FWN/Issue233

Fedora Weekly News Issue 233

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 233 for the week ending July 7, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Issue 232 begins with announcements from the Fedora Project, including notice of this past week's Fedora Board IRC meeting, details of a PHX2 outage on 7/5/2010 and changes on Red Hat's Licensing Guidelines, as well as a listing of Fedora Events globally. Fedora In the News brings one new story in PC World on Jared Smith' appointment as Fedora Project Leader. Quality Assurance is up next, with details on the Proven Testers project that they have been working on recently, updates on AutoQA work, triage metrics amongst other activity. In Translation news, an update on the Fedora 14 schedule for translation related work, a new wiki translation policy and more. In Artwork/Design Team news, details on a custom GTK+ theme, better hackergotchis, Fedora branding fonts, and decisions on Fedora 14 graphic concept. This week's issue wraps up with security-related packages for Fedora 12 and 13 from the past week. Enjoy FWN 233!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. 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: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

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: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcement News

Fedora Board IRC Meeting 1800 UTC 2010-07-02

Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, announced:

"The Board is holding a public IRC meeting on Friday, July 2, 2010 at 1800 UTC on IRC Freenode. For this meeting, the public is invited to do the following:

• Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.

• Join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post

 questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

This meeting will last approximately 60 minutes. The Board has reserved some time at the top of the hour to cover agenda items as appropriate. Following that we'll take questions from the community.

The moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the #fedora-board-meeting channel. We'll limit time per voice as needed to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard. We look forwardto seeing you at the meeting!"

Fedora Development News

Outage: PHX2 outage - 2010-07-05 01:00 UTC

Mike McGrath announced:

"There is an ongoing outage at this time in PHX2. The exact start time is not yet known and the ETA to be fixed is not yet known.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run:

date -d '2010-07-05 01:00'

Reason for outage:

Several people are experiencing issues connecting to various Fedora services (see below). The cause for these issues seems to be network related and it is impacting different people differently. Some see packet loss, other see complete connectivity loss and other still aren't having any issues at all.

Some services listed as unaffected would have been impacted previously to this announcement but as we became aware of the issue have made some changes to bring those services back online. Those services include bodhi, the account system, pkgdb, main website/wiki, community and mirrormanager.

Affected Services:

Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/ Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/ CVS / Source Control DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org Email system

Unaffected Services:

Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/ Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/ BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/ Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/ Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/ Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/ Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/ Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/ Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/ Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/ Smolt - http://smolts.org/ Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/ Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/ Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Ticket Link

Contact Information:

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

Fedora 14 Feature Submission Deadline is One Week Away (2010-07-13)

John Poelstra reminded the community of the upcoming Fedora 14 feature submission deadline:

"This email serves as the last reminder for the Fedora 14 Feature Submission Deadline--Tuesday, July 13, 2010. After this date newly submitted features will be targeted for Fedora 15 unless an exception is granted by FESCo.

Accepted Fedora 14 features so far

If you are a current feature page owner, thank you for submitting your feature for Fedora 14 and contributing to the next release of Fedora. If you haven't updated your feature page in the last month it would be a great help to every one if you would do so now.

As we start to reach deadlines and test releases for Fedora 14, more and more people will query the feature pages. We'd love to know that what they find is current and correct.

Thank you, John

More information:

  Fedora 14 Schedule

  Fedora Feature Process

Licensing Guidelines Update - Please Read

Tom "spot" Callaway announced a revised Red Hat licensing guidelines:

"Hello Fedora!

Please take a moment and read this email. There's cake in it for you.

Upon the advice of Red Hat Legal, we have slightly amended the Fedora Licensing Guidelines. The following section has been added:

 Subpackage Licensing

 If a subpackage is dependent (either implicitly or explicitly) upon a
 base package (where a base package is defined as a resulting binary
 package from the same source RPM which contains the appropriate
 license texts as %doc), it is not necessary for that subpackage to
 also include those license texts as %doc.

 However, if a subpackage is independent of any base package (it does
 not require it, either implicitly or explicitly), it must include
 copies of any license texts (as present in the source) which are
 applicable to the files contained within the subpackage.

Basically, what this means is this: If you maintain a package, and that package generates subpackages, then each subpackage must either include a copy of the appropriate licensing texts (as available in the source), or it must Require (either implicitly or explicitly) another subpackage which does include the appropriate licensing texts.

