Fedora Weekly News Issue 288

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 288^[1] for the four weeks ending December 21, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue kicks off with announcements, including details on a GPG keysigning at the upcoming FUDCon in Blacksburg, VA USA, details on Fedora 16 for IBM System z 64bit official release, FUDCon LATAM 2012 in Venezuela, and much more. In Fedora In the News, we have eight articles from the trade press on Fedora and related news. In Ambassadors this week, helpful pointers to recent regional Ambassadors meetings, highlights from the mailing list, events coverage, and much more. This issue completes with the last month's worth of security advisories for Fedora 14, 15 and 16. Enjoy, and happy holidays, wherever you are in the world!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues^[2] 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^[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

Fedora Announcements are the place where you can find the major coverage from the Fedora Project including general announcements^[1], development announcements^[2] and Fedora Events^[3].

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

GPG Key Signing Event at FUDCon Blacksburg 2012

Nick Bebout announced^[1]:

"We are planning a GPG Key Signing event at FUDCon Blacksburg, which will be held on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 1600 (4pm). If you are interested in participating, please add your info^[2] so we can compile a list of participants and keys.

Thanks,

Nick"

Outage: Server reboots - 2011-12-21 22:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced^[1]:

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-12-21 22:00 UTC, which will last approximately 2 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at^[2] or run:

date -d '2011-12-21 22:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

We will rebooting some of our servers for new kernel and OS versions.
Each particular affected service should be only down for a short time,
but services may be unstable during the update window.

Affected Services:

Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
Smolt - http://smolts.org/
Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Unaffected services:

BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
GIT / Source Control
DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
Email system
Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
QA Services
Secondary Architectures
Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3073

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above.

Fedora 16 for IBM System z 64bit official release

Dan Horák announced^[1]:

"There was still a longer delay after the Fedora 16 release for the primary architectures than we would like to see, but at least we are faster than with Fedora 15 and so here we are.

As today, the Fedora IBM System z (s390x) Secondary Arch team proudly presents the Fedora 16 for IBM System z 64bit official release!

The links to the actual release are here:

http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/16/Fedora/s390x/

http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/16/Everything/s390x/os/

and obviously on all mirrors that mirror the secondary arch content.

The first directory contains the normal installation trees as well as one DVD ISO with the complete release.

Everything as usual contains, well, everything. :)

Additional information about known issues, the current progress and state for future release, where and how the team can be reached and just anything else IBM System z on Fedora related can be found here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/s390x/16

for architecture specific release notes, and

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/s390x

for the general information.

Thanks go out to everyone involved in making this happen!

Your Fedora/s390x Maintainers

-- Dan Horák, RHCE Senior Software Engineer, BaseOS

Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkyňova 99, 612 45 Brno"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-December/003026.html

A change in Fedora's policy regarding Public Domain

Tom Callaway announced^[1]:

"In consultation with Red Hat Legal and the Fedora Board, I have implemented a chance to Fedora's policy regarding software marked as being in the Public Domain. The new policy is as follows:

Works which are clearly marked as being in the Public Domain, and for which no evidence is known to contradict this statement, are treated in Fedora as being in the Public Domain, on the grounds that the intentions of the original creator are reflected by such a use, even if due to regional issues, it may not have been possible for the original creator to fully abandon all of their their copyrights on the work and place it fully into the Public Domain. If you believe that a work in Fedora which is marked as being in the Public Domain is actually available under a copyright license, please inform us of this fact with details, and we will immediately investigate the claim.

The wiki home for this new policy is here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines#Public_Domain

This policy is effective immediately. If you have had a package rejected by Fedora because it was in the Public Domain and we were unable to determine the validity of the Public Domain declaration, the declaration was deemed to be incomplete, or there were jurisdictional issues with the declaration, please feel free to open new package reviews or contact legal at fedoraproject.org to lift any FE-Legal blocks.

If you have questions about this change in policy, feel free to email me directly or send a mail to the Fedora Legal mailing list <legal at lists.fedoraproject.org> (note: it is moderated and gets a metric ton of spam, so I probably won't see it if you're not subscribed).

