FWN/Issue181

Fedora Weekly News Issue 181

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 181 for the week ending June 21, 2009.

Here are a few highlights from this week's issue. Announcements starts us off with a reminder that Fedora 9 end-of-life is July 10, and an update from the Fonts SIG, including many Fedora 11 items, along with coverage of the Fedora Activity Day recently held. From the Fedora Planet, details on a new Fedora Community Portal that opened to much excitement. The QA beat turns its sights to Fedora 12, with details on schedule, installer and rawhide testing plans. In Fedora Ambassador, news on the SouthEast Linux Fest last week in Clemson, SC. Translation news brings us word of many new members to the localization project, and translation updates for Fedora web for Dutch and Hebrew. The Artwork & Design beat completes the issue with coverage of discussion on Fedora 12 theming.

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 9 (Sulphur)

The end-of-life for Fedora 9 has been set for Friday, July 10.

After this date, no builds will be allowed in Koji, and no further updates will be pushed.

Fonts Special Interest Group

Nicolas Mailhot posted a fantastic status report about all of the recent happenings in the Fonts SIG.

Some of the Fedora 11-related highlights include automatic font installation courtesy of PackageKit, as well as updates to the fonts packaging guidelines, and re-packaging of many fonts as a result.

FUDCons and FADs

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

FUDCon Porto Alegre 2009

FUDCon Porto Alegre will take place June 24-27 in Brazil. About 35 people have signed up so far.

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 150 people pre-registered for the event.

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

If you have not yet acquired your e-ticket, find instructions here.

Fedora Activity Day Fedora Development Cycle 2009

A Fedora Activity Day (FAD) was held June 8-10 at Red Hat's campus in Raleigh, NC to refine the development cycle for the coming year. More detail and discussion logs are available

Upcoming Events

Consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!

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

Planet Fedora

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

Community Portal

The new Fedora Community Portal has been opened! A number of Planet bloggers have posted about this with great excitement. No more paintain!

General

Chitlesh Goorah explained how to use the newly-packaged MinGW cross-compiler suite in Fedora 11, by cross-compiling gerbv for Windows.

Daniel Walsh answered the question "What Happened to setroubleshoot?" in Fedora 11 and provided a preview of some sealert changes planned for Fedora 12. In another post, he added some information about the differences between running a daemon directly versus with an init script, and how that can cause permissions problems with SELinux.

Greg DeKoenigsberg described some of what he has been up to recently, an "attempt to change the way that computer science education works."

James "Ben" Williams wondered what will become of Fedora installation CDs. Robert 'Bob' Jensen also chimed too. For those of interested, see the F12 Feature Proposal.

Peter Hutterer posted Part 3 in the series on XI2 Recipies, this time with code snippets for gathering information about X Input devices.

Jeremy Katz requested that people help test isohybrid a new tool that "lets you take an ISO image, post-process it and then be able to either burn the ISO to a CD or write it to a USB stick with dd".

Karsten Wade suggested that there should exist some sort of "rpm2all" tool that could take an RPM file and automatically build installable releases for any distribution.

Josh Boyer mentioned the fact that for F13, PPC will no longer be a primary architecture, and there are a number of tasks to be done in order to make the transition as smooth as possible. Those interested should join the PowerPC SIG.

Michael DeHaan offered to personally help people get started with hacking on Cobbler. "If you are interested in datacenter automation around Cobbler, from July 6th to July 10th, I’m going to offering myself up to teach folks how to hack on the Cobbler project."

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 finally released Fedora 11.

Currently, no Test Day is scheduled for next week - it is still very early in the Fedora 12 cycle. If you would like to propose a test day which could result in changes for post-release updates for Fedora 11, or an early test day for Fedora 12, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-06-17. The full log is available. Adam Williamson reported that he had added a suggested draft for the previously agreed change to the minimum hardware requirements to an existing bug report.

James Laska reported on the Fedora 11 retrospective meeting which had taken place the previous day, and which he, Adam Williamson, Jesse Keating and Edward Kirk had attended to represent the QA and BugZappers groups. All agreed that the meeting had been well-run and productive. Jesse pointed out that the real test of its success would be if any of the items discussed had led to actual changes within the next month or two. James promised to update the QA team's Goals page to incorporate the lessons learned from the Fedora 11 release cycle.

The group discussed whether some kind of voice format for the meeting would be better than IRC, but in the end there was wide agreement that it would not be.

James Laska mentioned that the period for open feedback on proposals stemming from the earlier Fedora Development Cycle Activity Day was nearing an end: feedback on these proposals will be accepted up to June 30th. The proposals can be found in an email from Jesse Keating. Anyone interested is encouraged to read the proposals and provide feedback.

Will Woods reported on progress of the AutoQA project. He noted that one of the FAD proposals, israwhidebroken.com, is essentially an AutoQA project, and so he has established it as the first AutoQA milestone, with a set of tickets. He noted that Jesse Keating is working on packaging autotest, which will be the harness used to create the automated tests for this project. Jesse pointed out that autotest required Google Web Toolkit, which is not yet packaged either, so packaging autotest is a big project, but he was confident that he will be successful.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-06-16. The full log is available. Adam Williamson reported that Brennan Ashton is working on having a components page as part of the triage metrics system.

Edward Kirk reported on his attempts to find out how the critical component list was generated so it can be accurately updated. He later spoke with Jon Stanley and Jesse Keating and was advised to use the critical path packages proposal to help re-generate the list. He will report further next week.

Adam Williamson reported on the progress of the kernel triage project. He had sent an email to all interested parties, asking the kernel team to provide information on the current workflow used for kernel bugs, but had not yet received a reply, so this project is currently waiting on that important information from the kernel team.