Unfortunately, there is no good way for us to determine which packages are out of compliance with this new guideline and will need to be fixed. (If http://rpm.org/ticket/116 was ever implemented, it would be possible...) However, we can identify packages which are likely candidates to be affected by this change. Thanks to Seth Vidal, I was able to generate a list of packages and subpackages, sorted by maintainer. The list was generated by querying rawhide for a list of source packages where:

* At least one subpackage was generated that did not have an exact name match to the source package name AND

* That subpackage did not depend on any other source packages.

Maintainers should look at the bottom of this email for the list.

FAQ

Q. Why are we doing this? A. The intent is to ensure that the appropriate license texts (as available in the source) are installed on the running system for all binary packages.

Q. Should I add explicit Requires: to another subpackage for the sole reason of complying with this new guideline? A. No. You should not add Requires simply for this licensing requirement. Instead, you should include duplicate copies of the relevant license texts (as available in the source).

Q. I thought duplicating files in a spec was forbidden? A. This is a permitted exception to that.

Q. You keep saying "as available in the source", what does that mean? A. It means you do not need to manually add license texts if they are not included by the upstream in the source tarball. However, if they are missing, you should ask upstream to add them.

Q. My package generates a -docs (or -javadocs) subpackage, which doesn't depend on any of the other subpackages, but the docs are under a different license from the code in the other subpackage(s), what should I do? A. You should make sure that the -docs/-javadocs subpackage has the correct License: tag, matching the files included, and be sure that the appropriate license texts are included as %doc in the -docs/-javadocs.

Q. My package generates a foo and foo-libs package. foo has the license files, and foo depends on foo-libs, but foo-libs doesn't have any license files in it. What should I do? A. You have two options here. You can either move the license texts from foo to foo-libs or duplicate the license texts in both packages. Moving the license texts is an acceptable option in this case because it ensures that if foo-libs is installed, the license texts are present, and if foo is installed, it will pull in foo-libs, thus, the license texts are present.

Q. What is the capital of the Republic of Ghana? A. Accra.

Q. What happens if I don't do this? A. Well, eventually, I'll go through and make the change myself. You will also suffer a horrible horrible curse.

Q. Do I need to make this change in stable branches? A. No, but you can if you want to. Rawhide is the only place that is a MUST fix.

Q. Do I need to push an update for this change? A. No, please don't. If you're already working on an update for other reasons and you want to do this (say, to keep the spec in sync with rawhide), you can.

Q. Do I need to build (not just commit) this change in rawhide? A. Please do. Don't forget to bump the release and add a changelog entry.

Q. Why can't we just have a "fedora-licenses" package which has copies of all the licenses in Fedora and just always install it? A. Maintaining that package would be a huge pain. We have a LOT of licenses in Fedora and they change all the time, often without notice. However, if you'd like to write some code to help us minimize duplicate license files on the filesystem with a "common-licenses" package, then you should look at<re>http://rpm.org/ticket/116</ref>. Have I mentioned that I'd like that functionality added to rpm?

Q. Why don't you add that functionality to rpm? A. Everytime I look at the rpm source code, blood starts dripping from my eyes, and it scares my newborn son, Jimmy. It also makes it hard to see the code.

Q. Some of the packages on your list don't need any changes to meet this guideline, what should I do? A. I'm sure there are some false positives here. Heck, _most_ of my packages which were flagged by this script did not need any changes, but some of them did. The only way to be sure was to have an informed human check. Just let me know that you checked them and they're okay. Please do this by sending me email, either by replying to this email on the list or emailing me directly. Telling me via IRC/AIM/Twitter/Facebook/Identi.ca/LinkedIn/MySpace/ICQ/CarrierPigeon just means I will forget about it.

Q. Hey, one of my packages didn't end up on your list, but it needed to be fixed to meet this guideline, why wasn't it on the list? A. There are plenty of other situations that we couldn't account for where a package would need to be changed to meet this guideline. If you think about it for a while, I'm sure you can come up with some. The case that Seth scripted was simply the most common one I could think of.

Q. I fixed my packages! Now what? A. Please email me (either in reply to this email on the mailing list, or in private) and let me know which packages you fixed.

Q. What about the packages owned by "orphan"? A. Well, it sure would be nice if a provenpackager could check these packages and fix them as appropriate, then let me know (via email). Thats the sort of thing that makes me feel like buying you a drink the next time our paths cross. But hey, if no one does it, I'll get to it eventually.

Q. What about new packages? A. All packages from this moment onward must meet this requirement. New packages, old packages, red packages, blue packages.

