Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. 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 March 6th, 2015:

Fedora 22 Alpha next week!

Fedora 22 development is well underway, and just this morning we cleared the F22 Alpha release to ship next Tuesday. Despite a few last-minute issues (which will be documented on the common bugs page), this is already looking to be a very solid release. Thanks to everyone for helping with testing so this can get out the door — and future thanks to everyone who helps in testing the Alpha itself!

Fedora Council Meeting

We’re planning on a Fedora Council IRC meeting this coming Monday at 17:00 UTC (which is 1pm US/Eastern — note the daylight saving time change). See this invite for some planned topics. If you haven anything else you’d like to discuss, please reply to that message. (Time permitting, we may also have an open floor at the end.)

(Yes, that message says “May”. That’s a typo. March 9th.)

New Upstream Release Monitoring Tool

This item is for Fedora package maintainers — or maybe people who work on other distributions and would be interested in adapting this for wider use. We have a new system for monitoring new upstream software releases and automatically filing bugs (or, now, providing other types of notifications). Ralph Bean posted details on the devel list.

One crucial note is that this monitoring is on by default for new packages, but opt-in for existing ones — check the instructions for opting-in for packages you work on.

Conference Slides and Videos

Wow, so much travel. I apologize for no 5tFTW last week, and blame it on my serious underestimation of how exhausting a month of conference-going would be. Sorry. Anyway, despite wearing me out, the conferences were all awesome, and the good news is that by now, video from these conferences is online. Here’s everything from the FOSDEM Distributions Devroom and DevConf.cz (in the Red Hat Czech Youtube Channel). Individual SCALE 13x session videos seem to here rather than the SCALE Channel ,which just has the full-day uncut streams (possibly temporarily?). Anyway, here’s my Fedora session:

SCALE FAD: Hacking on “Beefy Connection”

Also at SCALE, Fedora ambassadors Clint Savage, Scott Williams, and a bunch of other awesome people held an activity day to work on a project called Beefy Connection. This is intended to be a handy kiosk interface for conference booths for helping new contributors get involved in the project and make the initial connections they need to get started.

Not only is that cool and useful, it was great to see a roomful of people — including new contributors and old friends — all hacking together. The code may be not quite finished, but I think the activity day was a huge success without even considering that. Thanks to everyone who worked on this!

(Why Beefy? No actual commentary on cow-based food, but a reference to this.)