FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcement News

Fedora Board IRC Meeting 1800 UTC 2010-07-02

Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, announced:

"The Board is holding a public IRC meeting on Friday, July 2, 2010 at 1800 UTC on IRC Freenode. For this meeting, the public is invited to do the following:

• Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.

• Join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post

 questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

This meeting will last approximately 60 minutes. The Board has reserved some time at the top of the hour to cover agenda items as appropriate. Following that we'll take questions from the community.

The moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the #fedora-board-meeting channel. We'll limit time per voice as needed to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard. We look forwardto seeing you at the meeting!"

Fedora Development News

Outage: PHX2 outage - 2010-07-05 01:00 UTC

Mike McGrath announced:

"There is an ongoing outage at this time in PHX2. The exact start time is not yet known and the ETA to be fixed is not yet known.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run:

date -d '2010-07-05 01:00'

Reason for outage:

Several people are experiencing issues connecting to various Fedora services (see below). The cause for these issues seems to be network related and it is impacting different people differently. Some see packet loss, other see complete connectivity loss and other still aren't having any issues at all.

Some services listed as unaffected would have been impacted previously to this announcement but as we became aware of the issue have made some changes to bring those services back online. Those services include bodhi, the account system, pkgdb, main website/wiki, community and mirrormanager.

Affected Services:

Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/ Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/ CVS / Source Control DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org Email system

Unaffected Services:

Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/ Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/ BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/ Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/ Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/ Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/ Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/ Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/ Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/ Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/ Smolt - http://smolts.org/ Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/ Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/ Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Ticket Link

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage."

Fedora 14 Feature Submission Deadline is One Week Away (2010-07-13)

John Poelstra reminded the community of the upcoming Fedora 14 feature submission deadline:

"This email serves as the last reminder for the Fedora 14 Feature Submission Deadline--Tuesday, July 13, 2010. After this date newly submitted features will be targeted for Fedora 15 unless an exception is granted by FESCo.

Accepted Fedora 14 features so far

If you are a current feature page owner, thank you for submitting your feature for Fedora 14 and contributing to the next release of Fedora. If you haven't updated your feature page in the last month it would be a great help to every one if you would do so now.

As we start to reach deadlines and test releases for Fedora 14, more and more people will query the feature pages. We'd love to know that what they find is current and correct.

Thank you, John

More information:

  Fedora 14 Schedule

  Fedora Feature Process

Licensing Guidelines Update - Please Read

Tom "spot" Callaway announced a revised Red Hat licensing guidelines:

"Hello Fedora!

Please take a moment and read this email. There's cake in it for you.

Upon the advice of Red Hat Legal, we have slightly amended the Fedora Licensing Guidelines. The following section has been added:

 Subpackage Licensing

 If a subpackage is dependent (either implicitly or explicitly) upon a
 base package (where a base package is defined as a resulting binary
 package from the same source RPM which contains the appropriate
 license texts as %doc), it is not necessary for that subpackage to
 also include those license texts as %doc.

 However, if a subpackage is independent of any base package (it does
 not require it, either implicitly or explicitly), it must include
 copies of any license texts (as present in the source) which are
 applicable to the files contained within the subpackage.

Basically, what this means is this: If you maintain a package, and that package generates subpackages, then each subpackage must either include a copy of the appropriate licensing texts (as available in the source), or it must Require (either implicitly or explicitly) another subpackage which does include the appropriate licensing texts.

Unfortunately, there is no good way for us to determine which packages are out of compliance with this new guideline and will need to be fixed. (If http://rpm.org/ticket/116 was ever implemented, it would be possible...) However, we can identify packages which are likely candidates to be affected by this change. Thanks to Seth Vidal, I was able to generate a list of packages and subpackages, sorted by maintainer. The list was generated by querying rawhide for a list of source packages where:

* At least one subpackage was generated that did not have an exact name match to the source package name AND

* That subpackage did not depend on any other source packages.

Maintainers should look at the bottom of this email for the list.

FAQ

Q. Why are we doing this? A. The intent is to ensure that the appropriate license texts (as available in the source) are installed on the running system for all binary packages.

Q. Should I add explicit Requires: to another subpackage for the sole reason of complying with this new guideline? A. No. You should not add Requires simply for this licensing requirement. Instead, you should include duplicate copies of the relevant license texts (as available in the source).

