Dear CentOS enthusiast,

I hope you are all well. I know that this is a very difficult time for all of you, and that you likely have other things on your mind than CentOS, so I'll try to make it interesting this month.

In this edition:

News

We have had a fairly busy month in the CentOS project, with some exciting new developments on the contributor front.

Early in the month, Fabian announced a new CBS/SIG signing process. If you are in a SIG, or contribute in some other way, you'll want to read all about the updates to the workflow, which should make things a lot easier for you. And just a few days ago they announced that it was live, and tested, and ready for you to use. If you have questions, you should drop by the #centos-devel IRC channel.

Back in January, we talked about the decision of a Git forge platform. The CPE - Community Platform Engineering - team, which does a lot of the infrastructure work for Fedora and CentOS, listed requirements for selecting a platform that Fedora and CentOS could agree on, for shared collaboration. That decision has now been made, and you can read up on all the details in our blog post from the end of last week.

Over the past few months, areguera and others have been working on updates to our primary centos.org website, and a few days ago announced a staging website where you can see the progress of that project. See www.stg.centos.org for how the new website is proposed to look, and take your comments (or, better yet, your contributions) back to the centos-devel mailing list.

The process to propose changes to the logo and our visual identity continues, and you should see THIS THREAD (and particularly responses thereto) for updates to how that process is going.

And I want to draw attention to the thread about Unshipped -devel packages in CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream which may address a concern that many of you have had in recent months.

Every week for several months now, Aoife Moloney has been posting the CPE Weekly to the centos-devel mailing list, keeping us appraised of what's going on in the Community Platform Engineering team to support the work of the CentOS project. This covers major projects like the data center move, and the AAA project, as well as daily CI/CD status and other smaller ongoing maintenance efforts. I strongly encourage you to read that each week, for some background on what's involved in keeping a project of this size moving along.

Finally, I want to make mention of the amazing work that's doing on in the Supercomputing community - much of which is powered by CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux - to combat the corona virus using the power of HPC to simulate and test possible vaccines and cures. And if you want to participate in this effort with your spare CentOS computing power, have a look at the Folding@Home project which harnesses your spare CPU cycles to power the complex simulations of virus protein molecules.

Releases and updates

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during March:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during March:

Wed Mar 4 2020: CESA-2020:0702 Important CentOS 6 xerces-c Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035653.html

Wed Mar 4 2020: CESA-2020:0704 Important CentOS 7 xerces-c Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035654.html

Wed Mar 4 2020: CESA-2020:0703 Important CentOS 7 http-parser Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035655.html

Tue Mar 10 2020: CESA-2020:0726 Important CentOS 6 sudo Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035656.html

Tue Mar 10 2020: CESA-2020:0775 Important CentOS 6 qemu-kvm Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035657.html

Thu Mar 12 2020: CESA-2020:0790 Important CentOS 6 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035659.html

Wed Mar 18 2020: CESA-2020:0839 Important CentOS 7 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035660.html

Wed Mar 18 2020: CESA-2020:0850 Moderate CentOS 7 python-pip Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035663.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0853 Important CentOS 7 zsh Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035665.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0855 Important CentOS 7 tomcat Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035669.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0851 Moderate CentOS 7 python-virtualenv Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035680.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0913 Important CentOS 7 libvncserver Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035681.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0897 Important CentOS 7 icu Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035682.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0905 Important CentOS 7 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035683.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0815 Important CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035684.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0914 Important CentOS 6 thunderbird Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035685.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0816 Important CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035686.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0912 Important CentOS 6 tomcat6 Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035687.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0896 Important CentOS 6 icu Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035688.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0892 Important CentOS 6 zsh Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035689.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CESA-2020:0898 Important CentOS 6 python-imaging Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035690.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during March:

Tue Mar 10 2020: CEBA-2020:0749 CentOS 6 nfs-utils BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035658.html

Wed Mar 18 2020: CEBA-2020:0849 CentOS 7 sos BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035661.html

Wed Mar 18 2020: CEBA-2020:0845 CentOS 7 resource-agents BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035662.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0847 CentOS 7 binutils BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035664.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0846 CentOS 7 systemd BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035666.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0844 CentOS 7 sssd BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035667.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0848 CentOS 7 pcp BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035668.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0854 CentOS 7 subscription-manager BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035670.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0836 CentOS 7 libvirt BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035671.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0833 CentOS 7 sysstat BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035672.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0852 CentOS 7 rsyslog BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035673.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0843 CentOS 7 389-ds-base BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035674.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0837 CentOS 7 flatpak BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035675.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0840 CentOS 7 augeas BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035676.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0838 CentOS 7 lftp BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035677.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0835 CentOS 7 firewalld BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035678.html

Wed Mar 25 2020: CEBA-2020:0841 CentOS 7 kmod BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2020-March/035679.html

Track CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream package updates at feeds.centos.org.

Events

As you may already know, the upcoming Red Hat Summit has been converted to a virtual experience. What you might not know is that it is free to register for it. We'll be there, with video content, live "ask the expert" sessions, and a virtual "booth" chat room where you can drop by and ask questions, or learn about what we're working on.

The virtual event will be April 28-29, at redhat.com/summit. Afterwards, all of the CentOS content we produce will also be available on our YouTube channel.

Beyond Red Hat Summit, we are carefully monitoring the coronavirus situation, and will decide on future events once the danger has passed. We're looking into how we can put on some virtual events over the coming months, particularly in cooperation with our friends in the Fedora project. If you're interested in participating, please do let us know.

Our in-person events are still very important to us, and we want to do more of them, not fewer. But we also have no interest in putting our community at risk. So, stay healthy, and stay tuned.

SIG Reports

CentOS SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are the lifeblood of the CentOS project, and the best place to get involved. These groups work on specific topics or technologies on top of CentOS. You can learn more about SIGs, and see which ones are currently available, at https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup

Most SIGs hold periodic meetings on the #centos-meeting IRC channel, on Freenode, where they discuss what they're working on, what challenges they are facing, and where help is needed. Minutes are posted publicly after the meeting, so you can catch up on what was discussed.

Storage SIG meeting minutes, 2020-03-03 - https://centos.org/minutes/2020/March/centos-meeting.2020-03-03-10.03.html

SCLo SIG sync-up minutes, 2020-03-03 - https://centos.org/minutes/2020/March/centos-meeting.202 0-03-03-14.01.html

Virt SIG meeting minutes, 2020-03-03 - https://centos.org/minutes/2020/March/centos-meeting.2020-03-03-15.00.html

SCLo SIG sync-up minutes, 2020-03-17 - https://centos.org/minutes/2020/March/centos-meeting.2020-03-17-14.00.html