Fedora Weekly News Issue 204

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 204[1] for the week ending November 29, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We start this week's issue off with a couple additional Fedora 12 reviews to highlight, and also lots of Fedora Project Election information to inform and engage the user community! In news from the Fedora Planet this week, comparing the Nokia Maemo and Google Android platforms, thoughts on sustainable open source engineering, and a review of the 0.4 Eclipse Linux Tools. In the Quality Assurance beat, much detail on this past week's QA team activities, and an interesting Fedora 12 QA retrospective. Ambassadors news this week gives us an event report from the recent New York State Association for Technology and Computers in Education meeting. In Translation happenings, 0-day Fedora 12 translation polishing, and new members to the Fedora Localization Project for Italian, Sinhala and German. The Art/Design beat shows off discussion on an interactive design hackfest and wrapup of screenshots for a Fedora Game Spin. This issue wraps up with security patches released last week for Fedora 10, 11 and 12. Please enjoy FWN 204!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[2]. 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[1], development announcements[2] and Events[3].

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

More Fedora 12 Reviews

Last week, we highlighted several Fedora 12 reviews from around the globe. Here are a few more than came in over the past week:

Distrowatch, "First look at Fedora 12" [1]

Linux Planet "Fedora 12 pushes bleeding edge of Linux networking" [2]

FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST

Fedora Project Election Town Halls

There are a number of high-profile and important elections for the Fedora Project leadership in process right now, and there's lots on the wiki to inform the user community on the candidates[1]. See the linked page for a log of town hall discussions, and upcoming town halls[2] through December 3rd! Who can vote? Check out the Fedora Elections Guide![3]

FEDORA EVENTS

Fedora events are the 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

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]





Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora[1] - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Gerard Braad installed[1] the Maemo 5 SDK on Fedora 12. However, there were a few minor quirks with the installation process to be aware of.

Steven Moix compared[2] the Maemo platform (Nokia N900) with Android (Hero).

Richard W.M. Jones decided to take a look[3] into the Fedora and Ubuntu Live CDs to see if it was possible "to quickly create a Fedora or Ubuntu “all-defaults” virtual machine." Part 2 continues[4] with some optimization that drastically reduce the time taken to install (one 16 minutes operation in particular ends up taking 2 1/2 minutes after optimization).

Andrew Overholt announced[5] release 0.4.0 of the Eclipse Linux Tools, complete with SystemTap call graphs, GProf integration and better autotools support.

John Palmier explained[6] "why do we care about push messaging"? (in the form of a comic strip). This is all in preparation for a presentation on AMQP and qpid for the upcoming FUDCon.

Karsten Wade discussed[7] "building a business around sustainable open source engineering". Karsten wanted to "lay out a definition for sustainable open source engineering, provide some examples you may not have thought of, and find out who else is doing a good job at it (or trying to, at the very least!)"

Mike McGrath says[8]: "I'm happy to announce today we finally have context based sponsorship listings. What does this mean? Well, when you go to http://fedoraproject.org/ you end up hitting one of several reverse proxy servers. These hosts are located all over the world by different hosting providers."

Pavol Rusnak took a look[9] at community engagement in the OpenSUSE and Fedora communities. Many pie graphs ensued.

Ray Strode talked[10] about the point in the bootup process where it transitions from Plymouth to X. "f you haven’t seen it, when boot up finishes, plymouth settles down the boot splash to a transitionable animation frame, then the mouse pointer shows up, and GDM’s background cross fades in while the login window maps and expands to show frequently logged in users. In the best case, this transition all happens without any flicker, resolution changes, black intermediate screens, or console text showing up."

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, and no Test Day is currently planned for this week. 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[1].

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-11-23. The full log is available[2]. James Laska noted that a common bugs page entry had been added[3] to cover the known issue with preupgrade and free space in the /boot partition, and Rui He had been working to update the preupgrade test cases to catch similar problems in future[4].

James Laska admitted that he had not yet sent out the request for feedback for the Fedora 12 QA retrospective, but promised to do it soon. John Poelstra asked whether the group would be interested in a project-wide retrospective at the upcoming FUDCon; James offered to discuss the idea with John after the meeting.

The group discussed the question of privilege escalation testing, following the PackageKit installation permission controversy[5]. James Laska wanted to discuss the plan Tom 'spot' Callaway had proposed via a blog post[6] and create a test plan based around it. Adam Williamson felt it was too early to begin planning testing, since Tom's blog post was only a proposal, and there was no official policy or guideline for privilege escalation issues on which a test plan could be based. Adam was also worried about defining the scope of testing, as checking every package in the distribution would be impractical given the size of the QA team. The group agreed that for any useful testing to be done, two things would be needed: a project-wide policy or set of policies and guidelines, and a tool for generating a list of packages which are capable of privilege escalation. Adam agreed to start a discussion of this on the development and security mailing lists. Will Woods offered to work on the tool for identifying escalation-capable packages.

James Laska brought up John Poelstra's plan to improve the release criteria[7], and asked the group to provide feedback. John noted that he was hoping people could get together to work on finalizing the new criteria at FUDCon.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. Will had completed the redesign of the autoqa code to be based around a Python shared library containing functions commonly used in multiple watchers and tests. The new post-koji-build test hook is also included, and autoqa is currently running an rpmlint test on every Koji build to test the hook. He said the next objective was to solidify the post-koji-build hook, help package maintainers add post-build tests, and get the rpmguard test running. A later objective is to work on a post-bodhi-update hook and dependency check test so that all updates submitted to Bodhi will be checked for dependency consistency, to hopefully end the situation where updates are pushed which break dependency chains. Kamil had been working on the Wiki documentation, and had created a new front page[8] which briefly explains the project and contains links to the most important relevant pages. He also pointed out that James Laska had been drafting further improvements to this page[9].

