FWN/Issue178

Fedora Weekly News Issue 178

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 178 for the week ending May 31st, 2009.

We have several changes of note this week. Oisin Feeley, who has been on the editorial team for FWN and writer for the Development section, is leaving FWN for an extended time period due to other commitments. We will miss him and hope to have him back at some time. Adam Williamson, who currently also writes the wonderful QA beat, joins the editorial team at FWN -- welcome Adam!

This week's issue starts off with some poetry on next week's expected Fedora 11 release, and much activity on upcoming Fedora activity days, dev cons, and events. In news from the Fedora Planet, we learn about SELinux sandbox, an overview on virtualization features in F11, several musings on aspects of open source projects/communities, and a feature interview with Fedora Project leader Paul W. Frields. The Quality Assurance beat details the QA weekly meeting leading up to F11 next week, F11 FAQ work, and release candidate testing detail. Development asks whether gNaughty is indeed a Hot Babe, detail on getting graphics support working for the Fedora Live USB with the Chrome9 Vx800 GPU, and suggestions on upgrading to F11 via yum. In Translation news, upcoming F11 website translation details and a new member of the Romanian translation team. This issue is rounded out with an overview of the security advisories for Fedora 9 and 10 this past week. Enjoy this issue and get ready for Fedora 11 a week from tomorrow!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. 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 .

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

Fedora 11 (Leonidas)

This week's Fedora 11 announcements come with apologies to William Butler Yeats.

Somewhere in the build systems of Fedora,
A shape with lion body and the name of a Greek king,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the impatient downloaders.
The schedule slips again; but now I know
That 6 months of stony sleep
Were vexed to release by Jesse Keating,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards June 9th to be born?

Fedora Board

The Fedora Board's next public IRC meeting will be held on Thursday June 4th, at 1700 UTC.

Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation, and join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post questions.

FUDCons and FADs

This section previews upcoming Fedora Users & Developers Conferences, as well as upcoming Fedora Activity Days.

Fedora Activity Days: Malaysia and Rheinfelden

At press time, two Fedora Activity Days were wrapping up, one in Malaysia and one in Germany for more information. See Max Spevack's blog for more information.

Fedora Activity Day: Development Cycle

In North America, Jesse Keating announced an upcoming Fedora Activity Day "for maintainers, QA, and release engineering folks to meet and discuss ongoing issues with the Fedora Development Cycle and to create a proposal on how to fix many of the issues. Note, this is not an event to decide on a solution, it is an event to decide on a proposal, which will then be shared with the whole community for more input and work."

FUDCon Porto Alegre 2009

FUDCon Porto Alegre will take place June 24-27 in Brazil. About 30 people have signed up so far, and we're hopeful for an attendance of over 100.

If you would like more information, please visit the wiki page.

FUDCon Berlin 2009

FUDCon Berlin will be held from June 26-28, and we're got almost 120 people pre-registered for the event.

If you would like more information, please visit the wiki page.

Upcoming Events

Consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!

June 8-10: FAD Fedora Development Cycle in Raleigh, North Carolina.

June 9: Fedora 11 Release Party in Managua, Nicaragua.

June 13: Fedora 11 Release Party in Wageningen, The Netherlands.

June 12-13: VCNSL in Maracay/Aragua, Venezuela.

June 13: Southeast Linuxfest in Clemson, South Carolina.

June 14: Docs FAD @ Southeast Linuxfest in Clemson, South Carolina

June 17-19: Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon.

June 24-27: FUDCon Porto Alegre in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

June 24-27: LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany.

June 26-28: FUDCon Berlin in Berlin, Germany.

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Michael DeHaan responded respond to an article by Matt Asay on cnet (which in turn cited one of Michael's previous posts on the topic of "Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls"):

"Sure — building any sort of collaborative infrastructure is hard. Yet there are those that want to sell open source as that (another bullet point on a slidedeck), and then there are those that believe software is open, that information should be free, everyone can work together with everyone, we are all equals, and that we will keep no secrets."

Daniel Walsh introduced the SELinux Sandbox,a "policy that allows users to build scripts to process untrusted content into some output that they could safely use." James Morris elaborated with further points on the SELinux Sandbox and the problems with Ambient Authority.

