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Revision as of 13:05, 26 January 2009 by Ush (talk | contribs) (add brief, important nfs-utils update)

Developments

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

Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley

NFS Mounts and Caching DNS Nameservers Problem

An update on problems with NFS mounts was posted[1] by Warren Togami. It was decided that nfs-utils will revert to its pre 2009-01-14 behavior.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01242.html

Fedora 11 Alpha Release Activities

There was a flurry of activity related to the Fedora 11 Alpha release (scheduled[1] for 2009-02-03). Denis Leroy inquired[2] on 2009-01-21 what had happened to the freeze, originally scheduled for the previous day, and whether all builds in rawhide were queued until after the freeze. Mamoru Tasaka responded[3] with a link to Jesse Keating's explanation[4] that the freeze is a non-blocking freeze which allows targeted fixes to be made. Tom Lane wanted[5] an "all-clear signal that the alpha tag has been made and we can go back to breaking rawhide ;-)" Jesse created [6] the alpha tag and apologized for slacking on it. He suggested that if many dependencies were going to be broken by Tom's mysql-5.1 push that Tom should ask for a koji tag specifically to land it and build all the deps for it before moving it into rawhide itself.Josh Boyer demonstrated[7] how the Koji command-line can be used to answer queries about what tags are present:

$koji list-tags | grep f11-alpha
$koji list-tag-inheritance f11-alpha

Rahul Sundaram requested[8] that knowledgeable folks would help build the Release Notes[9] for Fedora 11 by adding relevant information to the wiki. After Rahul got the ball rolling, with some information on the use of ext4 as the default filesystem, the experimental provision of the btrfs filesystem and more, Richard W.M. Jones added information on the MinGW windows cross-compiler and Todd Zullinger added information about git-1.6.

The 2009-01-23 Rawhide Report[10] contained some large lists of broken dependencies which were pounced on by the respective developers. As the majority were due to the new MySQL mentioned above Jesse Keating asked[11] why his advice to use a special tag had been ignored. Tom Lane replied that there had been no objections when he mooted the idea a week ago and that a non-standard tag would cause more work for affected developers than the current rebuilds. Jesse re-iterated[12] his request to "[p]lease consider using it in the future if you're going to break such a wide array of packages."

Richard W.M. Jones reported[13] problems using yum on Rawhide. Tom London suggested and Richard W.M. Jones confirmed[14] that reverting to sqlite-3.6.7-1.fc11.x86.64 fixed the problems. It transpired[15] that there was indeed an SQLite bug which was quickly fixed by Panu Matilainen.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/Schedule

[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01275.html

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01276.html

[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg00664.html

[5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01298.html

[6] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01348.html

[7] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01299.html

[8] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01511.html

[9] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Alpha_release_notes

[10] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01510.html

[11] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01510.html

[12] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01533.html

[13] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01464.html

[14] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01485.html

[15] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01483.html

Minimalist Root Login to X ?

Warren Togami suggested[1] "mak[ing] root logins from GDM a stripped down desktop with only a terminal and a menu with only configuration tools [and making the desktop] ugly and with a very obvious note explaining why [users] shouldn't be logged in as root."

"Nodata" was among those who wondered[2] if Warren's use cases "[...] where /home filesystem is full and logins fail, or /home is remote and inaccessible[...]" were anything other than odd edge cases. Jeff Spaleta and Chris Adams expanded[3] upon this line of thought: "[...] if /home is full, can users really not log in? If that is the case, that's broke and should be fixed. The user should be able to log in and remove files."