Adam Williamson also reported on a request received from the EPEL team for some help with a Bug Day they have planned for July 11th. Kevin Fenzi, who is part of the EPEL project, provided some explanations: a copy of RHEL is not required to help, Bugzappers could help with only a CentOS box, or even just Fedora in some cases. Help asked of the Bugzappers team is mostly in typical Bugzappers tasks of triaging and pinging dormant bugs for further information. The EPEL project follows the Fedora bug workflow. The group agreed that they would be happy to help out with the Bug Day, and asked the EPEL project to provide more information closer to the date.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-06-24 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-06-23 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Improved and more detailed QA / Release Engineering scheduling for Fedora 12

John Poelstra announced that he had worked on a draft for an improved and more detailed schedule for release engineering tasks for Fedora 12, which also affects QA. He suggested that "we should move to more of a standard software model (just as we did with the naming of the schedule, etc.) where there is more separation between Releng and QA. IOW, Releng provides the service of packing the bits and composing an installable distro and QA provides the service of testing them and giving a thumbs up/down on them", and asked "What tweaks should I make to better reflect QA's needs?" The proposed schedule has blocker bug reviews happening the Friday before key freezes, exact dates for release engineering composes, and exact dates for compose testing. James Laska replied with broad support for each of the proposals.

Installer test plan

Liam Li announced a test plan for installation for Fedora 12, and asked for feedback. James Laska replied, noting that he had made some minor changes to the Wiki page, and providing some comments on the plan. He pointed out that it may be a good idea to consider the yum install cleanup feature in the plan, and suggested only listing the test priority order once.

Rawhide acceptance test plan

Will Woods announced the creation of a Rawhide acceptance test plan, which is part of the israwhidebroken.com proposal discussed during the weekly meeting (see above). This outlines the overall set of features which should be tested to determine if Rawhide is currently in a usable state or not. Jóhann Guðmundsson suggested a test for whether a basic wired network connection could be established. Adam Williamson suggested a test for whether basic input (keyboard and mouse) are working. Tom London suggested a test for encrypted root filesystems, but Will explained that this was beyond the scope of basic functionality testing.

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora at SELF

Fedora was on hand in a big way at the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) last weekend in Clemson, S.C.

Over 500 people attended the inaugural event, which instantly put itself on the national Linux fest map.

Fedora project leader Paul Frields gave one of the keynotes at the fest, and the Fedora booth rolled out not only Fedora 11, but also some new swag, including case badges and tattoos, which were a hit.

A Fedora Activity Day which covered a wide variety of topics was also held on Sunday.

More on the event at http://jbwillia.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/self-2009/ and at http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=2562

Fedora 11 released

Fedora 11 was released on Tuesday, June 9, and with it a variety of activities around the release will be forthcoming. As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 11, this is a reminder that posting 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.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

FLP Meeting Postponed

The FLP meeting called for the 18th of June was postponed due to a lack of responses and consensus on the meeting time.

F11 Translations for Fedora-Web updated for Dutch and Hebrew

Alerted by Richard van der Luit about missing Dutch translations for Fedora-Web, Ricky Zhou enabled Dutch and the newly added Hebrew translations. He also reminded that for new translations to be added to Fedora-web modules, the translators have to send a message to the web team to allow them to make necessary configuration changes.

New members in FLP

Renaud Estampe (French), Dušan Hokův (Czech), Giovanni Cucca (Italian), Javier Fernandez (Spanish), Nebojsa Kamber (Serbian) and Michael Wojdyr (German, Polish) joined the Fedora Translation Project last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Looking Forward to Fedora 12

After Thomas Kole asked about what is the Fedora 12 theme "I really want to create a wallpaper for f12, but what is the theme?" and Nicu Buculei pointed it will be announced in approximatively one week "I believe the result is expected to be announced next week at FUDCon", Martin Sourada started the debate about tht process for to be used"what's the theming process for F12?" and provided a first sketch "1. sketching the base concepts[...] 2. get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha[...] 3. have most of the artwork covered by Beta[...] 4. polish for RCs and Final".

Nicu further outlined the tight schedule "According to the schedule, we have Alpha freeze on 2009-08-04 and Alpha release on 2009-08-18", Martin mentioned some past problems to avoid "First of all we need to make clear it's not competition, but we still need more than one designs" and Máirín Duffy advanced a possible different approach "I wonder if we could take an approach instead of creating the base image from scratch this time, to go out and search the best of openly-licensed content and try to provide a thematic selection?", which was disliked by Nicu "is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough", Martin and Samuele Storari "I hope we will not stop create, and, I think we may work again in the contest mode", but also Martin noticed how the old process has put a lot unreasonable stress on Máirín's shoulders "One of the things I remember from the past releases are your all-nighters that saved us from disasters, especially considering you are doing it in your spare time..."

After a few more rounds of debate, Máirín Duffy proposed a plan: "I think I really like the requirement that the default be: original, vector, abstract, theme-related. And that we pick, let's say as originally proposed, 4 works from the creative commons / openly-licensed community that are related to the theme as well and have the following breakdown: 2 general appeal / any age group, 1 appeal to children, 1 appeal to women" which was positively received, with a possible addition by Nicu Buculei "- a larger "extras" package (but not very large) yummable from the repository and *maybe* also on the install DVD; a huge gallery with *everything* available online, where people can browse with Firefox and use it's "set image as desktop background" option."

Once the process is defined, it will be widely publicised so the larger community can take part into it "process announced in Fedora Weekly news & Fedora Forum; process announced on Planet fpo; each phase of the process announced in FWN & on Planet FPO & Fedora Forum; maybe some kind of podcast, www.fpo banner, some kinds of publicity that way to get people involved."