Jack Aboutboul interviewed Daniel Berrange, Red Hat Virtualization Team Engineer "about the many key upgrades to virt technology in F11 focusing on areas of usability, performance and security."

Dan Williams showed off the new NetworkManager network selector user interface, to replace the old GtkMenu-based interface.

Susan Lauber continued with Part 2 of a series on improving the Fedora Wiki: "Using Special pages to assist with wiki cleanup."

Gary Benson published an excellent introductory article on the history and reasoning behind Zero and Shark at java.net. Gary also wrote a tutorial on Instrumenting Zero and Shark.

Jeroen van Meeuwen posted an opinion piece on "Why the Open Source Channel Alliance is bad for Free Software". Jeroen also mentioned that "Starting in July...I'll be mentoring a workshop on Office and Infrastructure IT entirely based on Free Software and Open Source technology..."

Martin Sourada chronicled his preferred desktop applications (including background information on why each program is used) to ensure that he can run a FLOSS desktop using Fedora.

Paul W. Frields was interviewed about Fedora and RHEL by Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte at Twit.tv.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, as we are deep in the Fedora 11 final release run-up.

Currently, no Test Day is scheduled for next week - it is too close to the scheduled release of Fedora 11 for any testing to produce results directly in Fedora 11 final release, but if you would like to propose a test day which could result in changes for post-release updates, or an early test day for Fedora 12, please contact the QA team via email or IRC.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-05-27. The full log is available. Adam Williamson reported that he had again not yet remembered to ask the Bugzilla team to add a link to the Fedora bug workflow page.

James Laska reported that he was still not yet ready to send out a Test Day feedback survey to previous participants, but continued to work on it.

John Poelstra reported that he had updated the current Fedora 12 schedule.

Will Woods reported that he had added a test case for upgrading from one Fedora release to the next with an encrypted root partition.

The group discussed how to handle the installation test result matrix wiki page between release candidate revisions. James Laska committed to work out his best solution and send it to the mailing list.

Adam Williamson reported that the cleaning and revising of the Fedora 11 Common Bugs page was complete. James Laska added that he had as promised been adding significant installation issues to the page. Adam said that he had added the X.org issues of which he was aware, and sound-related issues. He noted that François Cami had created an initial draft of a list of ATI-related issues, but had not yet completed it.

Will Woods clarified that his preferred title in relation to autoqa issues is Cap'n Autoqa. The minutes do not relate whether or not there is a parrot.

The group reviewed the current status of Fedora 11 GA (final release) from its perspective. (Note that this meeting took place before the latest delay in the final ship date). They went over the list of currently open release blocker bugs, and agreed it seemed possible to make the final deadline for initial RC generation with all of the bugs at least tentatively resolved. There was detailed discussion of two bugs (502077 and 498553). Action plans were developed for both issues to have them addressed within the one-day deadline the team was at this point working with.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-05-26. The full log is available. John Poelstra reported on progress of the housekeeping changes for Fedora 11's release, and the group agreed that he was doing a fine job and should keep it up.

Adam Williamson reported on the progress of the triage metric system. Significant progress had been made during the week by the author, Brennan Ashton. The system is now fully working on the official Fedora infrastructure hosting server. It is currently working with a test snapshot of data rather than with the live Bugzilla data, but it should already be theoretically capable of working with the live data. The project will now enter a tidying-up and beta testing phase during which it will be brought up to a state where it can be declared fully usable. This should take two weeks or so. The group noted that the list of triagers was based on the FAS 'triagers' group, which leads back to the existing question of how to rationalize the 'fedorabugs' and 'triagers' groups. Brennan will work with Jon Stanley to address this issue.

Adam Williamson also reported on the progress of the proposal to include setting the priority / severity fields as part of triage. As no feedback opposing the Cepl Method had been received on the mailing list, the group agreed that it could now go ahead and adopt this as the official method of setting severity at the triage stage. Adam said he would work with the Bugzilla team to restrict access to the priority and severity fields as had been agreed as part of the proposal, and then adjust all the relevant documentation on the Wiki to put the severity policy into place.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-06-03 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-06-02 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Unified Greasemonkey triage script

Matej Cepl announced that he had released a new revised and unified Greasemonkey script for triagers incorporating all features of all previously released scripts. Edward Kirk thanked him for his work. Steven Parrish noted that GreaseMonkey did not yet work unmodified with the current Firefox 3.5 pre-release as found in Fedora 11. Matej suggested the Nightly Tester Tools extension as an easy way to work around this limitation.