Q. I thought duplicating files in a spec was forbidden? A. This is a permitted exception to that.

Q. You keep saying "as available in the source", what does that mean? A. It means you do not need to manually add license texts if they are not included by the upstream in the source tarball. However, if they are missing, you should ask upstream to add them.

Q. My package generates a -docs (or -javadocs) subpackage, which doesn't depend on any of the other subpackages, but the docs are under a different license from the code in the other subpackage(s), what should I do? A. You should make sure that the -docs/-javadocs subpackage has the correct License: tag, matching the files included, and be sure that the appropriate license texts are included as %doc in the -docs/-javadocs.

Q. My package generates a foo and foo-libs package. foo has the license files, and foo depends on foo-libs, but foo-libs doesn't have any license files in it. What should I do? A. You have two options here. You can either move the license texts from foo to foo-libs or duplicate the license texts in both packages. Moving the license texts is an acceptable option in this case because it ensures that if foo-libs is installed, the license texts are present, and if foo is installed, it will pull in foo-libs, thus, the license texts are present.

Q. What is the capital of the Republic of Ghana? A. Accra.

Q. What happens if I don't do this? A. Well, eventually, I'll go through and make the change myself. You will also suffer a horrible horrible curse.

Q. Do I need to make this change in stable branches? A. No, but you can if you want to. Rawhide is the only place that is a MUST fix.

Q. Do I need to push an update for this change? A. No, please don't. If you're already working on an update for other reasons and you want to do this (say, to keep the spec in sync with rawhide), you can.

Q. Do I need to build (not just commit) this change in rawhide? A. Please do. Don't forget to bump the release and add a changelog entry.

Q. Why can't we just have a "fedora-licenses" package which has copies of all the licenses in Fedora and just always install it? A. Maintaining that package would be a huge pain. We have a LOT of licenses in Fedora and they change all the time, often without notice. However, if you'd like to write some code to help us minimize duplicate license files on the filesystem with a "common-licenses" package, then you should look at<re>http://rpm.org/ticket/116</ref>. Have I mentioned that I'd like that functionality added to rpm?

Q. Why don't you add that functionality to rpm? A. Everytime I look at the rpm source code, blood starts dripping from my eyes, and it scares my newborn son, Jimmy. It also makes it hard to see the code.

Q. Some of the packages on your list don't need any changes to meet this guideline, what should I do? A. I'm sure there are some false positives here. Heck, _most_ of my packages which were flagged by this script did not need any changes, but some of them did. The only way to be sure was to have an informed human check. Just let me know that you checked them and they're okay. Please do this by sending me email, either by replying to this email on the list or emailing me directly. Telling me via IRC/AIM/Twitter/Facebook/Identi.ca/LinkedIn/MySpace/ICQ/CarrierPigeon just means I will forget about it.

Q. Hey, one of my packages didn't end up on your list, but it needed to be fixed to meet this guideline, why wasn't it on the list? A. There are plenty of other situations that we couldn't account for where a package would need to be changed to meet this guideline. If you think about it for a while, I'm sure you can come up with some. The case that Seth scripted was simply the most common one I could think of.

Q. I fixed my packages! Now what? A. Please email me (either in reply to this email on the mailing list, or in private) and let me know which packages you fixed.

Q. What about the packages owned by "orphan"? A. Well, it sure would be nice if a provenpackager could check these packages and fix them as appropriate, then let me know (via email). Thats the sort of thing that makes me feel like buying you a drink the next time our paths cross. But hey, if no one does it, I'll get to it eventually.

Q. What about new packages? A. All packages from this moment onward must meet this requirement. New packages, old packages, red packages, blue packages.

Q. I have another question which you did not answer here? A. Ask me, I'll do my best to answer.

Q. I'm confused by all of this? A. Sorry. Let me know what you don't understand and I'll try to make it clearer.

Q. Why are you always making me do things? A. Because I can! No, really, this is one of those "things we should have been doing all along", so we need to just bite the bullet and get it done.

Q. Hey you promised me cake, I read all this way! Where is my cake? A.

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What? You thought the cake was a lie?

Okay. Here's the list of packages that I think might be affected by this. Reminder: You need to check these packages and fix any which need fixing, then email me and let me know which ones you checked/fixed. Thanks!

Ed.: please see the original posting for the list of packages, as it is quite long.

~spot"

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