FWN/Issue234

Fedora Weekly News Issue 234

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 234 for the week ending July 14, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue starts with announcements from the Fedora Project, including several development announcements and word of another Fedora community gaming session this weekend! In Marketing news, some discussion on the OLPC software strategy, work on finding a new name for Fedora Buzz, and MeeGo Community Metrics. In Fedora In The News, details on some recent Fedora podcasts of interviews with Fedora contributors, and a couple articles from the past week from the trade press. In news from our QA Team, an update on the Proven Testers work that they have been working on the past few weeks, a guide to creating music with Fedora, and a plan to expand desktop validation testing during the Fedora 14 cycle. The Artwork Team brings us news on the Fedora 14 artwork efforts, testing the new Fedora branding Fonts recently developed, and a mockup for the new local communities landing page. Our issue wraps up with security advisories released over the past week. Read on!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Development News

Outage: Koji upgrade/migration - 2010-07-09 22:00 UTC

Dennis Gilmore announced:

"There will be an outage starting at 2010-07-09 22:00 UTC, which will last approximately 48 hours.

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

date -d '2010-07-09 22:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

Migrating the underling storage used by koji. as well as upgrading to koji 1.4.0

Affected Services:

Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/

Unaffected Services:

BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/ Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/ CVS / Source Control DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ Email system Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/ Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/ 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."

REMINDER: Test machine resources for package maintainers

Kevin Fenzi reminded the community of the availability of test machine resources for package maintainers:

"Greetings.

I'd like to remind package maintainers that there are some test machine resources they can use to help them in maintaining Fedora packages.

See for more information and FAQ.

Recent changes include:

- I have added a RHEL6b2 test machine. This may help EPEL-6 maintainers check for packages or test/debug their packages.

- EOL Fedora release test machines have been taken down, but I still have the disk images, etc. If anyone needs some information about a

 F9, F10, F11 machine, contact me and I will try and bring up the instance for you to use on a temporary basis. 

Please see the above page or contact me directly for any more information.

Happy maintaining!

kevin"

Fedora 14 Feature Submission deadline is tomorrow (2010-07-13)

John Poelstra reminded the community of the July 13 deadline for features for Fedora 14:

"The Fedora 14 Feature Submission Deadline is TOMORROW. After tomorrow, newly submitted features will be targeted for Fedora 15 unless an exception is granted by FESCo.

Accepted Fedora 14 features so far.

Thank you, John

More information:

  Fedora 14 Schedule: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/Schedule

  Fedora Feature Process: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy

Meeting logs enhancement

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Greetings.

Thanks to some scripting work from Mike Mcgrath, there's a enhancement to our meeting logs site available:

You can now go to and see a per directory listing of meetings grouped by their meeting name. This would allow you for instance to see all the fesco meeting logs and browse them at your leisure, without having to find the right dates for meeting by going to:

It's important that people running IRC meetings use the '#meetingname' command to name their meeting, and always keep the same name there so the logs appear under the same team name moving forward.

Hopefully this helps people find and review logs of our meetings.

kevin"

Upcoming Bugzilla Changes: Rawhide Rebase

Jeff Raber announced:

"Greetings,

I hope everyone is well. This e-mail is intended to inform you about the upcoming bugzilla changes happening around July 27, 2010 (Rawhide bug rebase) and what you need to do, if anything.

We will be automatically changing the version for most rawhide bugs to Fedora 14. This will result in regular bugs reported against rawhide during the Fedora 14 development cycle being changed to version ‘14' instead of their current assignment, ‘rawhide’. This is to align with the branching of Fedora 14 from rawhide and to more accurately tell where in the lineage of releases the bug was last reported.

Note that this procedure does not apply to bugs that are open for the ‘Package Review’ component or bugs that have the FutureFeature or Tracking keywords set. They will stay open as rawhide bugs indefinitely.

If you do not want your bugs changed to version ‘14‘, add the FutureFeature keyword. If you need help changing a large amount of bugs manually, we’d be glad to help. Stop by #fedora-bugzappers on irc.freenode.net and we’ll gladly help you.

More about these processes is here

Jeff Raber

Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team"

Fedora User Announcements

Community gaming Saturday - Session 6 - Wesnoth

Bruno Wolff III announced:

"There will be another Fedora Community Gaming session this weekend. We will be playing Wesnoth which is a turn based fantasy strategy game.

We will be starting at: UTC: 1700 Saturday July 17, 2010 EDT: 1pm Saturday July 17, 2010

We need people on time for this one as adding people late is difficult.

