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

The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at

Appointment to the Fedora Board

Jared K. Smith announced:

"The Fedora Board consists of five elected seats and four appointed seats. As part of the normal Board succession process, one Board appointment is made before elections and the other is made after the election cycle.

I'm happy to announce that Toshio Kuratomi has accepted the responsibility of serving on the Fedora Board. Toshio is a great contributor to open source in general, and has been actively collaborating with people throughout the Fedora Project for many years. I have no doubt that he'll work tirelessly to increase the level of trust, transparency, communication, and innovation within the Fedora community. I thank Toshio for his willingness to serve, and I hope the whole Fedora community will join me in welcoming him to the Board.

Toshio will fill seat A2 (see the Board History for a list of the seats), which has been held by Colin Walters. I'd also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Colin for the work he's done on behalf of the Fedora Board.

Elections for the two open elected seats on the Board (as well as FAmSCo and FESCo elections) will begin on November 20th at UTC 0001, as shown on the Fedora wiki's Elections page. All community members are encouraged to cast their vote until the elections close at the end of the day on November 28th. After the end of elections, another appointment will be made for the remaining Board seat (seat A2).

-

Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

Fedora Development News

The development 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

Moving /var/run and /var/lock to tmpfs in Rawhide

Lennart Poettering announced:

"Heya!

I hereby want to let everybody know that in the next days I will turn on /var/run and /var/lock on tmpfs on Rawhide/F15. This is in accordance with the following accepted F15 feature

My current tests indicate that we will not run into too much trouble with this and most things should continue to work just fine. However, of course I run only a small subset of packages of the fedora archive on my machine. So here's what might happen and which might need fixing over the next weeks in various packages:

• Not all packages might be able to create their directory in /var/run on start-up. Since SUSE and Ubuntu have already been shipping systems with tmpfs on /var/run and /var/lock for quite a while I expect the number of packages that are incapable of doing this to be very small. If your software nonetheless fails with this issue, then there are two options to fix this: a) patch the program in question, so that it is able to recreate the directories in /var/run, or b) ship a simple drop-in file for /etc/tmpfiles.d/ which recreates these directories on boot. (see below)

• There might be permission problems, since the rpms might have set different perms on the subdirs of /var/run than the software itself might apply when starting up. In this case, a drop-in file in /etc/tmpfiles.d/ might help. (see below)

• The SELinux policy might trigger AVCs and disallow creation of the dirs in question. In this case Dan will be of help of course, so make sure to file a bug. And I guess I don't need to mention this but temporarily falling back to permissive mode is a short-term workaround for this.

• In some cases daemons might want to create more than one file/dir below /var/run which are supposed to be labelled differently. In this case the daemon can either be modified to fix its labels up itself, or a drop-in file in /etc/tmpfiles.d/ might help (see below).

• Many .spec files currently own subdirs of /var/run. These need to be updated to %ghost those dirs only, so that the automatic removal of these files/dirs on boot doesnt cause rpm to complain. The list of packages which own such files/subdir you find on the aforementioned feature page. I will mass-file bugs against these packages later tonight, requesting the %ghosting of these entries. For more information on the %ghost directive in .spec files see this page

Action items:

a) Lennart will mass-file bugs regarding %ghost usage tonight

b) Lennart will switch on /var/run and /var/lock on tmpfs either tomorrow or the day after tomorrow

c) YOU need to edit your .spec file and place a %ghost where appropriate.

d) YOU need to test if you package still works, and if necessary file AVC bugs, add an /etc/tmpfiles.d drop-in file to your program, or patch it so that it is able to recreate these directories beneath /var/run on its own.

On /etc/tmpfiles.d:

This is a new feature of systemd, but which is apparently very much liked by people outside of systemd, so this might actually find adoption even on systems which will not adopt systemd any time soon, since it actually is not specific at all to systemd. By dropping a simple configuration file in /etc/tmpfiles.d you can ensure that volatile files and directories are: a) created, deleted or emptied at boot b) their permissions/ownership fixed c) its directory contents cleaned up in regular intervals (a la tmpwatch) and d) it is properly re-labeled at boot.

As an example, here's how such a file might look like for the screen package (name it /etc/tmpfiles.d/screen.conf):

d /var/run/screens 1777 root root 10d d /var/run/uscreens 0755 root root 10d12h

This encodes that two directories are created under the listed names, with automatic clean up after 10 days resp. 10 days and 12h.

For more details consult the man page

Thank you for your attention!

Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc."

FESCo Election IRC Town Hall (2010-11-18 1500UTC)

Kyle McMartin announced

"Hi folks,

Just announcing that there'll be an IRC town hall with the FESCo election candidates on Thursday, October 18th, at 1500UTC (1000 US/Eastern.)

You can join #fedora-townhall-public to ask questions of the moderators, which will be posed and answered by the candidates in #fedora-townhall.

More information is available here

A summary and the irc log will be posted and linked from the wiki after the discussion, if you're unable to watch it live.

Thanks in advance for your interest,

Kyle

PS: I'd like a volunteer to help me moderate the questions, or at least, help pick out the really good ones for our limited time (1 hr.) If you'd like to help out, please let me know."

Fedora Events

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 (Sept 2010 - November 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.