FWN/Issue294

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Fedora Weekly News : Issue 294

Welcome to the Fedora Weekly News End of April 2012 Issue 294!

The Issue 294 covers the tide of the Fedora Election 2012 and the community awareness about the involvement at the election with few fresh set of rules and guidelines. The schedule of the election has been announced by the project leader. More over the nomination period will be open soon after the bunch of the burning question for the candidates will be submitted by May 8, 2012. At the development precinct of Fedora, the outstanding news covers the new of exiv2-0.23 and easyfix project.

Fedora in the news- the residence beat of trade press and Fedora Marketing list wrap up with the news Will Fedora End Linux Distro Naming? and Fedora- one of the Five Best Linux Distributions where it seems that Fedora Community need extra attention at the census.

Recent issues of FWN are now being published to Fedora Insight. Insight offers RSS features, multimedia capabilities and more, beyond the mailshot/wiki FWN you have come to know and love. Try it out, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

Fedora Project is the right place for you and you can simply show your interest 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, Rashadul Islam

Announcements

Fedora Announcements are the place where you can find the major coverage from the Fedora Project including general announcements, development announcements and Fedora Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Breaking News of the Week

New FAmSCo election guidelines

Christoph Wickert on Thu Apr 26 11:19:10 UTC 2012 announced,

"after months of - sometimes controversial - discussion I am am happy to announce the new FAmSCo election guidelines . For those of you, who did not follow the discussion, here is a brief summary of the three most important changes:

More continuity

Instead of electing all seats once a year, we follow the example of the Fedora Board and FESCo and elect half of the committee every 6 months or with every release of Fedora. FAmSCo will not change over sudden and new members can easily catch up with their new duties by learning from others.

Easier filling of vacant seats

Every committee is in danger of members becoming inactive. This can happen to all of us for various reasons such as our dayjobs or personal problems. Under the old guidelines , we had to wait until only 3 members left - even with 2 left the committee is hardly operational - and then call a supplementary election - which never happened even though we had only 4 active members. Now we are filling vacant seat when necessary, either with runner-up candidates from the previous elections or by appointing new members.

Wider electorate

The ambassadors represent the whole Fedora Project, this is why now not only ambassadors are eligible to vote for FAmSCo, but everybody who has signed the Contributors License Agreement and is member of (at least) one other group in the Fedora Account System (FAS) is allowed to vote. This will not only strengthen FAmSCo's position but also help candidates who are active in other groups of the Fedora project.

Last but not least the guidelines have been massively cleaned up.

We think that the new guidelines are a big improvement and want them to come into effect as soon as possible. Therefor we will have a special election for Fedora 18 (the next regular elections were scheduled for F19). All 7 seats in FAmSCo are open for election. In order to make the transition to the new alternating terms, the top 4 vote-getters will serve 2 Fedora releases, the bottom 3 will have to run for re-election after one release.

More about the upcoming ambassadors elections to come later this week as part of the general Fedora 18 elections announcement. Please help us getting a better, stronger and more active FAmSCo by casting your votes.

If you have feedback or questions, please don't hesitate to ask. We are looking for your input on the Fedora ambassadors mailing list."

Fedora Elections: General information, and questionnaire opening.

Robyn Bergeron-Fedora Project Leader on Fri Apr 27 11:52:50 UTC 2012 announced,

"It is once again time for election season to begin. As noted in the elections schedule, the elections questionnaire is now open to populate with questions for candidates, and will close on May 8th. The elections nomination period will begin AFTER the questionnaire period has closed.

You may add your burning questions for candidates to answer here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F18_elections_questionnaire

The following seats are available in this election:

• Fedora Project Board: 3 seats
• FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee): 5 seats
• FAmSCo (Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee): 7 seats

Please take note of the following changes for this election:

• All questions for the questionnaire must be submitted by May 8th,

prior to the beginning of nominations. As seen in the schedule above, the nomination period does not start until May 9th.

• As noted on announce-list, FAmSCo is electing all 7 seats this

cycle, with the goal of having staggered elections similar to the Board and FESCo. Additionally, voting eligibility has been widened to allow anyone who has signed the FPCA AND is a member of at least one additional non-FPCA/CLA group. (In other words: No longer just ambassadors, but those part of other teams as well.)

Full election information may be seen here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections

Participating in these bodies are one of many ways to contribute to Fedora; I encourage you to consider running, or to urge those you believe are excellent candidates to run. Additionally, your contributions are welcomed in helping to keep the elections running smoothly; volunteers are needed to help collect questionnaire answers from candidates, as well as for scheduling and moderating town halls. If you are interested in helping with those efforts, please contact John Rose.

And a big thank you! to John for coordinating the elections thus far, your efforts are very much appreciated."

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement 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

exiv2-0.23 coming soon

Rex Dieter on Wed Apr 25 13:07:31 UTC 2012 announced,

"I plan on importing exiv2-0.23 into rawhide soon'ish. It includes an ABI bump, so dependent packages will require rebuilding, including:

• calligra
• darktable
• entangle
• geeqie
• gipfel
• gnome-color-manager
• gnome-commander
• gpscorrelate
• gthumb
• gwenview
• hugin
• immix
• kde-runtime
• krename
• libextractor
• libgexiv2
• libkexiv2
• luminance-hdr
• merkaartor
• oyranos
• pyexiv2
• rawstudio
• strigi
• ufraw

I'll take care of kicking off a round of rebuilds for these."

Announcing easyfix

Pierre-Yves Chibon on Thu Apr 26 09:12:28 UTC 2012 announced

"Good news everyone (© Farnsworth),

The easyfix project is now live:

As a new-comers, you will be able to find a list of projects which have bugs/requests considered to be easy to work on (ie: you do not need a deep understanding of the project to fix/implement it). The projects are divers and the tickets broad : from fixing typo, add a link in a template (dev) to add a node to nagios monitoring (sysadmin) via making the fedoraproject.org page w3c valid (websites). So everyone should be able to find for his taste.

As upstream, you will have a way to attract new-comers to your project and fixing easier tasks while you focus on the harder/more complex one ;-)

Easyfix gathers the tickets from fedorahosted and bugzilla. If your project hosted on fedorahosted.org and you would like to have it included, the instruction are on the wiki: If you have bugzilla ticket which you consider easy to fix (remember, easy for a new-comer != easy for you!), feel free to add the 'EasyFix' keyword to the bugzilla ticket. Hope this helps..."

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 (March 2012 - May 2012)

• 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: Jason Brooks

Will Fedora End Linux Distro Naming?

Jason Brooks posted:

"Linux distro names started to get 'weird' when Ubuntu arrived on the scenes with Weirdly Wacky African-inspired Animal names. Other distros, notably Fedora have taken a more democratic approach where community members vote on the release name, but that could soon change.

"'This cycle, the Board is also asking contributors to let us know if we should continue to have release names for future Fedora releases,' Fedora developer Toshio Kuratomi wrote."

The full article is available .

Five Best Linux Distributions

Jason Brooks posted the results of a recent Lifehacker reader poll:

"Fedora updates every six months, much like some of the other popular distros, but you'll find the community behind Fedora tends to stay on the cutting edge when it comes to platform updates, driver updates, and application updates. it's fast and it's stable—but be ready to start troubleshooting when something you've just installed breaks down."

The full article is available.