The impetus for this discussion may have been another thread which asserted that the denial of root login via GDM on Fedora 10 systems made it too difficult to maintain said systems. The thread yielded[4] good examples by Jud Craft and Dave Airlie[5] of arguments that such modifications merely penalized experienced users and failed to enhance security as the users could just login as root on the console anyway. As an aside Benjamin LaHaise brought up the issue that Ctrl+Alt+F2 no longer worked. DanHorák explained[6] that "F2-6 are blocked when you have getty running on vt1 (/etc/event.d/tty1 is the same tty[2-6]) and Xorg server runs on vt1 too (gdm runs with --force-active-vt) Then there are messages like `unable to switch vt' in /var/log/Xorg.log. [Such behavior] requires manual editing of at least /etc/event.d/tty1, it should not happen in default setups." Nicolas Mailhot suggested[7] an imperfect upgrade as another possible cause. A further nugget of information revealed in the thread was as Fedora 10 had implemented hiddenmenu as a default in grub it was best to hold down any key once the BIOS had finished the POST routine. Jesse Keating suggested[8] the shift key as it typically had no bindings either in BIOS or grub. Andrew Haley pointed out[9] that many of the recent changes were breaking established use patterns. Kevin Kofler and Christopher Wickert suggested[10][11] that anyone who wished to revert to the previous status should just edit /etc/pam.d/gdm to comment out

auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet

Back in the later thread which sought to deal with some of the difficulties raised above Tom spot' Callaway suggested: "A Rescue Mode' in GDM which goes to a root session with minimal apps, marked as "Rescue Mode", rather than a root X login (even though it does need root credentials)." Lyos Gemini Norezel preferred[12] that "[...] the root login should use the user selected interface (gnome, kde, xfce, etc)" but Matthew Woehlke emphasized[13] the maintenance benefits of choosing a single Desktop Environment and forcing that as the safe root login.

Variations on this topic have been covered previously in FWN#133[14] and FWN#103[15]

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01387.html

[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01542.html

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01547.html

[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01300.html

[5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01335.html

[6] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01399.html

[7] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01398.html

[8] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01455.html

[9] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01408.html

[10] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01278.html

[11] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01291.html

[12] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01493.html

[13] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01495.html

[14] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue133#Running_As_Root

[15] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue103#Root_Login_And_Display_Managers_In_Rawhide

Fedora Geo Spin for USB Key and LiveCD

Yaakov Nemoy announced[1] a "[...] respin of Fedora with packages for doing OSM[0] and cartography installed out of the box, or included on a LiveCD and/or LiveUSB. For OSM people, the primary advantage is a live usb stick that can be used at mapping parties to save time cono/guring user computers to do mapping. The USB stick can then be brought home, and the user can continue doing mapping there."

[0] Open Street Mapping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01155.html

Draft Guidelines for Approving provenpackagers

Jesse Keating drafted[1] a definition of provenpackager' (see FWN#151[2)]. Alex Lancaster was worried[3] that too many hoops would mean that maintainers such as himself would lose motivation to continue their work.

As a subsidiary concern Alex was worried that there were still some packages not being opened up. KevinKofler assured Alex that he would become a provenpackager' based up his sterling work and Jesse confirmed[4][5] that this redefinition and re-seeding of the `provenpackager' group was in part to address such concerns.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01573.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue151#Security_Exceptions_to_the_Mass_ACL_Opening

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01620.html

[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01629.html

[5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01628.html

Cloning of Bug Reports ?

Jóhann B. Guðmundsson asked[1] for input, in the form of suggestions and votes, as to whether Bug Hunters (which later seemed to mean testers, but not triagers) should file a separate bug entry for each of: past supported release, current release and rawhide or just annotate a bug for one of the former with a note that it was present in the others.

There was general agreement that mailing list votes were ineffective and unwanted.

Kevin Kofler objected[2] to the tack taken by Jóhann which seemed to assume an authority over a decision which would affect not just QA, testing and triage teams but also packagers and maintainers. It appeared[3] that the matter would be elevated to FESCo for a decision but as of going to press this had not happened.

Mark McLoughlin suggested[4] a more flexible policy and warned that "[...] you can be sure you'll have maintainers who haven't read or replied to this thread waking up and getting annoyed that they've 3x bug reports to deal with :-)"

Jesse Keating argued[5] that the multiple bug-entry option was preferable on four heads: 1) that bugs may have different causes in their releases; 2) users of past releases will not be helped by closing bugs on rawhide; 3) bodhi updates are not pushed at the same time; 4) maintainers are the only people with the knowledge to make such a call.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/thread.html#01497

[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01423.html

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01490.html

[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01442.html

[5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01342.html