FWN/Issue215

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 215 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 215 for the week ending February 28, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This issue kicks off with an announcement last week of one week slippage for Fedora 13 Alpha, as well as a call for Fedora 13 slogan suggestions, which will be finalized on 3/2. In news from the Fedora Planet, a report from the GNOME London UX Hackfest, a summary of the Fedora 13 Talking Points, and the return of Chromium to Fedora 12. In a new beat, "Fedora in the News", a recent article from LinuxPlanet on recent positive changes to Rawhide, Fedora's development version. In Quality Assurance team news, coverage of the recent Test Day on language pack plugin for yum, details on this week's Test Day, detailed coverage of the QA weekly meetings, and an update on Fedora 13 Alpha validation testing and delay. In Translation team news, fixes to Hivex and kf translations submission issues, announcement of an upcoming release of Transifex v 0.8 rc1, and new members for the Fedora Localization Project for Russian, Spanish, Italian, and Bengali! The Art/Design team brings us news of a couple Fedora 13 website banner designs, work on a LiveCD icon, and a call for help with testing the Fedora 13 Alpha backgrounds. This issue finishes off with a quiet week of security patches for Fedora 11, 12 and 13. Enjoy!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for a few past 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: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 13 Alpha Slip by One Week
Jesse Keating announced "Today at the go / no-go meeting we decided to slip the Alpha by one week. This slip is needed to verify blocker bug fixes and validate new builds of software necessary to fix those bugs.  We are confident that the fixes we have are valid, however we do not have enough time to prove them valid.  We will spend the next few days doing that validation.  In the mean time builds will continue to be pushed to updates-testing for 13, and even to 13 stable, however critical path packages might not be pushed unless they are fixing a release blocking issue.  Once we've validated all the fixes we will do more frequent pushes to 13 stable.

At this time we are not adjusting later milestone dates, as with no frozen rawhide we are not taking away any developer time."

Call for F13 release slogan suggestions
Robyn Bergeron announced

"Greetings Friends,

We need a slogan for the F13 release. It will be chosen one week from now, on 3/2. A release slogan is a short call-to-action that fits the artwork theme from Design. (F12's slogan was "Unite.")

If you are interested in suggesting ideas for the release slogan, please take a look at the Release Slogan SOP, and the criteria for selection. The slogan must be:


 * short (1-3 words)
 * a call to action
 * positive

It should reinforce that Fedora helps the user achieve something great. It should also reflect some of ideas and themes found in the release artwork, and, if possible, also touch upon the Four Foundations.

Please put your slogan ideas here

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 3/2 at 20:00 UTC, which is our next Marketing meeting. We'll be discussing submissions there, and then the FPL, Mo Duffy, and the Marketing team lead will take that input and select the final slogan on 3/2, following the marketing meeting. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns -- and let the wiki table know if you have any ideas!"

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 (March 2010 to May 2010)

 * 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.

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
Karsten Wade wrote ways to improve the FOSS legal landscape. "At the close of SCALE 8x I caught a presentation by my colleague Richard Fontana, who was talking on Improving the Open Source Legal System. Richard’s proposal is to consider FLOSS licensing and legal landscape as its own international legal system.  This is instead of how we do it now, which is to try mapping license terms to local law, or ignoring the problems that arise from that." Jon Stanley added comments "on some old news that people may or may not be aware of, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuits 2008 ruling in Jacobsen v. Katzer. Interestingly, the case was recently resolved with a settlement in favor of Jacobsen (the OSS author)."

Máirín Duffy attended the GNOME London UX Hackfest. Topics that Máirín covered include "Painless accessibility tips for GNOME designers and developers", a "GNOME Vision Brainstorm" and usability reports and possible improvements for Empathy and Totem. Bastien Nocera was there too, and shared a discussion about removing preferences from GNOME, replacing them with a "TweakUI" type interface called "GNOME Plumbing".

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been named as one of the "25 Decade Shaping Technologies" by eWEEK.

Mel Chua summarized the Fedora 13 "talking points" that have been chosen. And, "if you know cool things about a talking point that should be mentioned, good resources on it to link to, or otherwise have something to chip in, please add it to the wiki page; we’ll be cleaning up the final display next week right before the Alpha goes out."