Merging Fedora 11 FAQ into other pages

Christopher Beland revived the idea of merging the Fedora 11 FAQ, maintained by Rahul Sundaram, into other pages, as most of its content could more appropriately be located in various other places, including the Release Notes, Installation Guide, Common Bugs page and other places. Rahul explained that he was happy for any content that could be moved to a more appropriate place to be removed from the FAQ page. The documentation team's Susan Lauber contributed some suggestions on other appropriate places the content could be moved to, and in a later thread she provided some more useful information on adding information to the Release Notes post-freeze.

Release Candidate testing

James Laska announced testing for the first release candidate build for Fedora 11 (and, later, for the second). He asked for installation-related issues to be reported to the Wiki test matrix page. This led indirectly to questions about where to find the release candidate images (their location is buried within the matrix page in order to try and limit demand for the images) and why release candidate images are not more widely promoted and distributed. Jesse Keating explained that the amounts of data were too great, the available storage and bandwidth resources too small, and the timeframes too tight for release candidate images to be meaningfully distributed for public testing. He did emphasize, however, that the community could contribute useful testing through use of the Rawhide repositories and installer images, which currently are synchronized with the release candidate builds.

Developments

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

Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley

Would You Like to Write This Beat ?

Following this issue (FWN#178) I will, with regret, no longer be covering the @fedora-devel list. If you are interested in writing this weekly summary of the deeds and doings on the list then please contact fedora-news-list@redhat.com or Pascal Calarco. A short overview of what you may need to do can be obtained by reading the workflow section of the wiki. The @fedora-news list is also extremely open and helpful. Joining the News Project is quite straightforward.

Is gNaughty a Hot Babe ?

Rahul Sundaram posted the results of a survey conducted, primarily on @fedora-list and on the forums, to discover which non-repository-packaged software Fedora consumers were using.

One interesting point is that CMUCL was revealed to be only available for 32-bit systems. However what got people really excited was Rahul's question about what to do concerning the gNaughty package. Its sole purpose seemed to be downloading pornography. Rahul referenced the hot-babe CPU monitor which enjoyed controversy in Debian packaging circles due to its use of female nudity. Rahul wanted to find out "[...] is this allowed in Fedora?"

Amusingly a good deal of the controversy focused on whether the content was freely redistributable, but a predictable moral angle was raised by Muayyad AlSadi who asked for help in producing a spin which removed content deemed objectionable. Muayyad is a Jordanian developer who has been producing an Arabic-localized Fedora spin named "Ojuba" for some time. Muayyad sought a way to make identifying and tagging packages easier to facilitate this spin. Bill Nottingham was skeptical about the chances of tags keeping meaning unless there was some sort of review board. Equally predictable was the reaction typified by Seth Vidal which resisted any attempt to restrict packages according to standards which had nothing to do with licensing or patent issues. Mathieu Bridon thought that the creation of a wiki-page by Muayyad would allow anyone interested in co-ordinating work on "Inappropriate Content" to just go ahead and do it without dragging in bureaucracy.

Chrome9 Vx800 Graphics Support on LiveUSB

Kristaps Viesalgs asked for help in getting the Fedora Live USB to boot correctly on a machine using a Via Vx800 "Chrome9" GPU. Kristaps had some success with the latest upstream version (from their subversion repository) and asked: "Is there any brutal option how to properly boot X with vesa driver, install Fedora, then make openchrome svn installation? Is Fedora planning to make for VIA graphic chipset autoconfiguration utility?"

Adam Jackson asked for a more specific bug report because the chip should be supported. He preferred not to ship an autoconfiguration utility instead of just getting the driver correct. Similar points were made by Adam Williamson and Xavier Bachelot. The latter asked any interested developers to help out the openchrome project in both the 2D and 3D(Gallium) sides.

Who Wants a Pony?

Kushal Das promised a pony to anyone that would take the trouble to review one of his packages.

