FWN/Issue296

Fedora Weekly News : Issue 296

Fedora Project welcomes you to the Fedora Weekly News(FWN): Issue 296.

Fedora Project is the right and first place to explore your freedom, friends and features(idea, development, contribution) indeed. You can join your particular interest at any time; meantime if you interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. FWN welcome readers feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org.

In this August 2012 Issue, Fedora Project news stream covers the changes to the Packaging Guidelines, FUDCon Paris Updates(October 13-15, 2012), Fedora Infrastructure announces about status.fedoraproject.org, new bodhi release in production, build F-18 collection packages for all language translators, and Fedora 18 Alpha to slip by another one week.

The trade press and Fedora Marketing stream covers news of 5 most popular Linux distributions where Fedora has been criticized along with RHEL future, and why Fedora 18 Will Be The Practical Choice For Vanilla Enthusiasts.

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson, Rashadul Islam

Announcements

Fedora Announcements are the place where you can find the major coverage from the Fedora Project including general announcements, development announcements and Fedora Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Breaking News of the Week and Month

[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

• Contributor: [[User:Spot|Tom Callaway]
• Posted Date: Wed Aug 1 19:28:57 UTC 2012

"A new section has been added to the SysV Initscripts section, discussing the proper use of subsys locking. Even though Fedora packages should no longer be using SysV Initscripts as a primary service mechanism, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and EPEL do. Additionally, Red Hat points partners to the Fedora Guidelines when they build for RHEL.

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The review guidelines now reflect the use of sha256sum (instead of md5sum) to confirm upstream source integrity.

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The PHP Packaging guidelines have been updated to include guidance about when it is appropriate to have an explicit Requires on httpd & mod_php, how to handle explicit Requires on PHP extensions, and how to handle a Requires for a minimum PHP version.

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A new section on Macros has been added to the Packaging Guidelines, covering Packaging of Additional RPM Macros.

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A new section on the Documentation= field in systemd unit files (F17+) has been added.

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A short section on the Group tag in Fedora packages has been added. All current versions of Fedora (and their respective RPM versions) treat the Group tag as optional. Packages may include a Group: field for compatibility with EPEL, but are not required to do so.

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The RHEL conditionalization has been removed from the Python3 example spec file, as it is no longer valid.

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These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to Remi Collet, David Malcolm, Vit Ondruch, Lennart Poettering, Michael Scherer, Dave Sullivan, and all of the members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here: "

Enclosure: Here is one late change to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

FUDCon Paris Updates: Subsidy requests opening, hotel reminders

• Contributor: Fedora Project Leader-[[User:Rbergero|Robyn Bergeron]
• Posted Date: Fri Aug 3 17:00:53 UTC 2012

"Greetings! (...or perhaps I should say.... bonjour!)

I'd like to share a few reminders and announcements regarding the upcoming FUDCon in Paris, France, on October 13-15, 2012.

If you are planning to attend FUDCon and need a travel subsidy to do so, the ticketing system is now open for those requests. Requests will be accepted through August 15, 2012. Please note that funding requests without a ticket will not be considered. Preference will be given to attendees from the EMEA region who are actively contributing to Fedora, and have detailed their participation plans for FUDCon in their request.

To place a subsidy request, please follow these steps:

1: Pre-register at - and put an X in the $$$ column 2: Read about the funding request process and place a funding request ticket in the FUDCon-planning ticket tracker here:

Additionally, a few notes regarding the hotel in Paris:

There are other events in Paris during this time period; most notably, our first day of FUDCon will be taking place at the Open World Forum conference, on the day in which the public is encouraged to participate in and learn about open source projects. OWF had nearly 2000 attendees last year. Accordingly, rooms might be in short supply as we approach FUDCon; please, book your hotel as soon as possible, not only for affordability purposes, but also so that you have a bed to sleep in. :)

We currently have a rate of EUR81 per night at the ibis Paris La Vilette Cite des Sciencesfor the nights of the 12th, 13th, and 14th of October. However, this rate will expire at the end of August, and any remaining rooms in our block will expire.