Jesse Keating proposed a talk during FUDCon to explain how several new ideas across the release engineering and QA groups - no frozen rawhide, autoqa, autosigning, and new milestones - would fit together in upcoming Fedora release cycles. The group thought this was a good idea, and Jesse said he would take the lead in arranging it.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[10] was held on 2009-11-24. The full log is available[11]. The group discussed housekeeping tasks, particularly updating the components and triagers page[12]. Adam Williamson thought the list of triagers should be kept (rather than being emptied as was previously the case with each new release) but pruned, with triagers known to be inactive being removed. Edward Kirk volunteered to look into a method for updating the component list, based on the current critical path package list.

The group then discussed the topic of mentoring new members, with Edward Kirk encouraging experienced group members to help mentor new ones to make sure they got a good start on their triaging careers. He also thought it would be good for existing members to join in welcoming new members to the group when they posted their introduction emails. Adam Williamson suggested doing this via private mail to avoid cluttering up the list.

Matej Cepl brought up a problem related to the recently-implemented change in the method of marking bugs that had been triaged. He had found that the fact that this was now being done differently for different releases made it impossible to construct a Bugzilla search for all triaged or un-triaged bugs in a given component across all releases. To address this problem, he proposed adding the new Triaged keyword to all bugs in ASSIGNED state for existing supported releases (Fedora 10 through 12), which would allow searches to be performed using the keyword in all releases. The group could see no problems with this idea, as long as it was done without generating a large amount of email, and approved the plan for Matej to approach the Bugzilla maintainer for help in implementing it.

Matej Cepl pointed out that the level of duplicate bugs being filed via the abrt[13] automated bug reporting tool was increasing the triage workload on some components significantly. After a long discussion, the group agreed a plan to try and address this. Will Woods would talk to the abrt team about the idea of reporting issues to an intermediate, abrt-specific server rather than directly to Bugzilla, based on the kerneloops.org[14] model. Matej would talk to the abrt team about their plans to improve abrt's own automatic duplicate detection and about having abrt format its reports in ways that would aid triagers in manual duplicate detection. Adam Williamson would respond to the existing thread on the development mailing list about the problem to raise the group's concerns, and ask the abrt team whether future improvements to abrt's duplicate detection logic could be retrospectively applied to bugs already filed by older versions of abrt.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-11-30 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-12-01 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Increasing the grub timeout

Scott Robbins started a long thread[1] with the suggestion to increase the default timeout for the Fedora boot loader from its current default setting of 0 (which causes the boot loader menu never to be shown at all). There were many opinions on this idea, but the general response was positive enough for Scott to file a feature request[2] on the idea, where some compromises were suggested. Richard Ryniker suggested having the system detect unclean shutdowns and force the boot menu to be displayed on the next boot (much as Windows does). Stewart Adam suggested having grub initially installed with a non-zero timeout, and have firstboot change it to zero on the assumption that a system that can get to firstboot must have a properly configured bootloader.

Fedora 12 QA retrospective

James Laska posted a request[1] for feedback on the Fedora 12 QA cycle from anyone, both on things that went well and areas that could be improved. Many group members posted replies, including Adam Williamson[2], Jóhann Guðmundsson[3], and Rahul Sundaram[4].





Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project[1].

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora at NYSCATE

Karlie Robinson posted a follow-up to New York State Association for Technology and Computers in Education in her blog. Karlie had a variety of Fedora and XO materials available at the event.

Her blog is at: http://karlierobinson.blogspot.com/2009/11/nyscate-2009-bringing-open-source-to.html

"It was a good event and I hope we can do more next year," she says.

Fedora 12 is here

With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.





Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora 12 Translation Schedule Tasks

The Translation Schedule for this week included the completion of the 0 day Release Notes for Fedora 12, to be published on docs.fedoraproject.org. This task ended on 26th November 2009[1].

Accessibility Guide

Eric Christensen announced the availability of the Fedora Accessibility Guide[1]. However, this Guide is not yet ready for translation via translate.fedoraproject.org due to the older version of Transifex that is currently being used here[2][3].

New Members

Votta Luigi (Italian)[1], Yajith Ajanta (Sinhala)[2], Thomas Spitzmann (German)[3] joined the Fedora Localization Project last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Interaction Design Hackfest

Máirín Duffy announced[1] on @design-team an interaction design hackfest " I am planning to hold a Fedora interaction design hackfest next Tuesday to work on establishing a set of personas for Fedora" and followed on her blog with a detailed plan[2] " 1. Learn about how interaction design is done. 2. Pick up some interaction design and user research skills. 3. Get involved in an open design project. 4. Help make Fedora better!". After the IRC meeting, she also published[3] a summary and logs.

Game Screenshots Ready. Better Navigation Next

Máirín Duffy reported[1] the accomplishment of distributed the task to gather screenshots for the Games Spin[2] "We are done. I just checked in the last of the games images and we now have complete coverage. You rock. 127 games. This may be the most complete set of free game screenshots around. Congrats!" and opened a discuss for improving the navigation of the page "I'd like to design it such that maybe the games could be browsed slide-show style by category". James Mulroy proposed a set of mockups[3]. "I did a few very rough mock ups of an idea i had for this, my idea would be to create a ajax browser for the screen shots" and the discussion continued, exploring ways to categorize the content.

Security Advisories

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

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

Fedora 11 Security Advisories