Q. I have another question which you did not answer here? A. Ask me, I'll do my best to answer.

Q. I'm confused by all of this? A. Sorry. Let me know what you don't understand and I'll try to make it clearer.

Q. Why are you always making me do things? A. Because I can! No, really, this is one of those "things we should have been doing all along", so we need to just bite the bullet and get it done.

Q. Hey you promised me cake, I read all this way! Where is my cake? A.

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        (.)
        .|.
        l7J
        | |
    _.--| |--._
 .-';  ;-'& ; &.
& &  ;  &   ; ;   \
\      ;    &   &_/
 F"""---...---"""J
 | | | | | | | | |
 J | | | | | | | F
  `---.|.|.|.---'

What? You thought the cake was a lie?

Okay. Here's the list of packages that I think might be affected by this. Reminder: You need to check these packages and fix any which need fixing, then email me and let me know which ones you checked/fixed. Thanks!

Ed.: please see the original posting for the list of packages, as it is quite long.

~spot"

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the exclusive and 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 (June 2010 - August 2010)

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

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 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: Pascal Calarco

Continuing from the recent announcement of new Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith, this past week saw one more story in the trade press on this. from PC World.

Fedora Gets New Leader (PC World)

Kara Schlitz forwarded a brief posting about Jared Smith's appointment in PC World:

"The Fedora Project will be getting a new leader next month, as Jared Smith takes over the helm from current head Paul Frields, Frields announced Tuesday on the Fedora mailing list.

Smith, who will become a Red Hat employee next month, has participated in the Fedora community since 2007, primarily devoting time to the project's infrastructure and documentation teams. He also helped build a free Voice Over IP-based audio conference system for Fedora developers, called Fedora Talk, and participated in Fedora-themed conferences."

The full post is available

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

Proven testers

At the QA weekly meeting of 2010-06-28, John Dulaney offered to work on combining the two proven testers pages (concerning joining the proven testers, and how to conduct testing) into a single page and provide a draft to the list for review. John subsequently submitted his draft. Adam Miller liked it.

Meanwhile, Adam Williamson proposed activating the proven testers group before Bodhi was changed to activate the requirement for proven tester feedback, as a way to make sure the process worked smoothly and get in some 'practice'. The response was generally positive. The proposal was, however, overtaken by events. Luke Macken announced the next day that a new version of Bodhi had been put in place which enabled the proven tester feedback requirement, so Adam quickly announced the activation of the proven testers group and asked members to start testing immediately.

He also promised to start the ball rolling on the mentoring process, and sent out a proposal the next day for a rough plan for proven tester mentoring. He suggested existing proven testers take sponsorship requests, ask the applicants to read the appropriate instructions, and then confirm that they are familiar with enabling updates-testing and posting feedback on updates, before sponsoring them into the proven testers group. Jesse Keating suggested asking applicants in general to take the initiative and start reading instructions and providing feedback, and link to some of their feedback on their application ticket, so their membership could be quickly approved as soon as a mentor got around to looking at the ticket. Adam thought this was a good idea, but felt that in practice it should be possible to personally pick up every current mentor request very quickly, given the number of requests and the number of existing proven testers.

Bob Lightfoot wrote about his proven tester testing process, in case it was of use to others, or anyone could suggest improvements for him. Till Maas suggested a simplication.

AutoQA

At the QA meeting, Will Woods reported that the AutoQA team was working on a helloworld test (a test test), which would exist to check that watchers and hooks - particularly the bodhi watcher and hook - work correctly. This is a prerequisite for the dependency check test, one of the major AutoQA priorities. Josef Skladanka said he had a test instance of the ResultsDB up and running on one of AutoQA's infrastructure machines, and had rewritten the initscripts and rpmlint tests to store their results in the database. He would continue to work on converting other tests. Kamil Paral announced that he had patched autoqa to use autotest labels correctly, which allows us to configure the actual running of tests in several ways - ensuring they are run on particular machine configurations. He pointed to a mailing list post with a more detailed explanation.

Triage metrics

At the Bugzappers weekly meeting of 2010-06-29, Jeff Raber updated his progress with triage metrics. He had created a wiki page to track his goals and progress, and had discussed some modifications to python-bugzilla with Will Woods. The group discussed the specific metrics Jeff was targeting, and made a few adjustments.

Request for old DeltaISOs

Andre Robatino asked for anyone who had old DeltaISO files he had provided for various releases to seed the corresponding torrents so he could retrieve them, for the purpose of creating an archive of all previous DeltaISOs, making it easier to reconstruct particular test releases from the past whenever this might prove useful.

