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

Welcoming New Fedora Program Manager Robyn Bergeron

John Poelstra announced:

"Jared Smith made an announcement in his blog about some upcoming personnel changes in Fedora. I wanted to make a specific announcement to the Fedora lists as well.

Through the end of 2010 and a little bit beyond, I will be working along side Robyn Bergeron to transition my official Fedora responsibilities to her. This will include getting the Fedora 15 team schedules into shape, feature wrangling, bugzilla maintenance, and any number of other things. Robyn and I are committed to making this transition as smooth, complete and timely as we can, and expect the transition to be completed before the Fedora 15 feature submission deadline. Said a different way, if you've already been working with me on something, I'll continue to help you with it. For all new topics, please contact Robyn directly and we will work together as necessary to get them done.

One of the luxuries of my position was keeping tabs on most of the teams in Fedora via their mailing lists. I won't have as much time for this going forward so I'll be scaling back the number of mailing lists I watch and contribute to. If I posted to a list in the past, please don't assume I'll automatically see your message there in the future. Also please don't hesitate to contact me directly if you feel the need to do so.

Fedora, it's been a great ride. We've made great progress in the past three years and I'm thankful you let me be a part of it. Here's to wishing only the best to Robyn in her new role serving the Fedora community!

John

p.s. I'm still looking forward to and rooting for an on time Fedora 15 release. :)"

Thanks Fedora crew - F14 & RHEL6 releases

Tim Burke posted:

"Following on last week's successful F14 launch that we did together. This week, Red Hat launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. This is an exciting event not only for RH-ers but also for our co-contributors in Fedora.

For this reason, I wanted to deliver some personal kudos directly to the Fedora community. Lots of Fedora contributors can see their direct influence in shaping and co-developing of the best Linux in the world. We are proud to be able to work side-by-side with our community members in Fedora. The benefits of open source collaboration converge in Fedora where the confluence of upstream, community and industry come together.

This is the first Fedora -> RHEL major release in which the community members have had full access to all areas of the distro. This level of transparency has resulted is our most feature complete and robust release to date. Not only is RHEL stronger for it, but Fedora and its community directly benefits also. A win-win situation.

Take a look at free video drivers for instance. Since demanding Fedora users have so many variations in hardware, and participated in reporting issues, the drivers improved far faster than would be possible in RHEL. The same applies to more enterprise type features like virtualization. Common tools that apply across many different types of user or workload have come a long way, because of community participation. We're proud to keep working alongside the community to keep making these features stronger.

Thank you, Fedora contributors, users and fans worldwide. You are an awesome team and its great fun to be doing it together.

Tim Burke Vice President, RHEL Engineering"

Extending election nominations until November 13th

Jared K. Smith announced

"As you may be aware, there has been a lot of confusion with regards to the deadlines for election nominations for this election cycle. (In general, this election cycle hasn't been the smoothest, the blame for which falls squarely on my shoulders as the FPL.) FESCo, in particular, had several nominations that happened after the deadline, and has asked the Fedora Board to render a verdict on how to proceed. After careful thought and deliberation, we've decided to extend nominations for all three elections (FESCo, FAmSCo, and the Fedora Board) to November 13th at 23:59 UTC.

Please note that we are not changing any other part of the election schedule. We'll be sticking to the schedule as outlined below:

November 13-19 Town Halls Meetings

November 20-28 Voting Period

Please note that this decision does not intend to set precedent for future elections. Any changes to the scheduling or logistics for future elections will be discussed and decided after this election cycle.

Please help spread the word about the extension of nominations, so that we can try to eliminate any additional confusion. Thanks again for your efforts in Fedora!

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

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

Tom "Spot" Callaway announced:

"Here are the list of recent changes to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

D Packaging Guidelines have been added: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:D

---

The Java Packaging Guidelines have been revised:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Java

Diff:

https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Packaging%3AJava&diff=206526&oldid=154023

---

The Guideline that explains how and when to require base packages has been substantially revised. The old language focused on -devel packages and left other subpackages to the imagination of the reader. The update has more generic advice and uses -devel and -libs packages as examples.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#RequiringBasePackage

---

The perl guidelines have been updated with additional examples and clarifications. Specifically, the Directory ownership, requires and provides, and testing sections have seen wording changes:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Perl

---

A guideline was added explaining the %pretrans scriptlet and requiring that if used it must be written in Lua.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#The_.25pretrans_scriptlet

---

A note was added about additional checks obtained by running rpmlint on installed packages.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Use_rpmlint

---

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

Many thanks to Alexander Kurtakov, Jonathan Mercier, 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

Thanks,

~spot"

"Here are the list of this week's changes to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

The FPC has taken over evaluating exceptions to the Bundled Library Guidelines. A list of standard questions to be answered to give the FPC information on whether to grant exceptions has been added to the Guidelines:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries#Standard_questions

An exception was added to the Guidelines concerning use of %{_sourcedir}, specifically, when there is an available list of supplementary source files, it is permissible to use this list in conjunction with %{sourcedir} to simplify operations on those supplementary source files.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:RPM_Source_Dir"

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.