Daniel Walsh explained why there is an audit2allow but not audit2dontaudit tool: There should be. And now there is. "In Fedora 12 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I  added a new flag to audit2allow, -D or --dontaudit.  This option tells audit2allow to generate dontaudit rules rather then allow rules."

Max Spevack presented a talk at FOSDEM 2010 on Open Source Governance (video).

Tom Callaway noted that after a brief absence, Chromium packages are back, but for Fedora 12 only (for now).

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 Splits and Goes Faster (LinuxPlanet)
Kara Schlitz forwarded a summary of the following article posted to LinuxPlanet on 2/23/2010:

"Fedora Splits and Goes Faster By Sean Michael Kerner

The bleeding edge of Red Hat's Fedora Linux community has long been the branch of Fedora code known as Rawhide. New contributions land in Rawhide first, marking the tip of new Linux development for Fedora, though activity there slows down during Fedora release cycles.

As a result of a new move taken by Fedora developers this month, however, Rawhide is evolving to ensure that even when new Fedora releases are coming, the bleeding edge of Linux development won't grind to a halt."

The full post is also available

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's Test Day was on the langpack plugin for yum. The event suffered a little from falling in the same week as the Alpha candidate testing process, but testing did result in the identification of two bugs. Thanks to those who came out to test.

Next week's Test Day will be on the use of SSSD by default. As the page says, "The prime benefit of the System Security Services Daemon is support for offline logins. Above and beyond the traditional pam_ldap or pam_krb5 approaches, the SSSD would remove the need for laptop users of Fedora to maintain a local account, separate from their centrally-managed account, to work offline or disconnected from the central servers." This is a significant feature for many people, so please come out and help us test it! The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2010-03-04 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

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 2010-02-22. The full logs are available. Adam Williamson noted that the privilege escalation policy the group had helped to create had been approved by FESco and is now an official policy.

James Laska noted that the first Alpha release candidate was now available for testing. Jesse Keating mentioned that it had turned out to be quite broken. James pointed out the test result matrix as the best summary of exactly how broken. The group briefly discussed the causes for the regressions from the second test compose, with the X server input switch from HAL to dbus being one of the major causes, and some errors in anaconda changes the other. Kamil Paral pointed out that an SELinux bug was impeding desktop validation testing. After some discussion, the group agreed testing could go ahead with SELinux disabled and negative results recorded, but not positive results (as it was impossible to be sure if the result would also be positive with SELinux enabled). The group also discussed the best approach to testing to try and get all critical issues fixed without having to delay the Alpha release, and agreed to focus on closing as many open bugs as possible even with the known-bad RC1 images and then testing RC2 quickly once it was made available.

Adam Williamson briefly mentioned that he would be putting the topic of Fedora 13 bug procedures up for discussion at the next day's Bugzappers meeting.

The group discussed the question of membership of the QA group in FAS for a while. This has historically been unimportant as it was not used for anything, but in future, positive feedback in Bodhi for critical path packages will be required from members of QA or Release Engineering before the update can be pushed, so the question of group membership becomes important. Adam Miller volunteered to write an initial draft of a policy / procedure on group membership.

Adam Miller recapped his call for help with QA brainstorming for the new security spin. James Laska pointed out that there had recently been a test day for sectool, and suggested those involved with that may be interested in helping.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-02-23. The full log is available. The group discussed Jon Stanley's suggestions. No-one could immediately think of any extra resources the project in general could be providing that would help the Bugzappers' work. The question of sending out updates regarding the project's work became a discussion of the long-pending triage statistics project. Adam Williamson said that Brennan Ashton had been discussing incorporating the project into the Fedora Community system at FUDCon. Edward Kirk said he had blogged in the last couple of weeks about starting work on this. After the meeting, Brennan contacted the group to let them know he was working actively on the Fedora Community system and had been posting about his work on the infrastructure SIG mailing list. He also granted Matej Cepl administrator access to the triage section on fedorahosted.