Thanks,

~tom

-- Fedora Project"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-December/003025.html

Announcing FUDCon LATAM 2012 in Venezuela / Call for bids for FUDCon LATAM and FUDCon APAC 2012

Jared K. Smith announcedCite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content:

"It's my pleasure to announce the winning bid for FUDCon Latam 2012 as Margarita Island, Venezuela. FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a premier Fedora event that is held several times a year in different regions of the world. For more information on premier Fedora events, see the Fedora wiki^[1]. As you might imagine, choosing the winning bid was a difficult decision to make, as both bidding teams have put together very compelling bids. I'd like to publicly thank both teams for their hard work and effort.

I would also like to take this opportunity to officially open the bidding process for FUDCon EMEA 2012 (for Europe, Middle East, and Africa), as well as re-open the bidding for FUDCon APAC 2012. FUDCon APAC 2012 will likely be held between March 1st and May 31st, and FUDCon EMEA will likely be held between September 1st and October 31st.

All bids for both of these FUDCon events should be submitted by January 11, 2012. If you have any questions or concerns regarding FUDCon events, I invite you to subscribe to the FUDCon planning mailing list^[2].

Fedora 14 End of Life

Dennis Gilmore announced^[1]:

"As of 09 December 2011, Fedora 14 has reached its end of life for updates and support. No further updates, including security updates, will be available for Fedora 14. A previous reminder was sent on November 8th^[2].

Fedora 15 will continue to receive updates until approximately one month after the release of Fedora 17. The maintenance schedule of Fedora releases is documented on the Fedora Project wiki^[3]. The Fedora Project wiki also contains instructions^[4] on how to upgrade from a previous release of Fedora to a version receiving updates.

Dennis"

Re-appointment to the Fedora Board

Jared K. Smith announced^[1]:

"The Fedora Board consists of five elected seats and four appointed seats. In this elections cycle, there were two openings for appointed Board seats and two opening for elected Board seats. As part of the normal Board succession process^[2], one Board appointment is made before Board elections and the other is made after the election cycle.

I'm happy to announce that I've re-appointed David Nalley to serve in seat A2 on the Fedora Board for another full one-year cycle. (See the Board History^[3] page on the wiki for a list of the various Board seats.) David has been very active on the Fedora Board over the past year, and has shown a strong commitment to the Fedora community and to Fedora's underlying principles. Please join with me in welcoming David back to the Fedora Board for another term.

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader

Outage: Fedorahosted.org migration - 2011-12-14 22:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced^[1]:

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-12-14 22:00 UTC, which will last approximately 2 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at ^[2] or run:

date -d '2011-12-14 22:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

We are migrating fedorahosted.org and all its services to a new RHEL6 instance. We will be converting data over to work with the newer trac in RHEL6. All existing trac tickets, scm data and history, and wiki pages will be preserved.

lists.fedorahosted.org will also be unavailable during this migration.

Affected Services:

Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/

Unaffected Services:

BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
GIT / Source Control
DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
Email system
Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.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: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3059

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above.

Outage: list server migration - 2011-12-12 22:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced^[1]:

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-12-12 20:00 UTC, which will last approximately 1 hour.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at^[2] or run:

date -d '2011-12-12 22:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

We are migrating our primary lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list hub to a new RHEL6 instance. The web interface will be unavailable during the migration window for archives or admin functions. Mail sent during the outage will be queued and sent when the outage is complete.

Affected Services:

Fedoraproject.org mailing lists - https://lists.fedoraproject.org/

Unaffected Services:

BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
GIT / Source Control
DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
Email system
Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.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: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3053

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above.

Election Results: Fedora Board, FAmSCo, and FESCo

Jared K. Smith announced:

"The latest round of Fedora Elections has concluded, and I am pleased to announce the results for elected seats on the Fedora Board and FESCo and FAmSCo. The results are as follows:

Fedora Board

There were two open seats on the Fedora Board this election cycle. A total of 224 ballots were cast. Due to the system of range voting that we use in Fedora elections, this means that each of the four candidates could receive up to 896 votes (224 ballots multiplied by four candidates).

Votes | Candidate

638 | Jaroslav Reznik
557 | Christoph Wickert

334 | Larry Cafiero
228 | Robert 'Bob' Jensen

The two candidates receiving the most votes were Jaroslav and Christoph. I'd like to welcome Christoph to the Fedora Board, and welcome Jaroslav back for a second term. Both Jaroslav and Christoph will server for a one-year term.

* * * * * * * *

FAmSCo

All seven seats on FAmSCo were up for re-election this cycle. There were a total of 104 ballots cast in the FAmSCo election. Each of the eleven candidates could receive up to 1144 votes (104 ballots multiplied by eleven candidates).

