Fedora Weekly News Issue 206

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 206^[1] for the week ending December 13, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue kicks off with news from Ambassadors, including details on Fedora 12 release parties in Greece and Venezuela, and an Amabassadors update from Tunisia. Also a reminder to vote before the end of today in the FAMSco elections. In Quality Assurance news, we have a special double issue for you, including details from the latest weekly meetings, a report on QA activities at FUDCon Toronto last weekend, and early news on Fedora 13 work. In Design news, early details on Goddard theming and looks toward updating the Fedora community website. Security Advisories brings us up to date on the latest security patches for F10 through F12. We hope you enjoy FWN 206!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page^[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements^[1], development announcements^[2] and Events^[3].

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

FEDORA BOARD, FESCO & FAMSCO ELECTIONS

Paul W. Frields announced^[1] that elections for the Fedora Board, FESCo and FAmSCo would be extended one day, now ending at 2009-12-16 UTC 2359.

As a reminder:

All groups have chosen to use the Range Voting method ^[2]

Ballots may be cast on the Fedora Elections System at ^[3]. If this is the first time you've used the voting system, please refer to the Fedora Elections Guide, currently located at ^[4].

Fedora Board Election:

This election, the Fedora Board is electing two candidates and will appoint another two members.

Vacating the seats on the board this election are elected representatives Matt Domsch & Bill Nottingham, and appointed representatives Christoher Aillon and Dimitris Glezos^[5].

The candidates for this election, in alphabetical order are:

Chris Tyler (ctyler)
Colin Walters (walters)
Matt Domsch (mdomsch)
Steven M. Parrish (SMParrish)

To vote, you must have a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Vote Here: ^[6]

Town Hall Logs: ^[7] ^[8]

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee Election:

For this election, FESCo will be electing four candidates to sit on the committee.

Vacating the seats on FESCo this election are Jon Stanley, Dan Horák, Jarod Wilson, and David Woodhouse.

The candidates for this election, in alphabetical order are:

Adam Jackson (ajax)
Christoph Wickert (cwickert)
Justin M. Forbes (jforbes)
Matthew Garrett (mjg59)
Peter Jones (pjones)
Richard June (rjune)
Robert Scheck (rsc)

To vote, you must have a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and be a member of another Fedora group.

Vote Here: ^[9]

Town Hall Logs: ^[10] ^[11]

Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee Election:

This election FAmSCo will be electing all 7 seats on the committee.

These seats were previously held by Max Spevack, Joerg Simon, Francesco Ugolini, Thomas Canniot, Rodrigo Padula, David Nalley and Susmit Shannigrahi.

The candidates for this election, in no particular order are:

David Nalley
Jean-Francois Saucier
Joerg Simon
Luca Foppiano
Maria Gracia Leandro
Max Spevack
Robert Scheck
Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira
Sandro Mathys
Scott Seiersen
Shakthi Kannan
Susmit Shannigrahi

To vote, you must be a member of the ambassadors group in the Fedora Account System.

Vote Here: ^[12]

Townhall Log: ^[13] ^[14]

I'd also like to point out the following from Paul Frields' announcement for the June 2008 Board Election:

"I'd like everyone voting to remember that this isn't a popularity contest, or a reward system. Think about how you'd like to Board to look when you vote, the same way you think about how you'd like any government body to look when you cast votes for their elections. We have a lot of worthy candidates on this list, and you should pick the ones that you feel will best represent you in advancing the Fedora Project.

This is one of numerous ways in which our community makes decisions about the leadership of Fedora. Your vote counts, and I hope you take advantage of it."

This advice is still valid, not just for the Fedora Board election but for all three elections.

Thanks also go to John Rose and other volunteers who have helped with organising and running Town Hall meetings for these elections.”

FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Fedora 10 final updates cutoff: December 11

Josh Boyer reminded^[1] the community on the fedora-devel-announce list that December 11 would be the final day for any remaining Fedora 10 updates:

"Just a friendly reminder that Dec 11 00:00:00 UTC is the cutoff for F10 updates submission. Ideally these would just be the final stable updates, as pushes to updates-testing would basically be stuck there forever.

