FWN/Issue222

Fedora Weekly News Issue 222

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 222 for the week ending April 21, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In project-wide announcements, we have news of a time extension on the Fedora Summer Coding project, a request for comments on a new Fedora contributor agreement to replace the CLA, and the start of the always-exciting naming process for the next Fedora release. From Planet Fedora we hear of a new IcedTea (Java) release, a PyGTK hackfest, some suggestions for sticking more closely to the release schedule, and an interesting essay from Dan Williams on CDMA 3G data adapters. QA tells us all about the recent Graphics Test Week, and some results of Fedora 13 Beta testing. From the Translation team we hear about the start of Fedora 13 User Guide translation and an improvement in the arrangements for updating the Translation Quick Start Guide (TQSG). Finally, the design team lets us know about an update to the Fedora 13 wallpaper. Enjoy FWN 222!

Unfortunately, as Kamisamanou Burgess is busy with study, the audio version of FWN - FAWN - is on hold until early May. You can still listen to old issues on the Internet Archive, though. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

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, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcement News

Summer Coding 2010 - now with more time!

Karsten Wade - Senior Community Gardener of Red Hat Community Architecture announced, "We have pushed back the first part of the Summer Coding 2010 schedule. There wasn't enough time to find sponsors. Now there is more time for mentors and students to generate ideas and write up good proposals, while people like you and me look for more sponsors."

New Fedora Project Contributor Agreement Draft

Tom "spot" Callaway from Fedora Legal announced a proposed new contributor agreement to replace the old Contributor License Agreement. He asked project members to give feedback on the draft.

Fedora 14 Naming

Paul W. Frields announced the start of the naming process for Fedora 14. "Fedora 13 is just around the corner, so it's time for us to kick off the naming process for the next Fedora release. You can make a suggestion for the name for Fedora 14 here: "

Development News

Fedora 13 Bodhi updates cleanup

Bill Nottingham announced a cleanup of problematic Fedora 13 updates: "We've had a couple of issues with F13 updates where multiple versions of a package had updates-testing requests filed in bodhi at once, causing the 'wrong' update to be pushed to final."

Planet Fedora

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Jan Wildeboer announced the availability of IcedTea6-1.8 with many bugfixes and feature enhancements.

Colin Walters attended a PyGTK hackfest. "There are two major orthogonal changes happening simultaneously..." Python 3 and Introspection. Dave Malcolm had more to say on the introspection front. "In the old GTK approach to binding native libraries for use by other language runtimes (such as Python's), a .defs file provided metadata on the API, which had to be kept in-sync with the code...In the new approach, "gobject-introspection" defines a simple textual format for source-code comments, containing similar information to a .defs file, but (I hope) rich enough to handle more of the special cases. This is scraped from the source into an XML file (e.g. Foo.gir), then compiled into an efficient binary format (e.g. Foo.typelib) which can be mapped into memory at runtime using a library (libgirepository.so)."

John Poelstra posted suggestions for the Fedora release schedule. "We need to accept that unforeseen regressions and late changes have consequences. Slipping the full Fedora release schedule when we don’t meet our release criteria is a good way to show that and maintain a baseline of quality for our releases. Working backwards from important milestones and starting earlier is how we ship on time...If we really want our releases to be on time we must give interim milestones and tasks just as much value as the big ones..."

Karsten Wade announced that the Fedora Summer Coding schedule has been moved back a month in order to provide more time to prepare.

Dan Williams examined the "two major mobile broadband technology families: GSM/UMTS (which three quarters of the world uses) and CDMA/EVDO (used by the rest)." The rest of the post outlines the progress in making various broadband chips work under Linux and why you should "buy Sierra stuff. It’s top quality and they actually care about open-source...And guess what? They actually listened, did the work, and put the documentation under a Creative Commons license too."

Steven Moix explained how to show the desktop (hiding all applications) now that the "Show Desktop" button has disappeared from Fedora 12.

Richard W.M. Jones ordered some of the newly-opened Ordnance Survey (UK) datasets. "The format is really open — TIFF for the maps, and CSV files for most of the other data. Full marks to the OS for releasing this under a CC-compatible license."

Juan J. Martínez sought to explain why your bug isn't being fixed - and also what you can do to help the process along.

Adam Williamson recapped the results of a Graphics Test Week.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week saw Graphics Test Week, with NVIDIA Test Day on Tuesday 2010-04-13, ATI/AMD Test Day on Wednesday 2010-04-14, and Intel graphics Test Day on Thursday 2010-04-15. We had a great turnout again, with 164 total adapters tested by slightly fewer testers (extra thanks to those diligent souls who tested multiple systems!) and great support from the Fedora X.org developers and triagers. Adam Williamson provided a recap of the week, with some statistics on the numbers of bugs filed, and on the numbers of bugs from previous graphics Test Days that were fixed.

This week's Test Day will be on Anaconda (the Fedora installer)'s storage support: we will aim to test all the various exotic storage device options Anaconda makes available, including various types of RAID array, iSCSI (with iBFT), FCoE (if we can find someone with the hardware - please do come along if you have it!) and multipath devices. The broader the base of devices we can test the better, so please do come along and help if you can, particularly if you have, say, a motherboard that supports BIOS RAID and a couple of hard disks you can use temporarily. Unlike normal Test Days, it's impractical to do this testing with a live image, but there is some testing that can be done in a virtual machine. The Test Day will take place all day on Thursday 2010-04-22 in the #fedora-test-day channel on Freenode IRC (if you're not sure how to use IRC, there's an instruction page, or you can use WebIRC). If you can't make it on the day, you can still provide your results on the Wiki page before or after the event.