Votes | Candidate

615 | Christoph Wickert
591 | Neville A. Cross
534 | Igor Soares
439 | Clint Savage
377 | Zoltan Hoppar
348 | Gerard Braad
339 | Caius Chance

287 | Truong Anh Tuan
243 | Shakthi Kannan
236 | Buddhika Chandradeepa Kurera
132 | Rejaul Islam

Let me be the first to welcome Christoph, Neville, Igor, Clint, Zoltan, Geraard, and Caius to the new Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee.

* * * * * * * *

FESCo

There were four FESCo seats up for election this cycle. A total of 225 ballots were cast in the FESCo election. Each of the six candidates could receive up to 1350 votes (225 ballots multiplied by six candidates).

Votes | Candidate

778 | Marcela Mašláňová  	
773 | Miloslav Trmač
642 | Matthew Garrett
526 | Jon Ciesla

454 | Justin M. Forbes
358 | John Dulaney

The top four candidates were Marcela, Miroslav, Matthew, and Jon. Each will server a full two-term position on the Fedora Engineering Steering committee.

* * * * * * * *

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have previously served on the Fedora Board or FAmSCo or FESCo for their hard work and perseverance. I'd also like to thank all the candidates and volunteers who participated in this round of elections. I look forward to working with each of these people as we strive to make Fedora better over the months and years ahead.

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

</references/>

Reminder: Fedora elections end December 5th

Jared K. Smith announcedCite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content:

"If you haven't yet taken the time to vote in the current Fedora elections, I encourage you to take the time to vote before the voting period ends at the end of the day (UTC time) on December 5th. This election cycle has elections for open positions on the Ambassadors steering committee (FAmSCo), the Engineering steering committee (FESCo), and the Fedora Board.

Please visit https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/ to vote. For more information on the elections, refer to

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora 16

Ben Liblit announced^[1]:

"The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI) is now available for Fedora 16. CBI^[2] is an ongoing research effort to find and fix bugs in the real world. We distribute specially modified versions of popular open source software packages. These special versions monitor their own behavior while they run, and report back how they work (or how they fail to work) in the hands of real users like you. Even if you've never written a line of code in your life, you can help make things better for everyone simply by using our special bug-hunting packages.

We currently offer instrumented versions of Evolution, The GIMP, GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Liferea, Nautilus, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, and SPIM. Download at http://research.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/downloads/. Or just download and install^[3] to automatically configure your system to use the CBI repository.

It's that easy! Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! The more of you there are, the more bugs we can find.

We still offer CBI packages for earlier releases as well, going all the way back to Fedora 1. When and if you decide to upgrade to Fedora 16, we'll be ready for you. Until then, your participation remains valuable even on older distributions.

-- Dr. Ben, the CBI guy"

Announcing Ask Fedora: Community Knowledge Base and Support Forum

Rahul Sundaram announced^[1]:

"Hi

As part of the release of Fedora 16 (Verne) today, I am proud to announce the launch of Ask Fedora^[2]. Ask Fedora is a community knowledge base and support forum for the Fedora community. You can ask any questions related to Fedora and you do not need to a separate id to post questions or answer them.

You can use any openid to login including Google or Wordpress. You can use your Fedora identity as well (fasname.id.fedoraproject.org). Refer to^[3] for more details.

Ask Fedora is powered by Askbot^[4], a Django based web application and upstream developers, especially Evgeny Fadeev, Adolfo Fitoria, NoahY and several others have very helpful and deserve special credit for being very responsive, collaborating with us regularly by fixing bugs, adding features and reviewing changes.

The goal of Ask Fedora is to be the best place for community support in Fedora and integrate tightly with the rest of the Fedora infrastructure. Refer to^[5] and get involved. If you are a Python/ Django programmer, we would love to have your participation. Join us!

Thanks to everyone who helped out including Prasad.J.Pandit (PJP), Kevin Fenzi, Toshio Ernie Kuratomi, Matthias Runge, Praveen Kumar, Arun SAG, Ratnadeep Debnath, Lakshmi Narasimhan, Jitesh Shah, Sayan Chowdhury, Raghu Udiyar, Jishnu, Hrishi and Rag Sagar for helping in packaging, fixing bugs and implementing new features and setting up the infrastructure. We couldn't have done without your enthusiastic participation.

