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==== Taking Advantage of Upstart ==== | ==== Taking Advantage of Upstart ==== | ||
Upstart was introduced in Fedora 9 and other distributions in Sys V compatibility mode as a means of transitioning into a stage where Fedora can take advantage of it's features better. Now we have reached that stage | Upstart was introduced in Fedora 9 (and other distributions) in Sys V compatibility mode as a means of transitioning into a stage where Fedora can take advantage of it's features better. Now we have reached that stage, Fedora is taking the initial steps to spearhead some changes in a core part of it's distribution. Bill Nottingham, one of the maintainers of the init system in Fedora posted a mail explaining his ideas on what could be done followed by a long discussion | ||
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg01888.html | https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg01888.html | ||
Revision as of 14:51, 1 June 2008
Developments
In this section, we cover the problems/solutions, people/personalities, and ups/downs of the endless discussions on Fedora Developments.
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Contributing Writer: Rahul Sundaram
Heading for Fedora 10
Speeding right past a pretty successful Fedora 9 release, a number of interesting developments for Fedora 10 are being discussed.
Glitch Free PulseAudio
Lennart Poettering, our resident PulseAudio maintainer and primary upstream developer has posted a detailed explanation of his plans in his blog at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html. Following that, he initiated a heads-up in Fedora development list about pushing this change to rawhide. Note that glitch free doesn't mean bug free especially in rawhide and feedback from testers is solicited
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg01244.html
Augeas Configuration Mechanism
Configuration files are under widely different formats among various upstream projects and writing robust parsers in a easy to use method for higher level tools has been a ongoing problem. We all have our own horror stories about some management utility overwriting user comments or worse configurations without even a backup. To address this and related issues, Augeas project has initiated by Red Hat. Harald Hoyer who was recently appointed as a Fedora Project Board member posted a mail introducing this tool and provided some interesting examples on the tool in action.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg00348.html
Taking Advantage of Upstart
Upstart was introduced in Fedora 9 (and other distributions) in Sys V compatibility mode as a means of transitioning into a stage where Fedora can take advantage of it's features better. Now we have reached that stage, Fedora is taking the initial steps to spearhead some changes in a core part of it's distribution. Bill Nottingham, one of the maintainers of the init system in Fedora posted a mail explaining his ideas on what could be done followed by a long discussion
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg01888.html
Live CD creator in SELinux enforcing mode
One of the long standing complicated issue to resolve is the difficulty of enforcing SELinux policies in a chroot. While this can affect a number of similar areas that uses chroot to do it's job, the current focus is the ability to run livecd-creator in in SELinux enforcing mode to create a live image with SELinux labels correctly set. While we can do this now by running in permissive mode, that is not a optimal solution. This was discussed within the Fedora Board which made a call to action. Eric Paris, one of the SELinux developers at Red Hat responded to this and has been deligently working on a solution for the past couple of weeks. He finally made a initial stab at getting this fixed and explained what needs to be done at
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-selinux-list/2008-May/msg00169.html
While there are still some issues to address, we are far closer to a solution now than we have ever been.
Printing Management
Tim Waugh, the master of CUPS and printing management in Fedora has posted in his blog at http://cyberelk.net/tim/2008/05/29/version-100/ about changes in system-config-printer as it reaches the mystical 1.0 milestone. As he has explained, the main focus has been improving the way the application looks and behaves.
OpenJDK and Fedora 10
While Fedora 9 already includes OpenJDK by default, packaging can still be improved a lot. Thomas Fitzsimmons, Java expert and initiator of IcedTea project has explained the scheduled improvements of OpenJDK for Fedora 10.
Plymouth, singing the death of RHGB
Red Hat Graphical Bootloader aka RHGB has been lingering with us for quite a while now. There has been a number of core improvements in Fedora 9 including a preview kernel mode setting (http://airlied.livejournal.com/58778.html. Explanation by Keith Packard at http://keithp.com/blogs/kernel-mode-drivers/) and rewrite of GDM which paves the way for a better method.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg00954.html
Plymouth (http://freedesktop.org/software/plymouth/), a freedesktop.org has been announced by Ray Strode at Red Hat with the intention of replacing RHGB which in true Fedora fashion can be adopted by other distributions too. Plymouth is already in rawhide now though not activated yet.
Better Webcam Support
Fedora has a long standing upstream policy (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream) which means not stuffing up the kernel with third party drivers that aren't getting merged in the Linux kernel. One of the areas affected in webcam support. Hans de Goede, a very active Fedora volunteer has been working on merging the gpsca driver which will vastly improve the amount of webcams Fedora supports out of the box. He has posted a feature specification to do this and related things.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-May/msg02011.html
Fedora: Prowling In The Night
Fedora Nightlife has been announced by Bryan Che, product manager of Red Hat MRG product which provides real time and grid computing capabilities. Fedora Nightlife is a community grid computing project that takes advantage of idle CPU cycles donated by the Fedora community to provide social benefits to the world. A ambitious project with hopes of more than a million nodes, this would be a interesting effort to keep a eye on
http://bryanche.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-fedora-nightlife.html
As Bryan Che explains, Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/) created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin repository in an open manner.