For instructions on booking your hotel, please read the Lodging/Hotel section of the FUDCon: Paris wiki: "

Fedora Infrastructure announces status.fedoraproject.org

• Contributor: Fedora Infrastructure Leader-[[User:Kevin|Kevin Fenzi ]
• Posted Date: Thu Aug 30 20:31:24 UTC 2012

"I'm happy to announce the general availability of our status.fedoraproject.org site.

This site provides an easy way for Fedora contributors and users to check on the status of services provided by Fedora Infrastructure.

The site auto reloads every minute, and also provides a rss feed at .

If you run into a problem or issue that is not reflected at status.fedoraproject.org, please do report it to us in #fedora-admin on irc.freenode.net or via ticket at We update the site status information manually so we need to be aware of the issue in order to keep the site accurate.

As with everything in Fedora Infrastructure, this application is open source. Source is available from: and is released under a GPLv2+ license.

This application is hosted at the link to avoid any issues with outages in our infrastructure affecting status reporting. "

Beats are open!

• Contributor: Fedora Docs Leader-[[User:Bcotton|Ben Cotton]
• Posted Date: Tue Aug 28 15:35:59 UTC 2012

"The Release Notes beats for Fedora 18 are now open:

If you're looking for a way to dip your toes in the water, so to speak, writing a beat is a great way to get started. If you're a regular, don't forget about the checkBeat program:

As a reminder, the wiki drafts of beats are due on 12 September."

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements

• Policy or process changes that affect developers.
• Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
• Tools changes that affect developers.
• Schedule changes
• Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements

• Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
• Discussion
• Anything else not mentioned above

New bodhi release in production

• Contributor: [[User:Lmacken|Luke Macken ]
• Posted Date: Thu Aug 9 21:53:41 UTC 2012

"A new release of Bodhi has just been deployed to production.

Bugs and enhancement requests can be filed here:

Major changes in bodhi 0.9.2

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• fedmsg support! Bodhi now fires off messages for various events that occur. Join #fedora-fedmsg to see it in action. (Ralph Bean)

• Re-organized the links on the front page, and link to the new Update Feedback Guidelines

• The submitter of an update can no longer effect the karma (Till Maas)

• Fix duplicate status change email notifications. (Till Maas)

• Mention age of updates in testing digest mails (Till Maas)

• Support e-mail threading in notification e-mails (Till Maas)

• Add X-Bodhi mail headers (Till Maas)

• Gracefully handle private bugs (Cole Robinson)

• Set the default request for new updates to 'testing' in the web form

• Fix a bug in our critpath policy that occurs when a critical path update to a pre-release reaches the minimum amount of time in testing, but is unable to push to stable.

• Fixed the input box alignment in the login box (Kalpa Welivitigoda)

Full list of changes since 0.8.7

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Kalpa Welivitigoda (1):

     fixed input box alignment issue in login box #579

Luke Macken (25):

     Convert our tags_url to a byte string before passing it to urlgrabber.
     Add a script to detect when older builds become the 'latest' in stable
     Update our test suite to reproduce ticket [ticket:683]
     Fix a bug in our critpath policy ([ticket:683]).
     Set the default request for new updates to 'testing'
     Clean up EOL buildroot overrides in our rmrelease tool (bz#818617)
     Fix a busted unit test (test_push_EPEL_critpath_before_tested)
     Add pkg_resources __requires__ hacks to bodhi tools to mitigate version

conflicts

     Handle the case where a release doesn't have any overrides
     Change our X-Bodhi-Update-Release header to use the short name
     Apply a modified patch from Cole Robinson to gracefully handle private bugs (#639605)
     Update our unit tests to assume submitters cannot alter karma
     Merge branch 'bodhi1-fedmsg' into feature/bodhi1-fedmsg
     Merge branch 'feature/bodhi1-fedmsg' into develop
     Fix a typo in the metrics tool
     Fix a typo in the new mail headers
     Re-organize our links, and add one to the new update feedback guidelines
     Clean up stray buildroot overrides
     Version bump for 0.9.2
     Our build script uses bz2
     Merge branch 'release/0.9.2'

Mathieu Bridon (6):