Rahul"

Announcing the release of Fedora 16

Robyn Bergeron announced^[1]:

"The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 16 ("Verne").

Fedora is a leading-edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. Fedora 16 brings exciting new features for desktop users, for system administrators, and for developers. Highlights of these features can be found below. If the mere mention of Fedora 16 is all you need, download options can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

For detailed information, see the release notes: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Release_Notes/

Dedication

During the preparation of Fedora 16, the computing world lost one of its great contributors: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie co-invented Unix and the C language. He also co-authored The C Programming Language, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.

A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you, Dennis.

What's New in Fedora 16?

For desktop users: a journey to the center of the desktop...

GNOME 3.2, the latest update to the most popular desktop environment,

brings new features, including:

    o System Settings gains an "Online Accounts" panel, which provides

a central point for managing online accounts like Google, Facebook, etc.

    o A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy,

Evolution and the new "Online Accounts" settings panel

    o A new document management application provides a simpler

alternative to traditional file management for both local and "in-cloud" documents.

KDE 4.7, the most recent version of this feature-rich desktop

environment, brings substantial updates, including:

    o DigiKam 2.0 adds face detection and recognition, geotagging and more.
    o An updated Plasma Workspaces window manager (KWin) makes KDE

better suited for mobile devices, and also adds improvements for desktop users.

    o A new shutdown dialog allows users with multiple operating

systems to select the OS to boot next.

For developers: Twenty thousand lines in C...

Perl 5.14, a new version of Perl, brings many enhancements, including

Unicode 6.0 support.

GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing

with the C internals of GCC.

D2: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest

version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.

For system administrators: around the world in eighty columns...

GRUB2: This leap forward allows better configuration options and

better support for non-x86 architectures.

New system account ID numbering: Fedora 16 starts user IDs at 1000,

providing more room for system accounts and making it easier for administrators not have services run as root. This improves interoperability with other Linux distributions that start user IDs at 1000.

Chrony: Chrony provides network time protocol (NTP) client and server

pieces which are more tolerant of unstable clocks and Internet connections which are not always on.

ext4 driver mounts ext2 and ext3: Fedora 16 uses the ext4 driver to

mount ext2 and ext3 file systems, reducing the size of the kernel code.

Improved virtualization tools:

    o Fedora 16 provides improvements to virtual networking, making

large deployments easier.

    o Virt-manager guest inspection is a unique-to-Fedora tool allowing

read-only access to guest file systems, applications, and Windows registry.

    o Fedora 16 provides locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk

being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.

Cloud goodies galore:

    o Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.

    o OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a

collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.

    o Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high

availability for cloud environments.

    o HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the

filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.

This is only a taste of what is included in Fedora 16. A more detailed list can be found at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList

Download and Upgrade

Fedora 16 is not science fiction. It is here right now: http://get.fedoraproject.org

To launch Fedora 16 instances in the cloud, refer to: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_images

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading

Fedora 16 full release notes and guides for several languages are available at: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/

Fedora 16 common bugs are documented at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs

Fedora Spins

Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. They can be found at: http://spins.fedoraproject.org

Contributing

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!

Contact information

Journalists and reporters can find additional information at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Press

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-November/003011.html

Reminder: Fedora 14 end of life on 2011-12-08

Dennis Gilmore announced^[1]:

"Greetings.

This is a reminder email about the end of life process for Fedora 14.

Fedora 14 will reach end of life on 2011-12-08, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 16, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 14 collection.

Please see^[2] for more information on upgrading from Fedora 14 to a newer release.

Dennis"

Nomination period for Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAmSCo elections closes Nov. 5

Robyn Bergeron announced^[1]:

"Greetings and salutations,

It is time for yet another edition of.... "Robyn's Fedora Public Service Announcements" :)

I'd like to give you a friendly reminder that the nomination period for the upcoming Fedora elections will be closing promptly TOMORROW, Saturday, November 5, 2011, at 23:59:59 UTC (US 19:59:59 EDT, 16:59:59 PDT).

Full information about the elections, including the elections schedule, and links to where one may nominate, can be seen here^[2]

This election cycle will fill the following seats for a one-year period:

Fedora Board: 2 elected seats, as well as 2 appointed seats
FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee): 4 elected seats
FAmSCo (Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee): 7 elected seats

Running concurrently with the nomination period (and, hence, closing at the end of the nomination period), the elections questionnaire is also open for adding questions which will be posed to candidates. Following the closing of the questionnaire, candidates will be asked to answer questions relevant to the position for which they are seeking election.

