FWN/Issue191

Fedora Weekly News Issue 191

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 191 for the week ending August 30, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We kick off this week's issue with the latest news on the Fedora 12 Alpha release from this past Tuesday, as well as detail on the upcoming Red Hat/Fedora/JBoss conference in Brno, Czech Republic. News from the Marketing team includes logs of the recent weekly meeting, Fedora 12 talking points development, and a Fedora Insight update. In Quality Assurance news, detail from last week's Test Day, on Dracut, and the next Test Day this week on Sugar on a Stick. Also much detail on this week's QA meetings, and reporting on the ABRT Test Day. In Translation news, detail on a new version of Transifex, and coverage of some discussion of the prioritization of packages available for translation. News from the Design team includes a new Fedora 12 Alpha banner and news on a Fedora survey aimed to improve the usability of the Fedora download pages. These are just a few items from this week's FWN!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora, called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project .

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha Release

The breaking news of the week was "the Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha release" on Tue, 25 Aug 2009. "What's an Alpha release? The Alpha release contains all the features of Fedora 12 in a form that anyone can help test.", says Fedora Release Engineering team leader Jesse Keating. On his brief announcement, he mentioned about the beta version of F12, the due date of the final release of Fedora 12, the top features for end users (i.e.: Better webcam support, Empathy as default IM client, GNOME 2.27.90 beta and KDE 4.3,Network Manager Mobile Broadband, Better Free Video Codec, PackageKit improvements, PulseAudio improvements, Better power management, etc ), and the release notes for further queries.

Fedora 12 early branch now available

"For those of you that wish to separate Fedora 12 stabalization work from future development, we are now ready to process branch requests for F-12." says Jesse Keating on Fedora development announcement. To request a branch, please continue to use the cvsadmin request method.

Red Hat/Fedora/JBoss Developer conference in Brno, Czech Republic

Red Hat Brno office is organizing an open conference at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic on September 10th and 11th. Radek Vokál, Engineering Manager - Base Operating Systems Brno, has noted on his announcement, "Conference is bringing presentations and hackfest sessions/hands-on labs for skilled users, admins, Linux and Java developers. The list of presentations has several interesting topics, mostly covered be people directly involved in upstream development." While talking about the plan, he has said, "The plan is to base this event on the great success we had with FUDCon last year." The JBoss session will be focused on Portal, secure JEE programming etc at the conference. Please visit the wiki for more details about the conference.

Upcoming Events

Please, 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)

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Chaitanya Mehandru

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-08-25

Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-08-25 Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

F12 Beta release

We're preparing the beta release schedule.

Mel Chua to write Talking Points job descriptions and Rahul Sundaram to write Beta Announcement ticket

Site Redesigns

Robyn Bergeron is drafting a list of market research tasks for F12 volunteers/

Fedora Insight updates

Robyn Bergeron to come up with the workflow details and instructions. Mel Chua will be sending FI project status updates.

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's main track Test Day was on Dracut, the new initrd generation tool. There was a solid turnout of testers and developers. Many cases were tested to work without problems, but some problem cases were identified, and bugs were filed.

Next week's main track Test Day will be on Sugar on a Stick, the Fedora-derived USB stick distribution which features the Sugar desktop environment that is the default desktop for the OLPC project. This Test Day is being led by the Sugar developers. If you're interested in this exciting and innovative desktop environment, please come along and help test it! The testing will be on Sugar on a Stick v2 Beta, which should be available in time for the Test Day. The Test Day will be held on Thursday 2009-09-03 in IRC #fedora-test-day.

Next week's Fit and Finish project Test Day will be on Sectool, the security audit and intrusion detection tool. The Fit and Finish team are working throughout the Fedora 12 cycle to file the rough edges off Fedora's desktop experience, so please come along and help them test! The Test Day will be held on Tuesday 2009-09-01 in IRC #fedora-test-day.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 cycle, 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 2009-08-24. The full log is available. James Laska led a post-Alpha release recap (on the assumption the Fedora 12 Alpha would in fact be released on time). The group agreed that the process had been handled quite well. Jesse Keating was happy with the level of communication between release engineering and QA. James felt the blocker bug review meetings had gone smoothly and been a positive contribution. Adam Williamson thought the Alpha process had flagged up the need for a better process for filtering Anaconda updates into Fedora. James summarized areas of possible improvement: he felt planned testing could be extended to areas beyond installation. The group agreed, but generally felt that installation was the most important area by a significant margin. James committed to trying to extend the test plan to cover X.org testing for the Fedora 12 Beta release. Will Woods pointed out that basic X functionality was part of the Rawhide acceptance test plan, and suggested that the Rawhide acceptances tests should be considered a prerequisite to the installation testing.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He noted that the automated tests were still running and sending results to the mailing list. He had fixed bugs in several of the tests, and improved the subject lines of the result emails. He was still engaged in tracing other bugs in the existing tests, and writing documentation for creating tests and hooks. Jesse Keating pointed out that a new upstream release of autotest was available, and committed to getting it packaged and made available through the infrastructure team for testing. Adam Williamson asked whether the current state of the project was sufficient for the planned israwhidebroken.com website to be created. Will explained that some bits were still missing, particularly a method for getting data from autotest into the page.

David Pravec proposed creating a fedora-test-announce mailing list for those who wanted to be informed of events such as Test Days, but did not want to follow the traffic of fedora-test-list. Adam Williamson suggested using the list to announce test composes and changes to release schedules. Jesse Keating worried about the principle of creating more and more mailing lists, and suggested posting announcements to fedora-devel-announce instead, but James Laska said he had been asked to stop posting Test Day announcements to that list in the past. In the end the group agreed on the proposal, and David took responsibility for creating the list.