Please take a few moments to review your pending requests, add any final stable updates you'd like pushed, and clear out any update requests that don't make much sense for a soon to be EOL'd distro."

↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-December/msg00005.html

FEDORA EVENTS

Fedora events are the 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

North America (NA)^[1]
Central & South America (LATAM) ^[2]
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)^[3]
India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)^[4]

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events^[1]

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/PastEvents

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Fedora 12 release party in Athens, Greece

Pierros Papadeas reports that on Saturday, December 12, a Fedora 12 Release party was held in Athens. Many people showed up to learn about Constantine and Fedora Project in general. A presentation on Fedora Project and Fedora 12 was given and afterwards some hands-on testing was done on network sharing, virtualization enhancements, Moblin platform and other hints on support!

There was even a birthday cake to go along with the swag given out, as well as Live-USB sticks available.

Pierros says thanks to my fellow organizers -- Anastasis, Thalia and Pantelis -- and to everyone else who attended.

A report on the event can be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Party_F12_Athens

Photos from the evvent can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.gr/saliyath/Fedora12AthensReleaseParty

Fedora 12 release party in Caracas, Venezuela

Maria Leandro reports that about 30 people attended a Fedora 12 Release Party held in Caracas, Venezuela, on Saturday, December 12.

Guillermo Gomez (gomix) made the official presentation of RPMDEV. Several Live CDs along with stickers and tattoos were given out prior to everyone having lunch.

Maria also reports that the event exceeded several goals. First, they got twice as many people to attend than was expected. Also, some ambassadors who had been inactive came back into the fold.

Future plans in Caracas include having a Fedora hacklab every two months to teach people to be productive using Fedora and encourage them to join the Fedora team.

Special thanks go to Edwind Contreras (Richzendy), who gave an excelent RPM workshop; to Guillermo Gómez (gomix), who brings awesome ideas; to Wilmer Jaramillo (k0k), who is "coming to town" again encouraging new users to be developers like he is; and to Ricardo Fernandez (KOSHrf), who cheers us up all at every moment.

Photos, videos, and a report can be found at the links below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tatadbb/sets/72157622973046968/

http://tatica.blip.tv

http://tatica.org/2009/12/12/fedora-release-party-caracas/

Fedora Ambassadors active in Tunisia

Zied Fakhfakh reports that while Tunisian Fedora ambassadors have been silent for a while, "we are not sleeping."

Zied, Nihed Mbarek and Wael Ammar have started a lobbying strategy around Fedora in the nation's universities by creating local "Fedora Clubs."

Two clubs have already been formed -- one in ISET Charguia: http://www.isetch.rnu.tn (a public university); and one in ESPRIT: http://www.esprit.ens.tn (a private university).

Activities have already taken place at ISET CH, including:

A private mirror: created by Zied;
A Fedora 12 release party, where the following was presented:
- What's new in Fedora 12, by Nihed;
- Virtualization, by Imed Chihi, former Red Hat employee;
- How to contribute to Fedora, by Zied;
- Open source software, by our friend Mohamed Nejib Bejar;
- There was a real celebration, with cake, soda, candy;
Soon we are to migrate computers at the school to Fedora or CentOS, and
The group will start as soon as possible translating and contributing.

FAmSCo election now open: Vote

Among other elected bodies in the Fedora Project, the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo) elections are now open for voting. If you haven't done yet visit https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/ to cast your vote. Voting ends Monday, December 14, at 23:59:59 UTC. Your vote is important and crucial.

Fedora 12 is here

With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team^[1].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, and no Test Day is currently planned for this week. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac^[1].

↑ http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/

Weekly meetings

As the QA beat was unfortunately not present for Fedora Weekly News #205, we will cover two weeks' worth of events below.