Firestarter Retired as Unportable to PolicyKit

Adam Miller asked whether he should just retire the Firestarter package for which he had recently become the maintainer. His query was based on the recent filing of RFEs to integrate Firestarter with PolicyKit. These suggested to Adam that a large amount of work would be needed due to the lack of any upstream activity for four years and the need to grok PolicyKit.

Following confirmation from Rahul Sundaram and Seth Vidal a decision was made by Adam: "I would honestly rather retire the package than do a WONTFIX, if the project as a whole is going the direction of PolicyKit and upstream is dead then I don't want to keep old and busted cruft around the repositories as Fedora continues to look towards the future."

A further suggestion from "Cry" prompted Adam to start filing RFEs against system-config-firewall for any features present in Firestarter but missing in system-config-firewall.

Russian Fedora ?

When Peter Lemenkov asked about the idea of creating a Fedora Foundation outside of the U.S.A. the usual arguments from the past few years were rehashed. Kevin Kofler gave an able summary why this would still present Red Hat with a problem.

An assertion by Alexey Torkhov that there existed a Red Hat-sanctioned "RussianFedora" spin which contained mp3 codecs and other material excluded from the actual Fedora Project repositories drew demands for proof from Rahul Sundaram.

Will FESCo Revisit Kmods ?

A discussion of why VirtualBox will not be a feature due to its code not yet heading upstream and consequently remaining as kmods drew a statement of support from Kevin Kofler for reverting the current banning of kmods should he become a FESCo member. Upon request from Richard W.M. Jones for a dispassionate summary of the reasons to avoid kmods drew a concise response from Seth Vidal.

Adam Williamson and Matt Domsch (Dell's DKMS mastermind) kicked some ideas back and forth over the advantages of akmods versus kmods.

Upgrade from Fedora 10 to Rawhide (Fedora 11)

Following a report from Uwe Kiewel that a

yum upgrade

had spewed all sorts of errors the supported methods for upgrades were re-stated by Adam Williamson: "[I]f you talk to the people most involved in implementing it (Seth) and testing it (Will) they will tell you that doing live upgrades via yum can't really ever be 100% safe for various reasons, but preupgrade can get very close and is useful in all the same cases. So their position is, we support preupgrade, we don't support yum. If yum works, great, if it doesn't, you can bug people to fix whatever it stopping it working, but it's not 'required' by any policy or guideline."

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project.

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora Websites test instance

Ricky Zhou set up a preview test instance with the translations for the Fedora web pages, updated for Fedora 11. At present, the Leonidas image banner is not functional and an alternate text in english is displayed. Some configuration related errors caused the translated versions of the pages in a few languages to not preview correctly. These were later fixed by Ricky. Any updates to the translations automatically show up on the test site within one hour.

New members in FLP

Claudia Pascu joined the Romanian translation team this week.

Security Advisories

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

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

Contributing Writer: David Nalley

Fedora 10 Security Advisories

• kernel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01126.html
• squirrelmail-1.4.19-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01202.html
• wireshark-1.0.8-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01213.html
• jetty-5.1.15-3.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01262.html
• libwmf-0.2.8.4-18.1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01266.html
• php-Smarty-2.6.25-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01274.html
• freetype1-1.4-0.8.pre.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01316.html
• eggdrop-1.6.19-4.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01337.html
• acpid-1.0.6-11.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01342.html
• ntp-4.2.4p7-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01414.html
• opensc-0.11.8-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01420.html
• maniadrive-1.2-13.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01451.html
• php-5.2.9-2.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01452.html

Fedora 9 Security Advisories

• wireshark-1.0.8-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01167.html
• squirrelmail-1.4.19-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01195.html
• jetty-5.1.15-3.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01257.html
• libwmf-0.2.8.4-18.1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01269.html
• kernel-2.6.27.24-78.2.53.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01271.html
• php-Smarty-2.6.25-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01283.html
• eggdrop-1.6.19-4.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01333.html
• acpid-1.0.6-8.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01365.html
• opensc-0.11.8-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01432.html
• ntp-4.2.4p7-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01449.html
• maniadrive-1.2-13.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01465.html
• php-5.2.9-2.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01468.html