Questions may be added here^[3], and, again, will also close on Saturday, November 5, 2011.

If you are planning on seeking election to one of these bodies, please remember to complete your self-nomination *prior* to the deadline. Additionally, if you have a fellow contributor who had indicated interest and has not yet self-nominated, be a Friend and remind them to act promptly.

Thanks!

-Robyn"

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement^[1] list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements

Policy or process changes that affect developers.
Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
Tools changes that affect developers.
Schedule changes
Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements

Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
Discussion
Anything else not mentioned above

↑ https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce

Heads-up: GIMP 2.7/2.8 in Rawhide, license change to (L)GPLv3+

Nils Philippsen announced^[1]:

"Hi,

I just finished with the Fedora 17 feature page for GIMP 2.8^[2] and built gimp-2.7.4 into Rawhide.

GIMP changed its licensing to GPLv3+ (app, included plugins) and LGPLv3+ (libraries) from the 2.7 development versions on. I've checked dependent packages and found that all are listed with compatible licenses in their spec files (CeCill v2, GPLv2+, GPLv3+, Public Domain). One minor licensing issues was introduced with this change, namely with poppler, used for importing PDFs and GPLv2 only. For the moment, GIMP packages from 2.7.x on won't use poppler, but the PostScript plugin for importing PDFs. This is a workaround until the next stable version poppler 0.20 which will be based off xpdf-3.03 (or later), thusly GPLv2/GPLv3 dual-licensed and compatible again.

While APIs used by external plugins should be backwards-compatible, I'll rebuild packages using GIMP libraries (i.e. having GIMP plugins) against the current (not yet stable) version 2.7.4 and against the stable version when it's there, just to be on the safe side. These are the affected (source) packages:

GREYCstoration: deebs
gimp-fourier-plugin: fabiand
gimp-lqr-plugin: slankes
gimp-resynthesizer: ewan
gimpfx-foundry: rvinyard
gutenprint: twaugh - jpopelka
mathmap: rnorwood
ufraw: nphilipp
xsane: nphilipp

I plan to do the first round of rebuilds tomorrow, so if there's any reason why I shouldn't rebuild one of these, or you want to rebuild a package by yourself, speak up ;-).

Nils"

evolution-data-server 3.3.3 soname version bump in rawhide

Milan Crha announced^[1]:

"Hi,

Just a note that the upcoming release of evolution-data-server 3.3.3 contains soname version bumps for libcamel and libedatacal, as of today. The release is planned for the next week.

I'll rebuild broken deps packages the next day after the update lands to the rawhide, at least those I've commit rights to (it'll be definitely sooner than the last time). Bye, Milan"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2011-December/000871.htmll

An update on critical path packages

Bill Nottingham announced^[1]:

"As of this week, bodhi is using the Fedora Package Database to determine the critical path package list.

As part of this effort, the critical path package lists have been regenerated for Fedora 15, Fedora 16, and rawhide. Various errors in the generation process have been fixed, causing the critical path package list to change.

If you have any questions about why a package you maintain is or isn't in the critical path, feel free to open a ticket with rel-eng at:

https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/

Bill, on behalf of rel-eng & FESCo"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2011-December/000868.html

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, 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 (December 2011 - May 2012)

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

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.

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^[1].

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/

HP's WebOS plan modeled after Red Hat's Fedora

Rahul Sundaram posted^[1] an article from ZDNet on HP's development of a community around WebOS:

"What’s the governance model? HP will use an open governance model and has looked extensively at Red Hat’s Fedora model. The goal is to be open, but prevent forks. Under the Fedora model, contributions are evaluated by the community"

The full discussion thread is available^[2].

Five years of open-source Java: Freedom isn't (quite) free

Rahul Sundaram posted^[1] an interesting review of the past five years of Java, as an open source project:

"Two years after Java was delivered under the GPL we saw the first release of the Sun-led OpenJDK project for a Java Development Kit built using free and open-source code; that spawned the IcedT project lead by Red Hat, to build an even freer OpenJDK - the OpenJDK had contained a class-path exception to exempt from the GPL certain portions of the code that Sun or others still owned and open sourcers couldn't touch. A version of IcedTea shipped with Fedora in 2008 that was compatible with Sun's official spec"