A QA group weekly meeting^[1] was held on 2009-11-30. No meeting was held on 2009-12-07 due to many group members being absent at FUDCon or elsewhere. The full log of the 2009-11-30 meeting is available^[2]. Adam Williamson reported that he had started a development mailing list conversation regarding the proposed privilege escalation policy^[3].

James Laska thanked the group for their feedback on John Poelstra's plan to improve the release criteria^[4], and asked for comments on the planned next steps. John said he was planning to work in all the received feedback, send a revised draft of the page to the mailing list for comment, and do the final touches in a hackfest at the upcoming FUDCon. Adam Williamson volunteered to write a proposed paragraph to cover subjective judgment of configuration-dependent problems.

Adam Williamson gave a more detailed update on the privilege escalation policy topic. He said the development mailing list discussion had generated some useful points and potential issues that should be dealt with by any policy, but no clear road forward. With some help from Kevin Fenzi, a plan was made for Adam to escalate the issue for consideration by FESco with reference to the previous discussion, and possibly a proposed policy created with the help of the security team.

James Laska gave an update on the Fedora 12 QA retrospective. He thanked the group for their feedback, and outlined his plans. He intends to organize the feedback into topic groups to try and identify trends, and then discuss what can be improved for the Fedora 13 cycle based on that feedback.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. Kamil had written some patches intended to make test development easier, providing --help and --dry-run parameters for each watcher. He now plans to document these improvements in the wiki once they are accepted. He had also worked on integrating rpmguard into AutoQA. Will had added --local and --dry-run parameters to the test harness so that tests can be run locally by developers. He had fixed various watchers to run tests only once when repositories are changed or builds are ran, even if multiple architectures are changed. He was planning to write some notes on AutoQA for Fedora developers for use at the upcoming FUDCon, and help Kamil with rpmguard integration. James Laska reported that packaging of the israwhidebroken code was now complete, with help from Toshio Kuratomi.

Adam Williamson proposed that Glögg^[5] be adopted as the official QA team drink. Jesse Keating suggested magic hobo gravy^[6] as an alternative. No clear consensus was reached on the issue.

A Bugzappers group weekly meeting^[7] was held on 2009-12-01. No meeting was held on 2009-12-08 due to many members being absent. The full log of the 2009-12-01 meeting is available^[8]. Richard June noted that updating the components and triagers page^[9] had been left with Edward Kirk, who was not present to report on it. Adam Williamson encouraged all group members to make sure they were listed on the page next to the correct components.

Adam Williamson started a discussion on the topic of anaconda triage. He explained that the anaconda team could benefit from having a triage volunteer, as Andy Lindeberg was no longer working on anaconda triage. This would take a significant amount of time and require knowledge of anaconda, but the anaconda team was prepared to help train volunteers. Richard June volunteered to send a mail to the mailing list with details of the requirements, to ask for volunteers.

Adam Williamson took another look at the triage metrics situation. No-one had heard from Brennan Ashton lately, but Adam would try to check in with him at the upcoming FUDCon event. Adam also pointed out the fairly new statistics system within Bugzilla^[10] as a possibility for the group to explore.

Matej Cepl reported that he had completed the agreed plan to add the Triaged keyword to all ASSIGNED bugs in Fedora 10 through 12.

The next QA weekly meeting may be held on 2009-11-07 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, although several group members are at FUDCon during that time and may not be able to attend. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2009-12-08 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

FUDCon Toronto

The QA and BugZappers groups were both well represented at FUDCon Toronto^[1]. James Laska, Will Woods, Adam Williamson, John Poelstra, Steven M. Parrish, Brennan Ashton (comphappy) all attended, and a brand new BugZapper - Patrick Ian - was welcomed during the event. Steven, Will and Adam all gave talks: Steven^[2] on effective bug reporting, Will^[3] on AutoQA, and Adam^[4] on getting involved with QA and BugZappers. Several group members also posted write-ups of the event: John^[5], Steven^[6], and Adam^[7].