We'll meet up in #fedora-games. We'll use the Wesnoth lobby to set up the game once we see whose playing. Fedora Talk will be available (x2010) for people that want to try it.

It's not that hard to play for new players.

We'll either play team vs team or team vs AI depending on what people want to do. We'll play on a small map so we can finish in less than 2 hours. (I'll move faster this time, I promise.)

We will be using the 1.8 version. People running F12 well need to install a scratch build or perhaps run an F13 live games image for the session.

A bit more information is at

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 (June 2010 - August 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.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-07-07 to 2010-07-13.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

OLPC Software Strategy

Peter shared a message about OLPC software strategy which confirm ongoing collaboration, specially deploying fedora on a secondary architecture.

A New Name for Fedora Buzz

Luke Slater started brain storming about a new name for Fedora Fuzz. This will be a way to feedback and monitor social networks. Robin Bergeron proposed Hive. Jef van Schendel liked things related to earthquakes and climate. On his side Stephen John Smoogen liked things related with coffee. There was more ideas posted on the wiki.

Carl Gaudreault took the buzz idea one step forward, looking to what kind of information we will like to gather for Fedora.

MeeGo Community Metrics

Mel Chua shared a link to MeeGo community metrics. A good text to look at for think about how we will like to expand our own metrics.

Marketing Meeting Minutes 2010-07-13

Sweet MMM (Marketing Meeting Minutes) from July 13th are as usual available to public. There is a review of marketing weekly meeting schedule. You can view the details on Mel Chua's mail

Fedora In the News

In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Continuing from the recent announcement of new Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith, this past week saw one more story in the trade press on this. from PC World.

This Week In Fedora Podcasts (Frostbite Media)

Neville A. Cross forwarded a brief posting about the latest interview with him on This Week in Fedora.

Previous podcasts include interviews with Fedora Community Gardener, Karsten Wade, Fedora Design Team lead Máirín Duffy and past Fedora Project Leader, Paul W. Frields.

This and previous interview podcasts are available

10 things that will make you want to use Fedora again (TechRepublic)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting overviewing "top ten" reasons why users should give Fedora 13 a try.

"I will confess that I jumped off the Fedora Linux boat somewhere around Fedora 9. It just seemed the distribution that served as a testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was too much work to get stable and too prone to falling to pieces. That was then; this is now. Fedora 13 was just released, and I am here to tell you it’s a completely different ball game. Fedora 13 is solid… rock solid. So much so, it has made me a believer in the Hat once again. Here are some of the reasons I think you too will find Fedora 13 ready for your service now."

The full post is available.

Open source alternative for Active Directory (ZDNet UK)

Jonathan Nalley forwarded a brief posting about ZDNet UK's mention of the 389 Directory server in Fedora:

"the open source community responded with a product that is full featured, and very powerful. It's currently called the "389 Directory Server", and is developed as part of the Fedora Project (Red Hat's free Linux operating system)."

The full post is available.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Proven testers

The proven testers project was well underway, with most of the mentor requests being handled and many group members actively posting feedback. Aaron Farnes proposed a substantial revision to the wiki page which would incorporate information on joining the group (which was a separate page) and on the mentoring process (which was not yet documented), as well as rewriting the testing instructions. John Dulaney liked it, as did James Laska. Adam Williamson thought it was well laid out, but too wordy and too far abstracted to work as a clear set of instructions for prospective proven testers. Later, he posted an alternative draft which made fewer changes from the existing page, adding in information on joining the group and on the mentoring process with minimal disruption to the existing content. Aaron liked it.

Mike Cloaked generally liked Aaron's draft, but raised a question around kernel testing, and whether it was entirely safe for a single proven tester to 'approve' a kernel update when it was unlikely any single tester could come close to comprehensively testing a kernel. Adam thought that generally proven testers should approve updates which do not break critical path functions for them, but that it might make sense to develop a different policy for the kernel. Rick Stevens suggested requiring positive karma for each specific bug fix, but Adam explained that this was impossible under the current Bodhi system.

Adam Miller proposed two alternatives for sponsoring new proven testers - either having the whole group vote on proven tester candidates at weekly meetings, or allowing mentors to sponsor candidates when the mentor believes the candidate is ready. Adam Williamson was firmly in favour of the more liberal option, and with no disagreement, Adam Miller said he would go ahead and update the documentation to reflect this process. James Laska suggested holding the voting process in reserve in case a need to vet candidates more extensively transpired in future.

