FWN/Beats/Developments

Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.

Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley

Would You Like to Write This Beat ?
Following this issue (FWN#178) I will, with regret, no longer be covering the @fedora-devel list. If you are interested in writing this weekly summary of the deeds and doings on the list then please contact fedora-news-list@redhat.com or Pascal Calarco. A short overview of what you may need to do can be obtained by reading the workflow section of the wiki. The @fedora-news list is also extremely open and helpful. Joining the News Project is quite straightforward.

package. Its sole purpose seemed to be downloading pornography. Rahul referenced the  CPU monitor which enjoyed controversy in Debian packaging circles due to its use of female nudity. Rahul wanted to find out "[...] is this allowed in Fedora?"

Amusingly a good deal of the controversy focused on whether the content was freely redistributable, but a predictable moral angle was raised by Muayyad AlSadi who asked for help in producing a spin which removed content deemed objectionable. Muayyad is a Jordanian developer who has been producing an Arabic-localized Fedora spin named "Ojuba" for some time. Muayyad sought a way to make identifying and tagging packages easier to facilitate this spin. Bill Nottingham was skeptical about the chances of tags keeping meaning unless there was some sort of review board. Equally predictable was the reaction typified by Seth Vidal which resisted any attempt to restrict packages according to standards which had nothing to do with licensing or patent issues. Mathieu Bridon thought that the creation of a wiki-page by Muayyad would allow anyone interested in co-ordinating work on "Inappropriate Content" to just go ahead and do it without dragging in bureaucracy.

package for which he had recently become the maintainer. His query was based on the recent filing of RFEs to integrate  with. These suggested to Adam that a large amount of work would be needed due to the lack of any upstream activity for four years and the need to grok.

Following confirmation from Rahul Sundaram and Seth Vidal a decision was made by Adam: "I would honestly rather retire the package than do a WONTFIX, if the project as a whole is going the direction of PolicyKit and upstream is dead then I don't want to keep old and busted cruft around the repositories as Fedora continues to look towards the future." A further suggestion from "Cry" prompted Adam to start filing RFEs against  for any features present in   but missing in. will not be a feature due to its code not yet heading upstream and consequently remaining as  drew a statement of support from Kevin Kofler for reverting the current banning of   should he become a FESCo member. Upon request from Richard W.M. Jones for a dispassionate summary of the reasons to avoid  drew a concise response from Seth Vidal.

Adam Williamson and Matt Domsch (Dell's DKMS mastermind) kicked some ideas back and forth over the advantages of  versus.

Upgrade from Fedora 10 to Rawhide (Fedora 11)
Following a report from Uwe Kiewel that a yum upgrade had spewed all sorts of errors the supported methods for upgrades were re-stated by Adam Williamson: "[I]f you talk to the people most involved in implementing it (Seth) and testing it (Will) they will tell you that doing live upgrades via yum can't really ever be 100% safe for various reasons, but preupgrade can get very close and is useful in all the same cases. So their position is, we support preupgrade, we don't support yum. If yum works, great, if it doesn't, you can bug people to fix whatever it stopping it working, but it's not 'required' by any policy or guideline."