James Laska asked for an update on Test Day status. Adam Williamson reported that the Fit and Finish team's Printing Test Day had gone smoothly, from what he had seen. James linked to his report on the ABRT Test Day, and thanked David Pravec and Kamil Paral for organizing the event. James also reported on the readiness of the upcoming Dracut Test Day.

Adam Williamson raised the topic of the recently-introduced nightly live builds of Rawhide, and asked the group to support him in publicising their existence. Jesse Keating worried that the limited resources of the server on which they are hosted would be put under serious strain if they become too widely used. This led to another discussion of the best way to distribute regularly updated large images to a mass user base. As usual, no definite answers were discovered. Kevin Fenzi wondered if DeltaISOs would help, but Jesse explained they would not, due to the contents of a live image as compared to an installation image (live images essentially contain one large file that is an image of an entire filesystem, while installation images contain individual package files, and hence are much more amenable to having their size reduced by DeltaISOs).

David Pravec wanted to improve on the reporting of results of Test Days. He felt that having a results table which was essentially a set of Bugzilla links at the bottom of each Test Day page was unnecessary repetition of work. Adam Williamson pointed out that the results tables for some Test Days contained significantly more information than simply links to bug reports. David's suggestion was to automate the linking of Bugzilla reports to the Test Day Wiki pages in some way. Adam felt this might be theoretically possible, but technically difficult without undesirable significant modifications to Bugzilla. James Laska noted that reporting results to the Wiki pages was only ever intended to be an interim solution, and the group was still officially committed to implementing a proper test case management system, which should render the problem irrelevant. In the meantime, James and Adam were both happy to accept any improvements anyone could propose for the Wiki-based system. David promised to work on providing a practical proposal.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-08-25. The full log is available. Adam Williamson gave an update on the proposal to add the semantics switchover to the QA team calendar. He noted that the public Google calendar the QA team had run for a short time was now mostly unused and had only been intended as a test. He further noted that the Infrastructure group was still working on providing a project-wide calendaring solution. Niels Haase clarified that he had in mind the short lists of tasks and dates related to specific groups that are published by the release engineering team. Adam said he could have the switchover added to these Fedora 13 schedules once they were created.

Richard June gave an update on the kernel triage project. He had started on his work of triaging wireless related bugs. So far he had found that most reports were either very old, or were valid reports which already included all necessary information and hence did not need to be triaged. Adam Williamson suggested that he continue on wireless bugs for a while, and if the same pattern persisted, try a different kernel component instead. If several kernel components all seemed to be in the same state, the value of continuing with the kernel triage project could be re-evaluated.

Edward Kirk said that he was working on an SOP (standard operating procedure) detailing all aspects of arranging the Bugzappers group meetings, and asked the group if it had particular ideas or suggestions about any part of the process. In general everyone agreed the current process was good and was happy that Edward was working on officially documenting it. Edward promised to submit a draft of the SOP to the mailing list or a future meeting for review.

Edward Kirk suggested having meetbot announce Bugzappers meetings in related channels shortly ahead of the meeting. Kevin Fenzi and Adam Williamson worried that this might annoy people, and also considered the dystopian possibilities of a world where all projects announced all their meetings in all relevant channels. The proposal was not taken further.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-08-31 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-01 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

ABRT Test Day report

David Pravec and Kamil Paral reported on the ABRT Test Day held on 2009-08-20, with a list of all bugs reported during the Test Day and their current statuses. They were happy with the success of the Test Day.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Transifex v0.7 'Pyro' Released

Dimitris Glezos announced the availability of Transifex 0.7, code named 'Pyro'. This release includes the online translation editor 'Lotte' (Lightweight Online Translation Editor), fine grained permissions to allow maintainers to control user access to the repositories, translation submission to a mailbox, publican like I18N support and many other features.

Transifex is used for the Fedora Localization Process infrastructure, however an upgradation to 'Pyro' is subject to Fedora Infrastructure freeze and other related decisions.

New Modules for Translation

Two new modules, Multimedia-menus and ABRT have been added to translate.fedoraproject.org last week.

String Freeze Break Request for desktop-effects

Owen Taylor put forward a string freeze break request for strings in desktop-effects, primarily for the changes made to desktop-effect would allow users to switch the GNOME desktop to use GNOME Shell which would be available as an optional component for Fedora 12. This request was approved by the Fedora Localization Project.

Priority of Packages Available for Translation

A question raised by Noriko Mizumoto about the inclusion of the new 'multimedia-menus' package in the 'Various' collection has led to a discussion about classification and prioritization of the packages listed for translation. Piotr Drąg explained that the 'Fedora-XX' collection generally housed the traditional Core+Extras list and put forward a suggestion to re-organize the translation groups, since the Core+Extras principle was not followed in Fedora any longer.

Xavier Conde and Domingo Becker from the Brazilian Portugeuse and Spanish teams respectively, suggested a classification of all the existing modules based upon priority that would allow completion of the more important modules first.

New Members in Fedora Localization Project

Iestyn Pryce (Welsh) and Fernando Gonzalez (Spanish) joined the Fedora Localization Project last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Alpha Banner

After a reminder from John Poelstra about the upcoming scheduled tasks, with the closest item being the website banner for the Alpha release. Martin Sourada replied pointing to the two existing undecided candidates "I think we should make a choice now" and Máirín Duffy improved one of them, which is used now on the website "I did a version with different lettering, I hope it's okay:".

Download Survey

Studying the usability and with a website redesign on the agenda, Máirín Duffy conducted on her blog a survey about the ways people download Fedora and she followed with results and some conclusions. Expect a better, more useful download page on the Fedora website.