FWN/Issue236

Fedora Weekly News Issue 236

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 236 for the week ending July 28, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

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: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcement News

F13 Release Events - Mission completed!

Joerg Simon on Monday, July 26 at 10:26:52 UTC 2010 announced,

"FAmSCo want to thank all of you who held a F13 Release Party!

A special thank you goes out to all of you who posted Event Reports before the DeadLine!

Now it is Dinner-Time ;) pick 5 of your regional Fellows and/or Friends and have a great Evening -

we will pay for your Food and Drinks as a Thank You.

• Bert Desmet
• Pierros Papadeas
• René Jr Purcell
• Truong Anh Tuan
• Nilesh Vaghela
• Rangeen Basu Roy
• David Ramsey
• José López
• Edna Rheiner
• Neville A. Cross

We want to make sure that you have no trouble in getting the money and that you get it fast - so please have a proper receipt, that you can send to me FAS:jsimon"

Fedora Development News

Red Hat Bugzilla 3.6 Upgrade Public Beta

James Laska on Thu Jul 22 11:55:49 UTC 2010 announced,

"I am sending this on behalf of Dave Lawrence and the bugzilla team at Red Hat. Please forward this on to any appropriate lists that were missed.

Greetings,

The Red Hat Bugzilla team is happy to announce the first public beta release of the next version of Red Hat Bugzilla based on the upstream 3.6 code base.

Please test drive.

Over the years Red Hat has made substantial customizations to Bugzilla to fit into the Engineering tool chain. Over time the upstream has incorporated some of these customizations or solved them in different ways. Upgrading reduces our customization footprint (and thus maintenance) while bringing many bug fixes & enhancements.

The main area of focus for our public betas is stability. Functionality that currently works in our 3.4 code base should continue to work as expected in the new 3.6 release. These include various ajax optimizations, needinfo actor support, frontpage.cgi, product browser, several various UI enhancements, and of course the XMLRPC API.

Please feel free to point your various scripts and third party applications that use the XMLRPC API at the test server to make sure they continue to function properly.

There are numerous other changes behind the scenes that we haven't> listed. The goal is to make sure that functionality that people have come to expect in 3.4 is possible in the new system.

There are also numerous new features/fixes that are part of the upstream 3.6 release. For more detailed information on what has changed since the last release, check out the release notes page at .

The database is a recent snapshot of the live database so should be useful for testing to make sure the information is displayed properly and changeable. Also with a full snapshot it is possible to test for any performance related issues. Email has been disabled so that unnecessary spam is not sent out. So feel free to make changes to bugs to verify proper working order.

We are asking for everyone to get involved as much as possible with testing and feedback on the beta releases to help us make this the most robust and stable release possible.

Please file any enhancement requests or bug reports in our current Bugzilla system at . File them under the Bugzilla product and relevant component with the version 3.6. With everyone's help we can make this a great release.

Thanks The Red Hat Bugzilla Team"

Fedora 14 branching and dist-git roll out

Jesse Keating on Sat Jul 24 06:54:53 UTC 2010 announced,"Hey all! It's that time again, we're gearing up to branch for Fedora 14 this coming Tuesday! There is a major twist this time around, we're going to attempt a roll out of dist-git!

Dist-git is our replacement for the CVS system we are currently using. This is a pretty big deal, but we're going to try to make it as smooth as possible. In the next few days I'll be finalizing our git server setup and polishing up the user interface tool you all will be using to interact with the source control and build system.

The conversion will take a couple days, which means our normal short outage for branching will be a bit extended. I wish there was another way, but converting over 9K cvs repos into git repos does take sometime. I really feel that this move is worth the extended outage.

The tool you all will use to interact with git and the buildsystem is called "fedpkg". It comes from the fedora-packager package. There is a version of it available now in all active Fedora and EPEL releases, although it is built to work against our staging environment where we have been testing the setup for a while. This setup is slightly different than the final version, but you can install it and poke around the help system to get a feel for what's going on. Most of the make targets have made it over and are named the same; build, sources, srpm, etc... Many of the targets can take arguments and options. Where the make system used shell variables, fedpkg uses options and arguments. Each target takes a --help argument that will show any available options. Fedpkg does not yet have a man page, that may be coming soon.

We're also going to be working on wiki pages to document the new stuff and archive the old stuff. We're going to need help on this too, so if you want to pitch in, by all means!

As I mentioned above, this is an attempt. We are trying this pretty early, which I wouldn't normally do. However we have a good roll back plan. We are going to keep the CVS server as is, although turned read-only during and after the dist-git rollout. If something fails beyond reasonable repair with the dist-git attempt we will re-enable write access to the CVS server (after we branch it for Fedora 14). Otherwise we will keep it around, in some capacity, as a read-only reference point.

