Fedora Weekly News Issue 214

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 214^[1] for the week ending February 21, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In Announcements, we start off with an invitation to contribute Fedora 13 Talking Points from the Fedora Marketing team. Also of note is the Fedora 13 branching and freezing that happened last week, and announcement of a new privilege escalation policy for Fedora packaging. In news from the Fedora Planet, details on how libvirt deals with different CPU models and passing on their capabilities to guests, a discussion on the value of having a target audience for Fedora, how to update your system BIOS without having to use Windows or a USB stick, and announcement of a new utility, gnome-speaker-setup. We're pleased to welcome Neville Cross to FWN to cover the Fedora Marketing Team activities for FWN. Neville's beat this week includes pointers to the Team's meeting last week as well as more internal detail on the Fedora 13 Talking Points, mentioned above. The Ambassador's beat includes coverage of last week's Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 8X) con in California. In news from the Quality Assurance team, details on last week's team meetings, as well as the first Test Day in some time, this on Color Management, also updates on Fedora 13 images and a new Security Spin. In Translation news, announcement of Transifex v.0.7.4 for testing on the Fedora staging server, progress on the QA test of Fedora 13's L10n, and an update on Midnight Commander's availability for translations. In the Art/Design beat, updated details on Fedora 13 artwork including wallpapers, and testing results of the new Design Suite spin. Security Advisories provides last week's security patches for Fedora 11, 12, and for the first week, Fedora 13. This rounds out FWN 214, enjoy reading!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for a few past FWN issues that one of our contributors has begun. Find it on the Internet Archive^[2] and have a listen!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page^[3]. 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, including general announcements^[1], development announcements^[2] and Events^[3].

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcements

Call for Participation - Fedora 13 Talking Points

Robyn Bergeron announced^[1], "Talking points are key highlights of the new release. They should be compelling, but they will not necessarily be comprehensive. There are different types of talking points for different types of people: general desktop users/everyone, developers, and sysadmins. For the Fedora 13 cycle, we will also have talking points to address some of the Spins. They are meant to provide a short, effective answer to the question, "What cool stuff is in the latest release of Fedora?"

Each cycle, the Marketing team compiles a short list of approximately three talking points for each of these audiences for the upcoming release. For Fedora 13, they're found here:

^[2]

If you have a talking point that you feel meets the criteria found on the talking points SOP page at ^[3], add it to the the table on the F13 page with supporting information. Please make your contributions and changes on the wiki page, so that the Marketing team can efficiently capture and consider your input.

The Marketing team will make final adjustments to the list of talking points at their meeting on February 23, which will be announced on the marketing list and is open to everyone. If you are interested in attending the meeting, the agenda, location, and time details can be found at ^[4]. Following the meeting, the finalized list of talking points will be announced, and posted to ^[5].

We welcome you to participate in the process!"

Fedora Development News

Fedora Release Engineering Meeting

Fedora Release Engineering Meeting moved to 2100 UTC on Wed

Jesse Keating announced^[1] on Monday, February 15,2010 at 16:47:52 UTC 2010, "We've moved the time / day of the release engineering meeting to Wednesdays at 2100 UTC. I've updated the meeting page accordingly. See ya there!"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-February/000567.html

Fedora Release Engineering Meeting moved to 2100 UTC on Wed -- Make that 1800 UTC on Friday

Jesse Keating reannounced^[1] on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 03:49:46 UTC 2010,

"Whoops, we didn't have all the feedback. We've instead moved it to 1800 UTC on Friday. See ya there!"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-February/000568.html

CVS Outage Notification

CVS Outage Notification 2010-02-17 00:00 UTC

Jesse Keating announced^[1], "There will be a CVS outage starting at 2010-02-17 00:00 UTC, which will last approximately 3 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at ^[2] or run: date -d '2010-02-17 00:00 UTC'

Affected Services: CVS / Source Control

Unaffected Services: Everything else.

Reason for Outage: The CVS server will not accept connections so that we can mass-branch for Fedora 13.

Contact Information: Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage."