VERIFIED Bugzilla status

Aaron Farnes proposed an update to the bug workflow wiki page regarding the VERIFIED state. James Laska reviewed and approved his changes, which were also discussed at the weekly meeting. Aaron made it clear that triagers and reporters should manually set the status when they checked that a pending update would resolve an issue, leaving the Bodhi update system or the maintainer to close the bug.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora 14 Schedule

John Poelstra has updated the Fedora 14 schedule as per the changes suggested by Noriko Mizumoto. Presently, translation and updation of the documentation in the earlier released branch is scheduled.

Translation File Archives Now Available

The complete set of translation files for a language can now be downloaded as an archive from translate.fedoraproject.org.

New Wiki Translation Policy

After gathering feedback from the Translation team, the newly drafted wiki translation process has been established as a policy by Ian Weller. Further, Tetsuya Morimoto suggested that for new pages marked for translation, the English content be copied automatically over when a new page link is clicked.

The new policy has also been added in the Translation Quick Start Guide.

Links for Untranslated Fedora Documents

As a result of an earlier discussion, the publican source has been modified to include a feature to display the list of the untranslated documents for a particular language in the respective language page on docs.fedoraproject.org. Ruediger Landmann has rebuilt the Fedora Documentation site to reflect this new feature.

New Members in FLP

Łukasz Jernaś (Polish), Dirgita (Indonesian) joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Custom GTK+ Theme

Marcus Moeller shared with the Design Team a custom GTK theme he is working on "I tried to make it look visually unique and eye friendly. It fits with the current GNOME icon set" about which Nelson Marques was very enthusiastic "My personal position is that any brand (such as fedora) should have a strong visual identity, which eventually brings up the theming" and also pointed to Martin Sourada's work on theming Fedora with Nodoka. Martin joined the opinion about a visual identity "I also think Fedora should have its own visual identity" while Nicu Buculei remained bitter and skeptical about such a possibility "In fact we go the other way, rejecting icon themes, GTK themes, notification themes or any other visual identity produced by the Design Team."

Better Hackergotchis

As an action item following the past week team IRC meeting, Jef van Schendel posted the development for hackergotchi ribbons and also wrote a blog post with a tutorial for using them. Also as an action point, Nicu Buculei wrote a long blog post with good practices for hackergotchi creation, examples and instructions, intended to make Planet Fedora a better looking place. Papadeas Pierros informed about his work in identifying and improving bad images "After compiling the lists (the ugly and the missing) I will make an generic email for each list and send to all owners.. thus we will provide assistance, point to guidelines or simple clear up."

Fedora Branding Fonts

Máirín Duffy assembled a wiki page collecting info for the intended change in Fedora branding fonts for character coverage "MgOpen Modata doesn't support accent marks very well. For example, I (Máirín) can't write my own name in MgOpen Modata" and move to consistence. After the weekly IRC meeting she announced the team's decision "At our team meeting today we decided to trial Comfortaa as the headline/titling font and Droid Sans as the body text font" which is going to be tested.

Fedora 14 Concept Decision

With the deadline reached, at the weekly IRC meeting the Design Team decided on the graphic concept for Fedora 14, which was announced by Máirín Duffy on the Design Team mailing list "I double- and triple-counted our votes today - each voter picked their top 3 concepts - and the winner is Kyle Baker's concept for Fedora 14 with 9 votes." The next step is turning this concept in an usable wallpaper image and including in into the Fedora 14 Alpha release to gather feedback.

Security Advisories

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

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

• avahi-0.6.25-7.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043820.html
• mediawiki-1.15.4-54.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043803.html
• mingw32-libtiff-3.9.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043769.html
• gcc-4.4.4-10.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043729.html
• cups-1.4.4-5.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043667.html
• libtiff-3.9.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043661.html
• libpng-1.2.44-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043637.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

• mediawiki-1.15.4-54.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043856.html
• mingw32-libtiff-3.9.4-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043835.html
• avahi-0.6.25-7.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043800.html
• mediawiki-1.15.3-53.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043799.html
• libtool-2.2.6-18.fc12.1 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043780.html
• gcc-4.4.4-10.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043781.html
• rpm-4.7.2-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043749.html
• libpng-1.2.44-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043736.html
• python-2.6.2-8.fc12 -http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043726.html
• bugzilla-3.4.7-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043716.html
• libtiff-3.9.4-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-July/043711.html