailed the list with details of the two new matrices and some related changes he had made to the validation testing wiki pages at the same time.

Separation of release validation and feature processes
After James Laska announced the first Fedora 16 blocker bug review meeting, Bruno Wolff asked what was to be done. with the large amount of proposed blocker bugs relating to the Fedora 16 feature of porting core system services from SysV to systemd. Adam Williamson noted that the group had lately been consistent in rejecting proposed blockers which related simply to the implementation of features, preferring to keep the feature and release validation processes separate, and consider the release blocker system part of the release validation process. He proposed that the proposed blocker bugs related to this feature should be rejected en masse, and suggested that the separation between the feature and release validation processes should be made more explicit. He clarified this idea in a subsequent message. The idea met with the approval of James and Jóhann Guðmundsson, so Adam proposed it to FESCo (as the stewards of the feature process) via the development mailing list.

Shortening blocker bug review meetings
Tim Flink kicked off an effort to reduce the length of blocker bug review meetings with several ideas. Adam Williamson chipped in with some comments. At the blocker bug review meeting of 2011-07-15, those present at the meeting discussed Tim's ideas, and came away with a plan of following up on the idea of trying to provide more information in the bug reports outside of meetings in a more informal way than Tim had produced.

QA group meeting SOP
James Laska posted a draft SOP (standard operating procedure) for running the QA group meetings. Gerard Braad suggested it could be applied more generally. Bruno Wolff, Gerard and James elaborated this into a plan to provide a general meeting SOP and customized, group-specific versions using Wiki templates. Matthias Clasen thought the idea of an SOP for one of 'the most basic things' was unnecessary, but James disagreed , and Bruno and John Dulaney said they had found themselves hosting the group meetings in the past, and would have found such a guide valuable.

AutoQA
Kamil Paral continued to work on the SOP for AutoQA releases with input from Tim Flink and James Laska.

The group also continued to work on planning for AutoQA 0.6. They held an IRC planning meeting on 2011-07-14, and Tim sent the minutes to the list.

Tim suggested having a custom 404 page for the AutoQA results site, containing information likely to be useful to people hitting missing pages, which are likely to be old logs which are no longer retained.

Tim was also working on improving automated self-testing of AutoQA, and proposed identifying situations that would make for good functional regression tests and creating mockups of AutoQA's external dependencies (other systems without which it is difficult to run or test AutoQA correctly).

Pausing only for a coffee and a handful of amphetamines, Tim continued with a demo of AutoQA documentation converted to use the Sphinx system. Kamil Paral, Josef Skladanka and John Dulaney provided feedback and suggestions. A side thread provided a venue for a discussion on a more general level of the correct approach to documentation.

James Laska announced the availability of AutoQA 0.5.1 packages in the testing repository

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce for the period June 8- June 15, 2011.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

 * libpng-1.2.46-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062768.html
 * thunderbird-3.1.11-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062738.html
 * mingw32-libpng-1.4.3-3.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062734.html
 * drupal7-7.4-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062722.html
 * phpMyAdmin-3.4.3.1-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062721.html
 * krb5-appl-1.0.1-7.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062681.html

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

 * mingw32-libpng-1.4.3-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062720.html
 * phpMyAdmin-3.4.3.1-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062719.html
 * drupal7-7.4-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062714.html
 * krb5-appl-1.0.1-4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-July/062699.html