CVS Outage Notification - 2010-02-17 00:00 UTC

Jesse Keating announced^[1] on Wednesday, Feb 17, 2010 at 04:00:45 UTC 2010, "The outage is now over, more mail to follow regarding the changes!"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-February/000573.html

Fedora 13 Branching (and thus freezing) tomorrow

Jesse Keatingannounced^[1] on Tuesday, Feb 16, 2010 at 06:53:37 UTC 2010, "Tomorrow (or well the day after tomorrow to some of you) we will be branching off F-13 in CVS. This will start at 00:00 UTC on Feb 17. After this point, when the outage ends, all builds for Fedora 13 will happen from the F-13/ branch in CVS. All builds must go through bodhi in order to make it into Fedora 13. When you submit your build to bodhi, please push to testing first, as it will allow your peers to test your update before it makes it into the Fedora 13 tree.

For those of you who maintain a critical-path package, net positive karma from releng and/or QA plus at least one more net positive karma is required before your package can move out of testing and into Fedora 13. We're still working on the wiki documentation for all of this, but hope to have a good chunk in place tomorrow.

Builds from devel/ will continue to be pushed to rawhide each night and devel/ can be considered open for Fedora 14 development items.

^[2] has some info about the upcoming change and base information we'll use when editing the other wiki pages."

Fedora 13 Software Translation

Noriko Mizumoto announced^[1] on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 08:22:41 UTC 2010, "It is 16-Feb today, Software String Freeze. All Fedora translators are expecting NO more String change in any Fedora13 packages, and looking at to complete as many translation as possible from now on till the translation deadline. Please make sure that POT is up-to-date with latest strings."

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-February/000571.html

New packaging policy: privilege escalation policy

Adam Williamson announced^[1] on Tuesday, February 16,2010 at 21:39:10 UTC 2010, "This is to announce that the privilege escalation policy which has been under discussion and revision in the QA and development groups, and in FESCo, for the last few weeks has been approved at today's FESCo meeting^[2].

The policy can be found here for now: ^[3]

Please take it into account in future packaging work.

I believe the policy should be referenced in the packaging guidelines:^[4]

and should be renamed to: Packaging:Privilege_escalation_policy

However, I do not have the privileges to perform either of these actions. If someone with the appropriate privileges could do these for me, it would be appreciated."

Fedora 13 has been branched!!

Jesse Keating announced^[1] on Wednesday, February 17,2010 at 04:10:17 UTC 2010, " That's right folks, we are now branched for Fedora 13. What does this mean to you? Well that depends on who "you" are, here are some "you"s that we wrote about: ^[2]

The real take away here is explained at ^[3]

The upshot is that if you want to get a build into Fedora 13, you gotta build from F-13/ and you gotta put it in bodhi. The good news is that if your package isn't critical path, it's just like any other update in bodhi, you decide when it goes stable. If it's critical path, releng or QA will have to give it karma, but that means somebody will look at it! (We're working on ways to make it more visible to the user that your package is critical path).

There are new paths on the mirrors too:

pub/fedora/linux/development/rawhide <-- this is the new home of rawhide. Builds from devel/ go here. This is now the F-14 development ground.

pub/fedora/linux/development/13 <-- this is the branched Fedora 13. Builds from F-13/ that make it through bodhi as stable show up here. This is what we'll use to make the Alpha, Beta, Final release and all the snapshots in between and the nightly attempt at instllable images.

pub/fedora/linux/updates/testing/13 <-- this is where the testing updates go for the branched 13. Test 'em here before they go to stable.

For a better picture, see ^[4]

I have disabled the rsync part of the rawhide compose process so that I can do things by hand tomorrow and ensure we don't screw up the mirrors, so you'll see a delay in things. We'll also do the branched tree compose by hand as well and then sync the output at the same time to preserve hardlinks. It'll be a fun day! Hop by #fedora-devel if you've got questions and somebody will try to help you.

Welcome to the world of No Frozen Rawhide!!!"

