Heartbleed and Fedora, Flock proposal voting, Gnome 3.12, Fedora.next website refresh, and Fedora at Red Hat Summit….

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for April 8st, 2014:

Heartbleed vulnerability (and fixes)

At #1 with a bullet… the OpenSSL “Heartbleed” vulnerability, technically identified as CVE-2014-0160. This is an exceptionally severe security issue. The good news is that, thanks to heroic overnight work of many Fedora contributors, updated packages are available. More on this in a separate Fedora Magazine post, and watch for more info soon. The release engineering push to the mirror networks is in progress. Update: Previous post superseded by Update on CVE-2014-0160, aka “Heartbleed”. Fixed packages are on the mirrors now.

Special thanks to Robert Mayr, Kévin Raymond, Dennis Gilmore, Robyn Bergeron, Paul Frields, Major Hayden, Kurt Seifried, Kevin Fenzi, William Brown, Nick Bebout, Adam Williamson, Joachim Backes, Pádraig Brady, Lokesh Mandvekar, David Strauss, Joop Braak, Michael Cronenworth, Till Maas, Luke Macken, and others for effort in making these updates available quickly. And apologies if I missed any names which should be on this list — it’s been a long night and day!

Vote for Flock Talks

The call for submissions for talks at Flock (our annual development conference) is over. Later this week, voting will begin. There is a list of 128 potential talks, which all look worth attending, but there’s a goal of having less going on at once this year, so the voting process is going to be extra-important.

And of course, even if you are not speaking, this is an important event where we work on our strategy and direction, get some work done, make the personal connections which help a community run smoothly, and (of course) have a lot of fun. Register now!

There is some funding available for travel and hotel subsidies; it’s not guaranteed, but we want as many contributors there as possible, so if you have a need, there is a box to check at registration time.

Considering Gnome 3.12 as an F20 update

As mentioned last week, Gnome 3.12 is available in the Rawhide development repository and as an add-on “Copr”. This release is inspiring very positive reviews (The Register, Tech Republic) even among initial Gnome 3 skeptics. (Disclaimer: I was certainly one of those skeptics, having never run Gnome even in the old days, but I’m happily running it now. Your mileage may vary, but I do recommend a fresh look!).

This has inspired some discussion about possibly including the whole thing as an update to Fedora 20. This would be a large exception to the general policy of avoiding incompatible or user interface changes mid-release, but if the technical hurdles can be solved and user pain minimized, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) might consider it, especially since F20 has a longer-than-normal schedule.

And speaking of followups to last week, Jasper St. Pierre has a nice blog post on Xwayland landing in the X server and what that means for you. That has a lot of technical detail, but the short version is that now this compatibility layer is available on more hardware (not just Intel graphics), allowing more early experimenters and, in the future, a smoother transition for everyone.

Website Refresh for Fedora.next

Although she posted it on April 1st, Fedora designer Máirín Duffy’s proposal for Fedora’s website (considering Fedora.next) is no joke. I mentioned this effort last month, but there’s a lot more detail here, with sections on the brochure site, a user support site, and the “community hub”. Worth a read — and we’d love your input, especially on how we might make this idea succeed now when somewhat similar efforts have faltered in the past.

Red Hat Summit

Red Hat’s annual showcase conference is taking place in San Francisco next week (April 14–17, 2014), and as usual, Fedora will have a presence. Tom (“spot”) Callaway and Ruth (“Ruth”) Suehle will be running the booth, and I’ll be there showing off tech-darling containerization technology Docker and the Fedora Atomic Remix, which we are considering using as a base for one of our official cloud offerings. Of course, I’m happy to talk about anything else across the Fedoraverse as well. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of familiar faces and meeting many of you I haven’t yet.

5tFTW note

Thanks for your feedback last week, everyone. Looks like many people appreciate the explanation of project details and jargon. And overall, I’m glad you’re finding this useful — that makes it much easier to keep it up.

As always, tips on what’s going on in your part of Fedora are appreciated — e-mail them to me directly, or ping me on IRC.