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.

Update acceptance testing

Adam Williamson and James Laska got together with Bodhi developers Luke Macken and Mathieu Bridon to find out about their plans for implementing different feedback types in Bodhi, following the proposals by Doug Ledford and Adam. Luke and Mathieu indicated that this work was occurring in the tg2 (TurboGears 2) branch of Bodhi, which they plan to put into production in the Fedora 14 timeframe. Adam Miller continued to revise the draft Proven Testers policy based on the group's feedback.

Kernel triage

At the weekly Bugzappers meeting, Kevin Fenzi reported that he had begun to investigate kernel triage, an area Richard June had previously been looking into but had been lacking free time. Kevin had begun to contact kernel team members and consider an overall strategy for approaching kernel triage, and asked other interested group members to join him.

Fedora 13 Beta Delta ISOs

Andre Robatino announced the availability of Delta ISOs for Fedora 13 Beta. As a quick reminder, Delta ISOs include just the difference between two ISO images, allowing you to reconstruct one image from the other and the Delta ISO, making it much faster to download a new ISO if you have a similar previous ISO. Andre provided deltas from Fedora 12 to 13 Beta (around 40% of the size of the full F13 Beta images), and from 13 Alpha to 13 Beta (around 10% of the size of the full images).

Fedora 13 testing

Planned Fedora 13 testing was much quieter this week with the successful release of the Beta, but we did see the first final blocker review meeting, which was expertly summarized by James Laska. All outstanding blocker bugs for Fedora 13 were reviewed and assigned for action by testers or the development team.

Several group members were engaged in testing the final Beta release. Tom Horsley reported a README file was present on the DVD image which discussed the boot.iso image, which is no longer included in the DVD. Rahul Sundaram suggested he file a bug report. Tom also noticed a large amount of debugging messages from GDM in his system logs; Al Dunsmuir also observed this. Adam Williamson thought this was due to debugging statements that were temporarily enabled in plymouth to track down a bug, but Ray Strode later mentioned in IRC conversation that it was simply because the current gdm package is a development release. Tom wasn't done yet; he also reported results from testing three ATI video cards, complete with bug reports.

Wolfgang Rupprecht reported that upgrading to Fedora 13 Beta using preupgrade had failed for him; Birger also had problems despite definitely having a large enough /boot partition. Kamil Paral suggested waiting for preupgrade 1.1.5 and trying again, as it has fixes for several significant bugs.

Tommy He tried out the new backup tool Deja Dup and found it lacking: it could not restore a backup it had created. Rahul Sundaram swung into action and made sure the upstream authors were aware of the bug, reporting back that they would look into it over the coming weekend.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Upcoming Fedora 13 Tasks

John Poelstra informed the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 13. At present, besides the translation for the Fedora Guides and F13 Release Notes that are on schedule, Fedora Website translation work is due to start.

TQSG Updates

Continuing the earlier discussion related to linking the TQSG book from Fedora Documentation page, Piotr Drag has been granted access to docs.fedoraproject.org. As a result, updated TQSG and its translated versions can be published faster by the FLP team.

The TQSG repository in the Fedora git has already been rearranged to work with the new version of Transifex and Publican.

Fedora 13 User Guide Ready for Translation

The User Guide for Fedora 13 is currently ready for translation and submissions can be made to the 'f13' branch on translate.fedoraproject.org.

Submission problems for SELinux User Guide

Scott Radvan reported that a problem in the naming of the path is preventing submissions of new translations for the Fedora SElinux User Guide. The error was fixed and submissions can now be made for this document via translate.fedoraproject.org.

Problems With Security Guide and Readme Live Image Guide

Geert Warrink from the Dutch team reported that the PO files in the Fedora Security Guide for Dutch were not consistent with the other languages. Eric Christensen identified a few redundant files in the repository and would be checking the source to identify any further problems.

Additionally, redundant files were also identified in the Readme Live Image Guide. These files were removed from the source by Ruediger Landmann.

Translator/Contributors List in Guides

Russian co-ordinator Yulia Poyarkova highlighted that the contributors' list for the Fedora User Guide does not contain the names of all the contributors. Ruediger Landmann explained that the contributors list is currently compiled manually and as a result the complete list is delayed by one release. For Fedora 13, he intends to put in place a wiki page that would allow the contributors to list themselves for inclusion in the Guide. This would however result in additional strings to be translated.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Updated Fedora 13 Wallpaper

Paul Frields asked about updating the wallpaper design with the last iteration by Kyle Baker "So it seemed that most people enjoyed kybaker's refresh of the wallpaper. Can we get that pressed into RPMs as an update for F13?" Martin Sourada pointed at a current lack of high resolution versions "I'm still waiting for the high resolution versions, sorry if I missed it somewhere..." and as soon as those became available Martin updated the package.

Special topic: Fedora Summer Coding

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Summer 2010 Coding.

Contributing Writer: Karsten Wade

New schedule available

The program schedule has been updated to reflect the new program timing.

Search for sponsors continues

The search for sponsors continues, as the funding pool directly affects how many proposals can be funded.

Karsten Wade wrote, "If you work for or with an organization, business, foundation, non-profit, etc. that benefits from a better Fedora Project … consider if you have some budget to help fund a student proposal.

Students proposals due 20 May

If you are a student, read the appropriate section on the Summer Coding 2010 page. It includes a schedule that highlights student due dates.