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Upcoming Events (December 2009 to February 2010)

North America (NA)^[1]
Central & South America (LATAM) ^[2]
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)^[3]
India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)^[4]

Related Events

RHCE Loopback in Washington, DC

On Thursday, February 25, 2010, Red Hat will hold a free, informal conference for RHCEs, offering information sharing on a variety of topics at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street. Complimentary dinner will be served, and more details are available^[1].

↑ http://www.redhat.com/rhceloopback

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events^[1]

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/PastEvents

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.

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora^[1] - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

↑ http://planet.fedoraproject.org

General

Daniel Berrange explained^[1] how libvirt deals with different CPU models and passing on their capabilities to guests. "Every hypervisor has its own policies for what a guest will see for its CPUs by default, Xen just passes through the host CPU, with QEMU/KVM the guest sees a generic model called "qemu32" or "qemu64". VMWare does something more advanced, classifying all physical CPUs into a handful of groups and has one baseline CPU model for each group that’s exposed to the guest...libvirt does not like to enforce policy itself, preferring just to provide the mechanism on which the higher layers define their own desired policy...In the 0.7.5 release that will be in Fedora 13, there is finally a comprehensive mechanism for controlling guest CPUs."

Nicu Buceli displayed^[2] the different concepts for Fedora 13 artwork.

John Poelstra discussed^[3] the value of having a target audience for Fedora, as well as concerns with stagnant download numbers for the distribution.

Stephen Smoogen looked at^[4] and its many different target audiences. "Looking through the long conversations, it is clear that some people are talking about Fedora the distribution, others are talking about Fedora the community, Fedora the websites, Fedora the desktop, or even Fedora the hat. Very few people go into what they are talking about and everyone seems to assume that the other person knows exactly what is going on in their heads."

Máirín Duffy revamped^[5] the authconfig-gtk/system-config-authentication dialog, described as "a box of chocolates GUI, meaning 'you never know what you’re going to get'" since, among other issues, it "allows you to check off as many and whatever identity and authentication methods you desire, even if the combinations make no sense."

Mark J Cox disclosed^[6] some interesting statistics for security flaws in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. "During the creation and review of the list we spent some time to see how closely last years list matched the types of flaws we deal with at Red Hat. We first looked at all the issues that Red Hat fixed across our entire product portfolio in the 2009 calendar year and filtered out those that had the highest severity. All our 2009 vulnerabilities have CVSS scores, so we filtered on those that have a CVSS base score of 7.0 or above."

Charles Brej described^[7] how you can update your system BIOS without having to use Windows or a USB stick.

Josh Bressers examined^[8] an MSDN Blogs post titled "Microsoft's Many Eyeballs and the Security Development Lifecycle". Josh concludes "The original article I'm mostly disagreeing with here concludes with the usual old data that Microsoft releases fewer security advisories than Open Source does. This is of course a red herring meant to distract the reader. They've been caught multiple times only releasing one advisory for multiple flaws. With closed source, there isn't a good way to tell what's all getting fixed. In Open Source, we can't hide anything, it's all there. This keeps us honest."

Although probably only a coincidence (Planet Fedora generally doesn't usually spend very much time being hostile to Microsoft), Richard W.M. Jones explained^[9] "Why the Windows Registry sucks ... technically".

Lennart Poettering created^[10] a new utility, gnome-speaker-setup. "The tool should be very robust and even deal with the weirdest channel mappings."

Zoltan Hoppar announced^[11] "OsmocomBB: A Free and Open Source software project to create a Free Software GSM baseband firmware"

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

Marketing Meeting Log for 2010-02-13 and 2010-02-19

Meeting logs ^[1] and notes ^[2] for the 2010-02-16 Fedora Marketing Meeting are now available.

All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public. ^[3]

F13 Talking Points

The Marketing team is looking at dates for F13 deliverables, and at this moment it is time for Talking Points ^[1]. There were a first call by Aamir A. Bhutto ^[2] and then some additional comments to reinforce this call by Paul Frields ^[3] and Robyn Bergeron ^[4]. Those messages were integrated on Talking Point Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) ^[5]. The Marketing team has taken a lot of effort on writing SOP for all deliverables for any release, hopefully next time everything will run more smooth. Finally, an official call has been made ^[6] that will be posted in other lists inviting other groups to pitch in the F13 Talking Points.