     Have bodhi-init create all the tables
     masher: Fix the comparison
     masher: Reuse variable
     setup: Fix the Turbogears version requirement
     Don't version control auto-generated files
     setup: Add missing dependencies

Ralph Bean (19):

     Sending messages with fedmsg.
     No longer using fedmsg schema/validation.
     fedmsg.ini -> fedmsg-config.py
     More detail in the update.complete message.
     More concise send_message calls.
     Ignore dev db.
     Merge branch 'master' into bodhi1-fedmsg
     Updates for the latest fedmsg.  Getting tests passing.
     Merge branch 'master' into bodhi1-fedmsg
     Ignore mashing fedora file.
     Fixed what I think is a regression in login template.
     Merge branch 'master' into bodhi1-fedmsg
     Update to test fedmsg config.  Work with both tests and under WSGI.
     Version bump for fedmsg in staging.
     Only send the comment with a comment is added, not the whole update.
     Using a "bodhi" user/group for mod_wsgi.
     fedmsg+ssl changes to bodhi.spec.
     Use modern fedmsg config format.
     Disable message signing for bodhi tests.

Till Maas (8):

     Add X-Bodhi mail headers
     Support e-mail threading in notification e-mails
     Mention age of updates in testing digest mails
     Use format string instead of string concatenation
     Import exceptions from sqlite3
     Remove files used by mercurial
     model.py: Change karma from Submitter to 0
     Fix notification on automatic status change"

Build F-18 collection packages for all language translators

• Contributor: Fedora Infrastructure Leader-[[User:Noriko|Noriko Mizumoto]
• Posted Date: Thu Aug 30 09:17:01 UTC 2012

"Hi Fedora package maintainers

Please build and push your package with latest translation file (e.g. pull from Transifex/Zanata) for L10N QA test BY THIS FRIDAY 2012-08-31. Your packages with latest translation will be composed into test live image on 3-Sep Monday. Then various language translators worldwide will test the image in their own languages. Any issue will be filed as bug. This is only one chance for translators to check and modify Localization quality of your packages by checking UI, and we need your help.

Thank you so much.

noriko Fedora Localization Project"

Fedora 18 Alpha to slip by another one week

• Contributor: [[User:JaroslavReznik|Jaroslav Reznik]
• Posted Date: Thu Aug 30 23:26:35 UTC 2012

"Today at Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip Fedora 18 Alpha release by one week due to remaining open blocker bugs and incomplete test matrices for Alpha . Meeting's full log is at .

As a result, ALL MAJOR MILESTONES, and their dependent tasks, will be pushed out by one week.

The next Go/No-Go meeting is on Thursday Sep 06, same place but different time (19:00 UTC, 3 PM EDT, 21:00 CEST

1. fedora-meeting).

If you have an accepted blocker bug, please try to fix it as soon as possible to help us with Fedora 18 Alpha release!"

Fedora Events

The purpose of Fedora Event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning and press releases.

Upcoming Events (September 2012 - November 2012)

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM)
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Guideline to write Fedora Press Releases

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 Press Releases

Fedora press releases will be found at the link: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_press_archive#Fedora_Press_Releases

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: Jason Brooks

The 5 most popular Linux distributions

"...Fedora clearly has its fans. And, if you work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) development, it's a really wise idea to keep a copy of Fedora on hand so you can see RHEL's future."

The full article is available .

Why Fedora 18 Will Be The Practical Choice For Vanilla Enthusiasts

Arnav Kalra posted :

"Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) and future releases — along with RHEL 7 and future CentOS releases — will be the best way to enjoy a vanilla Gnome 3 experience."

The full article is available .

Fedora 18 Linux Set To Package Spherical Cow Load of Features

"The clock is starting to tick down on the Fedora Linux release with the feature freeze now in place. As such, now is as good a time as any to take a look at some of the new features that are likely to land when Fedora 18 goes live at the end of the year."

The full article is available .

Fedora 18 schedule slips by a week

"At a go/no-go meeting of the Fedora QA Team, the developers decided to postpone the release of the first Fedora 18 alpha by a week. The team unanimously voted to not go forward with the release because of the relatively large number of blocker bugs that are still unresolved."

The full article is available .