I'm certain we will run into some bumps along the way, and some wrinkles to iron out. I ask that you are patient with us as we work through these, and as we either get updates pushed out of fedpkg or make adjustments to the git repos on the git server. This transition has been a long time coming, and I'm really happy to be the one to make it happen. Keep in mind that this will be the first iteration of our transition, and it will operate mostly the same as dist-cvs did with a few improvements. Later on we will start to explore more interesting advancements such as automatic patch management with exploded sources, linking to upstream source repositories, automatic %changelog generation from git changelogs, or things I haven't even thought about. Most of all, we won't be using CVS any more and that feels really good to me.

If you're curious about how the new system will work or have concerns, or want to help, you can reply to this email thread or find me on IRC as "Oxf13" (that's an o, not a zero). If you run across bugs in fedpkg, you can file them in the fedora-packager hosted trac space or just find me on IRC as well.

Thanks again for your patience, both in waiting so long for us to make this move, and for bearing with us during the transition."

Fedora 14 Feature Freeze is tomorrow (2010-07-27)

John Poelstra on Mon Jul 26 20:59:07 UTC 2010 announced,"A friendly reminder that tomorrow, Tuesday, July 27, 2010, is Feature Freeze for Fedora 14.

Feature Freeze means that all accepted features for Fedora 14 must be *significantly* "feature complete", ready for testing, and have a current status.

If you have a feature that will not be feature complete by tomorrow that is okay. Simply change the wiki page category to Category:FeatureReadyForWrangler (edit text at the very bottom of the page) and include the reason and your plans in the commit comment. I'll see that your feature is targeted for Fedora 15 instead."

f14 boost-1.44.0 upgrade: pushed

Benjamin Kosnik on Tue Jul 27 17:19:25 UTC 2010 announced,"The boost maintainers have updated the boost package to the current release (1.44.0) in rawhide for F14. More info here:

Rebuilds for devel packages that require boost are mandatory, as SONAME was bumped. Help from package maintainers with rebuilding packages with boost dependencies is appreciated."

Outage: Build System - 2010-07-28 07:15 UTC

Jesse Keating on Wed Jul 28 07:05:27 UTC 2010 announced,"There will be an outage starting at 2010-07-28 07:15 UTC, which will last approximately 48 hours.

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

date -d '2010-07-28 07:15 UTC'

Reason for outage

dist-git migration and Fedora 14 branching

Affected Services

Buildsystem - CVS / Source Control

Unaffected Services

All others

Ticket Link

N/A

Contact Information

Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> or Oxf13 on IRC

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

Fedora User Announcements

The list,Fedora User Announcements, provides community assistance, encouragement, and advice for Fedora users.

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.

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.

Fedora 13: what you need to know (techradar.com/Linux Format)

Kara Schlitz forwarded a repost from Linux Format about Fedora 13, from the blog techradar.com:

"Corporate backing and a large supportive community – almost all Linux distributions can boast of at least one half of that.

Fedora, since its inception in late 2003 as Red Hat's community distribution, has nurtured around itself a devoted community. It has achieved this after providing, release after release, an innovative and complete distribution that demands attention and respect.

Being a rather large distribution (the number of DVD distributions now pales in comparison to single CD variants), Fedora 13 has something for just about every variety of Linux user."

The full post is available.

Fedora vs Ubuntu (MyBroadband - South Africa)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting comparing Fedora and Ubuntu project approaches to creating linux distributions:

"The difference between Ubuntu and Fedora lies primarily in their approaches to the end product they produce. Ubuntu's approach is to produce an easy-to-use desktop alternative to Windows. While not a Windows clone it is designed to be used by anyone keen to leave Windows behind. And in this it is remarkably successful.

Fedora, on the other hand, strives to make a desktop operating system that offers the best that the world of free and open source software has at the time. It routinely includes software that many other distributions consider too experimental to use and yet, somehow, manages to team that with stability."

The full post is available.

My Linux: Fedora 13 for Software Developers (University of Auckland New Zealand Linux User Group)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting from a New Zealand LUG about Fedora 13, from the perspective of an engineer:

"This is (hopefully) the first in a series of posts in which members of the LUG will detail their personal Linux set-ups and what they use them for. I’m going to start out by detailing my set-up which is based on Fedora 13. As a Computer Systems Engineer use my system(s) largely for developing software, both for desktop platforms and embedded systems. Therefore this article isn’t really for those new to computers, but it should be of use to those who are tech-savvy on other platforms. I’ll start by giving a quick overview of how I came to be a Fedora user, give a description of Fedora as a distribution and then give an overview of my 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

QA metrics

Kamil Paral asked for feedback on the topic of gathering statistics on QA activities, as part of a Fedora-wide 'Fedora Hall Of Fame' project. He asked what would be the most important tools to monitor and the most important characteristics to gather. Jóhann Guðmundsson pointed out some of the pitfalls that can come with trying to measure and reward voluntary contributions. James Laska pointed out that gathering statistics would be valuable in ways beyond trying to reward contributors. Jóhann clarified that he was only concerned with the 'Hall of Fame' concept and agreed that statistics could be useful in monitoring and improving overall team performance. Kamil thought that in practice the negative effects Jóhann feared would not be so pronounced. Jóhann followed up with some concrete suggestions of areas and numbers that would be interesting.