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Fedora at SCALE 8x

Larry Cafiero reports that the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 8x was a huge success for those running the event and for Fedora itself. Over 1,500 people registered and the expo floor was mobbed on Saturday, with folks ranging from new users to the most experienced.

Karsten Wade gave the keynote address on Saturday.

A preliminary report (with a wrap-up to follow) can be found here: http://larrythefedoraguy.wordpress.com

Karsten's keynote can be found here (in two parts): http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4874355 http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4874749

Fedora 12 is here

With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of 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.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team^[1].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA

Test Days

Last week's Test Day was on color management^[1]. Turnout was moderate, but those who did come helped us resolve several problems in gnome-color-manager. With the fixes introduced by Richard Hughes throughout the day, all testers reported success in using the application to import and apply color profiles. Unfortunately no testers had the extra hardware and/or accessories needed to test generation of accurate profiles for monitors, webcams and scanners, but we tested these features as far as possible without them.

Next week's Test Day^[2] will be on the langpack plugin for yum^[3]. This feature is intended to automatically install langpacks - packages containing translations for a particular language - for packages which use them. So if your system is configured with French support, when installing a package which keeps its French translation in a separate langpack, the langpack will be automatically installed. This is a great convenience feature for all those who use languages other than English, so please come out and help us test it! The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2010-02-25 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac^[4].

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting^[1] was held on 2010-02-15. The full logs are available^[2]. James Laska reported that Kevin Fenzi had set up watchers for the IRC bot zodbot for the Fedora 13 blocker bug trackers. John Poelstra had updated the wording on the group calendars slightly to refer to test milestones rather than specifically to installation testing.

James Laska gave an update on the third automated Rawhide testing milestone. He had also sent a recap to the mailing list^[3]. As well as finding some more installer bugs, the test run had exposed some areas for improvement in the test scripts, so James and Will Woods would be working on those.

James Laska noted that the second build of the Alpha test compose was now available for testing, and result matrices for installation^[4] and desktop^[5] validation testing were now available.

James Laska raised Adam Williamson's suggestion that live images be provided along with traditional installer images for specific testing points - pre-releases and candidate builds - to assist in desktop validation testing and live installation testing. Jesse Keating felt this would be an unnecessary complication, as the nightly live images could be used instead, and would in fact ultimately be closer to the final release. Adam pointed out that this made it harder to co-ordinate testing across multiple testers and be confident they were all testing the same code, but was willing to let it slide.

Kamil Paral explained his idea of giving candidate builds different names from the final builds (currently, Alpha candidate images have the same name as the final Alpha image, and so on). Jesse Keating felt this could potentially lead to a case where a bug would only happen with the final image name, and not with the candidate name. It was also difficult in that the name of the built image is tightly linked to the image building process. In the end there was a consensus not to try and uniquely name candidate builds.

Kamil Paral reported that the AutoQA group had discussed plans for the prospective results database, and logged the discussion on the mailing list^[6]. They are currently studying other similar projects for ideas and welcome any feedback on the mailing list. Will Woods recapped the general outline of the project: to provide a unified database where all AutoQA tests will report results, for ease of viewing and analysis. He mentioned that use cases for viewing the AutoQA results were one useful type of feedback that would be welcome.

Josef Skladanka explained he had been working with Kamil Paral on the potential use of beakerlib^[7] in AutoQA. They had created a simple example test^[8] to demonstrate the use of beakerlib in AutoQA. They hope to test migrating some of the existing tests to use beakerlib soon.

James Laska noted that Liam Li had updated the status of automated DVD installation testing on the mailing list^[9]. He had continued to work on techniques for providing boot arguments in automated installations, and welcomed ideas on that front.

Finally, James Laska gave an update on the status of gwt packaging, where he had continued to work on the dependency list with the assistance of the Java team. He was aiming to make a start on packaging in the upcoming week.

No Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-02-16 as there were no items needing discussion.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2010-02-22 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2010-02-23 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 13 Alpha test compose validation

Kamil Paral announced^[1] the availability of the initial Alpha test compose images. However, these turned out to be unusable^[2], and a second set of images was announced^[3] by James Laska. Finally, James announced a supplementary update image^[4] to fix some major issues encountered in the second test compose. With the second test compose and updates image, group members helped to fill out the installation^[5] and desktop^[6] results matrices. Andre Robatino provided deltaisos for both F12 to TC1^[7] and TC1 to TC2^[8].

Privilege escalation policy

Adam Williamson announced that the privilege escalation policy the group had worked on had been accepted by FESCo. It was now in place on the wiki^[1].

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Privilege_escalation_policy

Security spin QA

Adam Miller presented an outline^[1] for testing efforts for the new security spin^[2]. He asked the group for help in contributing test cases for the applications that would be specific to the spin.

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N

Fedora Transifex v.0.7.4 Open for Testing

Piotr Drag announced^[1] the availability of the staging server^[2] with upgraded Transifex v.0.7.4 for testing. The staging server is located at: https://translate.stg.fedoraproject.org/ and can be accessed with the FAS credentials. Special local projects have been created to allow the testing of translation submissions and Publican file structures.

Noriko Mizumoto reported multiple errors related to erratic file submissions^[3]. Domingo Becker requested for the addition of a Fedora logo^[4].

Bugs related to transifex and the Fedora specific instance are to be reported to upstream transifex and the Bugzilla respectively^[5].

Progress on QA Test of Fedora L10n

In response to James Laska's suggestion to use the Alpha compose for testing, Noriko Mizumoto highlighted^[1] that the Alpha compose would be available two days after the string freeze and would not include a major portion of the translated content, since translation activity increases post the string freeze. James Laska has also suggested that a request be filed with Release Engineering team for the creation of an image for Localization related testing^[2], which has been filed by Noriko Mizumoto^[3].

Additionally, Igor Pires Soares has also requested for some help from the developers, to understand the correct process to test a few packages that are dependencies for other packages^[4].

Midnight Commander and SSSD Translations

As announced by Slava Zanko, Midnight Commander is now ready to accept translations from transifex.net^[1]. The translation structure for SSSD has been modified by the developer, Stephen Gallagher and currently the SSSD server and client components would have a single translation file. Translators have been requested to verify the merged translations to check for any errors^[2].

New Members in FLP

Andrew Zaytsev (Russian)^[1], Chandru Chandrasekhar (Kannada)^[2], Pablo H. Cattáneo (Spanish)^[3], and Alexander Shopov (Bulgarian)^[4] joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team^[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

Artwork for Fedora 13 Alpha

Nicu Buculei called^[1] for a decision regarding the wallpaper for Fedora 13 wallpaper "As we are one day after the deadline and people are asking, I think we

must* take a decision about what we are going with for Alpha" and proposed one of the designs^[2], an image created by Máirín Duffy "based on the recent discussions, it looks to me like like the strongest option is one of the 'Rocket Trails'". Since this proposals received the consensus, Martin Sourada proceeded^[3] to build and push the package. Martin also blogged^[4] about the new wallpaper.

Some More News on the Design Suite

Martin Sourada tested^[1] the Design Suite^[2], the new Fedora Spin targeted at professional designers, noticing a number of problems "20100211 hanged on starting rsyslog, 20100214 hanged on starting gdm" and raised the question about the need for OpenOffice.org Impress on the spin "why do we have OOo Impress but not the rest of the OOo suit (at least I haven't noticed it in menus)? This is IMHO just duplicating some of Inkscape functionality." Sebastian Dziallas, the spin maintainer, looked into the issues^[3] "I had given the snapshot from Feb 14 a try in a local VM but didn't give installation a try, yet. I've also removed Impress, Krita and GThumb lately - basically to see where we can get size-wise." Still, the targetted image size remains under debate "We could also throw Impress and the rest of the OpenOffice suite in, though. 1 GB sounds like a good goal, then, indeed."

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

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