Musician's guide testing

Christopher Antila wrote to let the group know that the Docs SIG had been working on a guide to creating music with Fedora. He asked for help checking the consistency and language in the guide, and also for testers to try and follow the guide and provide feedback on whether it comprehensively covered the necessary information.

Installation validation test matrix update

In the Trac ticket, Rui He reported that she had made considerable progress on re-designing the installation validation test matrix, including re-organizing the tests into categories and making the matrices for each category collapsible and re-orderable. James Laska thought the changes looked very good.

Desktop validation testing expansion

Adam Williamson announced a plan to expand desktop validation testing during the Fedora 14 cycle to the Xfce, LXDE and KDE desktops, as well as the default GNOME desktop. He explained that, on an experimental basis, the desktop validation test suite would have to be run against each desktop at each release validation test point, and any release criteria-breaking failure in any desktop would need to be fixed before the release could be made. He noted that he had contacted the leaders of the various desktop SIGs, and they were enthusiastic about the idea. John Dulaney asked whether ISOs would be available for each desktop. Adam explained that each desktop can be installed from the DVD image, and that the automated nightly builds could also be used for testing.

AutoQA

At the QA meeting, Will Woods reported that the AutoQA team was working on a helloworld test (a test test), which would exist to check that watchers and hooks - particularly the bodhi watcher and hook - work correctly. This is a prerequisite for the dependency check test, one of the major AutoQA priorities. Josef Skladanka said he had a test instance of the ResultsDB up and running on one of AutoQA's infrastructure machines, and had rewritten the initscripts and rpmlint tests to store their results in the database. He would continue to work on converting other tests. Kamil Paral announced that he had patched autoqa to use autotest labels correctly, which allows us to configure the actual running of tests in several ways - ensuring they are run on particular machine configurations. He pointed to a mailing list post with a more detailed explanation.

Triage metrics

At the Bugzappers weekly meeting of 2010-07-06, Jeff Raber updated his progress with triage metrics. He had been updating the wiki page on his work, and working on a patch to python-bugzilla to allow querying bug history data, which is required for some of the planned metrics. Adam Williamson said he would try to take the metrics Jeff had already implemented and work them into a prototype weekly update email format to send to the list for feedback.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Fedora 14 Artwork

After in the previous week the team decided on the graphic concept to be used for Fedora 14, now is the time to gather feedback and ensure the theme is developed openly and with input from the entire community. For this Kyle Baker created a wiki page to collect it and Máirín Duffy wrote a blog post on the topic. Everyone is invited to comment and spread the word, the deadline for Alpha is 2 weeks away.

Also in Fedora 14 related news, the Design Team is calling for contributions with the supplemental wallpapers where everyone is invited tu submit freely licensed images (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) and the team will make a selection for inclusion in the distro.

Testing the new Fedora Branding Fonts

The Design Team is testing a new selection of branding fonts, Comfortaa as title font instead of MgOpen Modata and Cantarell or Droid Sans as body font, for this the current Bi-Weekly Design Bounty will use those fonts. Also Ryan Lerch and Ian Weller wrote blog posts, informing ans asking for feedback about this trial.

Design for the Local Communities Website

Máirín Duffy posted a mockup for the new local communities landing page "So Sijis converted it to the 960.gs grid we've been looking at using for the upcoming new www.fpo" and Jef van Schendel proposed the use of flags "Maybe flags would be less trouble + take up less space + be clearer." Máirín forwarded the question to the Advisory Board together with Jef's mockup where the general opinion was contrary to such use "Lets avoid the flags, shall we?"

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

• w3m-0.5.2-18.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043956.html
• gv-3.7.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043948.html
• kernel-2.6.33.6-147.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043944.html
• rpm-4.8.1-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043889.html
• bugzilla-3.4.7-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043875.html
• python-mako-0.3.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043867.html
• libgdiplus-2.6.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044050.html
• mono-basic-2.6.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044054.html
• mono-2.6.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044049.html
• xsp-2.6.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044057.html
• mod_mono-2.6.3-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044055.html
• mono-tools-2.6.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044048.html
• gtksourceview-sharp-2.0.12-11.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044052.html
• gnome-sharp-2.24.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044047.html
• qt-4.6.3-8.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044023.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

• gv-3.7.1-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043913.html
• python-mako-0.3.4-1.fc12- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043892.html
• kernel-2.6.32.16-141.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044061.html
• mono-2.4.3.1-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044051.html
• qt-4.6.3-8.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044031.html