Localization testing

Following on from last week's coverage of Igor Pires Soares's localization testing discussion, Noriko Mizumoto suggested using the newly open-sourced Nitrate tool for tracking the tests. Igor asked if the tool was yet packaged for Fedora and deployed in Fedora Infrastructure. James Laska reported that it was not, but said he thought it would be a good candidate to be included. Later, Igor announced that he had made an initial set of updates to the template for Fedora 14.

Boot menu release criterion proposal

After a contentious first Fedora 14 blocker bug review meeting, Adam Williamson proposed two alternative ways to cover boot menu functionality in the release criteria. He suggested either having a basic test of essential functionality (the installer eventually boots without manual interaction) at the Alpha stage and a more advanced test (the graphical boot menu appears as intended) at Beta or Final stage, or simply having the more advanced test at Alpha stage. James Laska and Jesse Keating both came down in favour of simply requiring the menu to work correctly at Alpha stage.

Bootloader menu release criterion

Adam Williamson announced that, following the list discussion, he had added the simpler version of the proposed release criterion mentioned in last week's issue to the Fedora 14 Alpha release criteria. Rui He added a validation test to check this.

Lessons learned about update process

Kevin Fenzi announced that he had created a page to track lessons learned from problems in the update process, and asked the group to document any serious issues they had experienced involving updates to stable releases so that FESCo could benefit from the information in planning changes to the update processes and tooling.

Design

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Fedora 14 Alpha Artwork

As scheduled, at the latest weekly IRC meeting the Design Team decided on the "winning" concept for Fedora 14 "We decided to go with Kyle Baker's latest iteration for the alpha". The team is interested in receive feedback as early as possible, so Martin Sourada wrote a blog post pushed to Planet. The package is being built and will land into Rawhide soon.

Design Team Weekly Meeting

Máirín Duffy started a debate about the efficiency of the Design Team weekly IRC meetings "Are you able to make the meetings? Are you going? If not, how come? Is there anything we could change about the meetings to make them easier for you to attend? How can we make the meetings more fun?". Jef van Schendel supported extended talks "I think the idea of having extended discussions after the meetings would be great", Martha Benitez pointed to them as a good learning experience "I find the meetings a good way to learn more about all this and they are certainly an opportunity to get more involved" and Nicu Buculei encouraged more the social part "I think we should do more socializing at those meetings, even if we do less work done."

The Comfortaa Font

Fabian A. Scherschel reopened the talk about introducing Comfortaa as the new secondary font for Fedora branding with a complaint about the shape of one letter "As I mentioned in the meeting yesterday, I love the way Comfortaa looks and I think it goes well with the Fedora logo, the only problem I have with it is the way the capital 'i' looks" and at the latest IRC meeting, after a few weeks of evaluation, the Design Team decided in favor of Comfortaa, the evaluation for the body text is still open "We still need to make a Droid Sans vs. Cantarell decision."

New Join Page

After Michael Beckwith created a new 'Join Page' for the Design Team and Emily Dirsh added a round of improvements from the perspective of a new contributor, the page went live, there is hopping this will make easier for new people to start contributing.

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

• turba-2.3-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044592.html
• mingw32-libpng-1.2.44-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044585.html
• xulrunner-1.9.2.7-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044584.html
• mysql-5.1.48-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044546.html
• libvirt-0.8.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044520.html
• pidgin-2.7.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044518.html
• openttd-1.0.3-0.1.RC1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044516.html
• imp-4.3.7-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044514.html
• horde-3.3.8-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044509.html
• sunbird-1.0-0.26.b2pre.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044488.html
• thunderbird-3.1.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044487.html
• galeon-2.0.7-30.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044454.html
• gnome-python2-extras-2.25.3-20.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044452.html
• perl-Gtk2-MozEmbed-0.08-6.fc13.15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044453.html
• gnome-web-photo-0.9-10.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044451.html
• mozvoikko-1.0-12.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044448.html
• firefox-3.6.7-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044450.html
• xulrunner-1.9.2.7-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044449.html
• bind-9.7.1-2.P2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044445.html
• seamonkey-2.0.6-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044428.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

• mingw32-libpng-1.2.44-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044590.html
• libvirt-0.8.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044579.html
• cups-1.4.4-5.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044567.html
• xulrunner-1.9.1.11-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044566.html
• openttd-1.0.3-0.1.RC1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044565.html
• horde-3.3.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044558.html
• imp-4.3.7-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044543.html
• turba-2.3-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044528.html
• galeon-2.0.7-24.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044483.html
• gnome-python2-extras-2.25.3-19.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044479.html
• perl-Gtk2-MozEmbed-0.08-6.fc12.14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044480.html
• mozvoikko-1.0-11.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044482.html
• gnome-web-photo-0.9-8.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044481.html
• firefox-3.5.11-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044478.html
• xulrunner-1.9.1.11-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044477.html
• seamonkey-2.0.6-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044469.html
• sunbird-1.0-0.23.20090916hg.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044465.html
• thunderbird-3.0.6-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/044464.html