Adam Williamson introduced the topic of what to do with bugs reported against Rawhide between the Fedora 12 release and the early branch of Fedora 13 under the new 'no frozen Rawhide' system. After some discussion, the group agreed in principle that these bugs should be rebased to Fedora 13, and Adam volunteered to talk to John Poelstra and Dave Lawrence about this.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2010-03-01 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2010-03-02 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 13 Alpha validation testing and delay
It was a busy week for Alpha validation testing for QA and release engineering, with four Alpha release candidate builds being built and (to some extent) tested. As discussed at the meeting, the first release candidate had significant problems rendering it almost unusable. The second fixed some issues but was still had major problems. The third fixed most of the outstanding issues but introduced a regression which broke x86-64 installation, and could also not be installed from the live image. Despite great effort on the part of the release engineering team, It was not possible to build a fourth release candidate in time to be properly tested before the project-wide release readiness meeting, so QA and release engineering had to vote to delay the Alpha release. As announced by Jesse Keating, the Alpha release would be delayed by one week, but the Beta and Final schedules would not be changed. The fourth release candidate build was announced by Rui He on 2010-02-26, and validation testing results looked positive at the time of writing. Andre Robatino announced DeltaISOs for RC2 -> RC3, and RC3 -> RC4.

Dealing with old Target bugs
Christopher Beland asked what should be done with open bugs that were on the Target lists for previous releases. Adam Williamson replied to agree that this was an unsettled question, and pointed out that practically speaking, neither QA nor development teams had paid much attention to the Target lists for several releases. He suggested the system should be either revised or abandoned.

Critical Path Wranglers proposal
Adam Miller presented an outline of a policy for membership of the QA group in FAS (as initially discussed during the weekly meeting). He asked for the group to comment on the proposal and suggest possible refinements and improvements.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Documentation Related to the Release Schedule
John Poelstra has requested the creation of a wiki page, outlining information related to the requirements and consequences in line with the 'Software Translation Deadline' milestone. Currently, John is working to get in place a wiki page(link) for each milestone in the Fedora Schedule.

At present, the upcoming milestone for the Fedora Localization Project is the 'Fedora 13 Final Software Translation Period' scheduled to end on March 23rd 2010.

Hivex and kf Translations Submission Issues Corrected
Daniel Cabrera from the Spanish team notified that libguestfs and hivex modules pointed to the same bug component for translation submissions on translate.fedoraproject.org. This was corrected by Piotr Drag and the page for now points to the correct bug for hivex.

Thomas Canniot from the French team intimated about availability of the long dormant, kf package in translate.fedoraproject.org. This has been moved to the 'Deprecated' section by Piotr.

PulseAudio Translation Submission Disabled
Translations for the PulseAudio modules (PulseAudio, PulseAudio Preferences, PulseAudio Volume Control) can now be submitted via transifex.net. Hence, these modules have now been disabled for submission on translate.fedoraproject.org.

Transifex v 0.8 rc1 Upcoming Release
Dimitris Glezos informed about the upcoming string freeze and release of transifex v.0.8 rc1 and has invited translators to update translations.

Meanwhile, extensive tests are underway by FLP members for multiple file based documentation modules, on the translate.fedoraproject.org staging server running transifex v 0.7.4.

New Members in FLP
Pavel V Tyutin (Russian), Pablo Diale (Spanish) , Andrea La Fauci (Italian) ,  Imtiaz Rahi (Bengali) joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Alpha Banner
Following a reminder from John Poelstra about the upcoming scheduled tasks for the Design Team, Nicu Buculei proposed a first concept for the Fedora 13 Alpha banner for the website and Alexander Smirnov followed with his own.

LiveCD Icon
Onyeibo Oku proposed an icon for the Live media "I like to be reminded that I have a Fedora Media mounted (either in windows or in Fedora). I noticed that fedora media displays a generic icon when mounted so I decided to create something" and after Paul Frields pointed a few mistakes " normally we would not use a 3D version of the Fedora logo like this in the distro itself, since it doesn't match the other visual styling of the desktop" he updated the design.

Testing the Alpha Backgrounds
Paul Frields issued a call for help with testing the Fedora 13 Alpha backgrounds "If you've been testing the Goddard backgrounds, *please* log in at the Bodhi site and leave a comment to let us know if they're working OK for you in the F13 pre-release" and with the help of this call, Martin Sourada reported the package promotion "Many thanks anyone who tested and left a comment in Bodhi. The packages have been tagged into dist-f13 now, so they should make it into Alpha :)"

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * squid-3.1.0.16-7.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035866.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * squid-3.1.0.16-6.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035961.html
 * mingw32-libltdl-1.5.26-20.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035850.html
 * cronie-1.4.3-4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035762.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * httpd-2.2.14-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035949.html
 * mingw32-libltdl-1.5.26-17.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035851.html