BugZappers triaged bugs policy change

Adam Williamson announced^[1] a small modification to the recently-implemented triaged bug policy change. To make searching easier, triagers should now add the Triaged keyword to all Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 bugs when they have been triaged, as well as marking them as ASSIGNED.

↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-November/msg01228.html

Release criteria revision

John Poelstra posted a final request^[1] for feedback on the proposed new release criteria^[2], noting that the pages would be finalized and made active at the upcoming FUDCon Toronto. At FUDCon, a group including John, James Laska, Adam Williamson, Bill Nottingham and Tim Burke revised the pages including all feedback provided from the list, and then made further revisions based on feedback by the anaconda and desktop teams. Adam announced the changes to the list^[3]. Some further changes were then made based on suggestions from A. Mani^[4] and others.

Bugzilla 3.4 public beta

James Laska passed on an announcement^[1] from Red Hat's Bugzilla team that a public beta of Bugzilla 3.4 for the Red Hat Bugzilla instance (which Fedora shares) is now available^[2]. Later, James passed on the announcement for the second beta^[3].

Fedora 13 schedule

John Poelstra provided^[1] a draft schedule of QA tasks for the Fedora 13 release. He later provided an updated schedule^[2] based on discussion at FUDCon Toronto. James Laska requested^[3] an extra pre-alpha acceptance milestone on 2009-01-21.

Fedora 13 Alpha release notes

Rahul Sundaram posted^[1] a preliminary draft of the Fedora 13 Alpha release notes for comment and discussion.

↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-December/msg00138.html

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N

Fedora 13 Schedule Draft Discussion

In response to the Fedora 13 translation schedule proposed last week^[1] by John Poelstra, Noriko Mizumoto put forward a review^[2]^[3] highlighting changes in dates and duration of tasks. Zoltan Hopper suggested the addition of the translation task for Marketing Materials and Press Release^[4].

Additionally, Noriko would also be attending a meeting with the Fedora Documentation team to discuss the Fedora 13 schedule^[5].

FLSCo Election Proposed

After a brief discussion on the mailing list^[1], an election for a new FLSCo is being currently considered, provided a suitable number of candidates volunteer themselves for nomination^[2].

Update About translate.fedoraproject.org Issues

In continuance to the discussion last week about the various issues affecting the normal operations of the current infrastructure of translate.fedoraproject.org^[1], Stickster suggested^[2] the Fedora L10n Infrastructure team to distribute the tasks in the to-do list for upgradation to the new version of Transifex as proposed by Diego. He also called for assistance from the Fedora Documentation, Devel and Infrastructure teams to assist in the upgrade process.

Mentoring of New Members

The co-ordinator of the Simplified Chinese team, Yuan Yijun suggested the introduction of a mentoring process within the Fedora Localization Process, that would help new translators to be made familiar with the work flow and allow them to make prolonged contribution within the project. He cited the mentoring process currently in place for the Fedora Ambassador's group, as a reference^[1].

↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-December/msg00056.html

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team^[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

Goddard Ahead

Luya Tshimbalanga created^[1] the wiki page^[2] to hold the development for the Fedora 13 graphics "Feel free to submit with favorite media (sketchs, illustration, photos collage as a long it complies to Fedora licensing guideline)". Nicu Buculei invited^[3] everyone to contribute "Now is the time for everyone to start posting sketches and concepts" and Máirín Duffy proposed^[4] "I was thinking it might be a good idea to hold a hackfest where we could get together and brainstorm some ideas and get inspired."

Improving the Fedora Community Website

Máirín Duffy posted^[1] some usability observation from the user interaction with the Fedora Community website during the Toronto FUDCon "there was definitely a lot of confusion shown through the tests - and we weren't really 100% happy with it to start" along with a couple of improvement mockups and asked for feedback "On the FUDbus back home I started trying some of her ideas -on the left, the nav bar could slideback and slide out on demand, and I tried making the right navbar look more 'navigation-y' rather than like it is little ads or something not relevant to the content."

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-December/001578.html

Security Advisories

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

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce