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 and 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 long 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.