FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcement News

Package update notifications fixed

Jared K. Smith on Fri Jul 30 19:56:24 UTC 2010 announced,

"Recent updates to Fedora introduced two unexpected bugs, either of which results in users no longer seeing notifications of or being able to apply new updates.

Updates to the relevant packages have been shipped to fix these issues, but users will not receive notifications for them unless they first apply the pending fixed updates using the "yum" tool. (Please note that these issues should only affect Fedora 13. Fedora 12 does not appear to be affected.) Packages fixing these issues were pushed to the Fedora software repositories around July 22, 2010. Users who have done a manual "yum update" since that push may have already received these fixes.

To fix the issue, please:

1. Open a Terminal (Applications > System Tools > Terminal)

2. Type either of the following commands and enter the password for

the root user when prompted.

a. To choose to apply all pending updates now:
 su -c "yum -y --skip-broken update"

b. To choose to apply updates fixing only the specific issues mentioned above:
 su -c "yum -y --skip-broken update gnome-packagekit selinux-policy"

3. Log out and and then log back in, or reboot your computer.  Note that logout/login will complete the fix for the notification issue. However, if you applied all updates in the previous step, you may need to reboot for other updates that require it.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and we are working on further improvements to our testing and quality assurance processes to avoid this and similar problems in the future.

If you have any further questions or require additional assistance, please refer to for ways to get additional help from the Fedora community.

Outage: SSL Cert - 2010-07-31 12:00 UTC

Mike McGrath on Sat Jul 31 12:59:07 UTC 2010 announced ,

"There will be an outage starting at 2010-07-31 12:00 UTC, which will last approximately 3 hours?

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

• Docs -
• Email system
• Fedora Account System -
• Fedora Community -
• Main Website -
• Mirror List -
• Mirror Manager -
• Package Database -
• Spins -
• Start -
• Translation Services -
• Wiki -

Unaffected Services

• BFO -
• Buildsystem -
• CVS / Source Control
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org</ref>
• Fedora Hosted -
• Fedora People -
• Fedora Talk -
• Smolt -
• Torrent -

Contact Information

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage.

Announcing FUDCon Tempe 2011 -- Jan. 29-31, 2011

Jared K. Smith

In the past, the planning and execution of FUDCon events was handled completely by a few Red Hat employees. This seemed out of alignment with the principles of Fedora, so in late January of this year, we kicked off an effort to fix that issue. We wanted to increase the effectiveness and transparency of FUDCon, and our other premier Fedora events. So we assembled a Fedora Activity Day specifically to change the way that we plan FUDCon.

In accordance with those changes, we opened a bid process for FUDCon events. The process encourages Fedora contributors to propose locations for the FUDCon event in their region, pursuant to their commitment to help with the logistics of the event. The first event that went through this lightweight process is the upcoming FUDCon in Zurich, Switzerland, which happens September 17-19, and is being planned by long-time Fedora contributors including Sandro Mathys and Marcus Moeller. In April of this year, we opened bids for the next North American FUDCon event.

As a result of that process, and thanks to the continuing work of Fedora contributors Robyn Bergeron and Ryan Rix, our next community-powered, North American FUDCon event will be held in Tempe, Arizona from January 29-31, 2011, on the Arizona State University campus. We'd also like to thank Adam McCullough from the ASU LUG and the faculty of the ASU School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (CIDSE) for their invaluable assistance thus far.

• * *

FUDCon events are held around the globe each year. Our most recent event was held just a couple weeks ago in Santiago, Chile, where contributors from around the Latin American region gathered to exchange information, share ideas, and collaborate on various aspects of Fedora. In the past we've held other FUDCons in diverse places like Berlin, Porto Alegre, Brno, and Boston.

Our last North American FUDCon was in Toronto, Canada. The year previous it was in Boston, MA. We always encourage feedback from the contributors, and the one answer that popped up more often than any other was, "Let's go somewhere warm this coming winter!" So we're pleased our fellow community members in a warmer part of the USA took up that challenge, and stepped forward to work on organizing the next FUDCon.

With that warmer climate in winter, of course, comes higher demand for travel lodging where people vacation. So as with previous FUDCons, we'll once again provide travel subsidies for contributors. Furthermore, our sponsor Red Hat is making an even larger commitment to these subsidies than in previous years, to offset the higher lodging costs. We all want to do our part to help everyone stay together at the conference, for the best possible collaborative experience after hours -- because collaboration is what FUDCon is all about!

• * *

As in the past, we encourage our community members to get involved by offering talks and other sessions of interest. The content provided by the attendees is what makes FUDCon events so special and exciting. Over the next few days planners will be setting up more information at the event wiki page:

We'll have more details appearing soon there, including but not limited to:

• A schedule that makes it easier to see more of the talks you enjoy and value

• Lightning talks and hackfest pitches to get attendees excited and motivated to collaborate

• The ever popular FUDPub event!

We hope you'll join us for the best North American FUDCon yet. If you want to get involved and help plan the details of the event, you're welcome to join our planning list:

Fedora Development News

Red Hat Bugzilla 3.6 Upgrade Public Beta

James Laska on Thu Jul 22 11:55:49 UTC 2010 announced, " I am sending this on behalf of Dave Lawrence and the bugzilla team at Red Hat. Please forward this on to any appropriate lists that were missed.

> Greetings, >

> The Red Hat Bugzilla team is happy to announce the first public beta release of the next version of Red Hat Bugzilla based on the upstream 3.6 code base. >

> Please test drive at: >

> >

> Over the years Red Hat has made substantial customizations to Bugzilla to fit into the Engineering tool chain. Over time the upstream has incorporated some of these customizations or solved them in different ways. Upgrading reduces our customization footprint (and thus maintenance) while bringing many bug fixes & enhancements. >

> The main area of focus for our public betas is stability. Functionality that currently works in our 3.4 code base should > continue to work as expected in the new 3.6 release. These include various ajax optimizations, needinfo actor support, frontpage.cgi, product > browser, several various UI enhancements, and of course the XMLRPC API. >

> Please feel free to point your various scripts and third party applications that use the XMLRPC API at the test server to make sure they continue to function properly. >

> There are numerous other changes behind the scenes that we haven't> listed. The goal is to make sure that functionality that people have come to expect in 3.4 is possible in the new system. >

> There are also numerous new features/fixes that are part of the upstream 3.6 release. For more detailed information on what has changed since the last release, check out the release notes page at . >

> The database is a recent snapshot of the live database so should be useful for testing to make sure the information is displayed properly and changeable. Also with a full snapshot it is possible to test for any performance related issues. Email has been disabled so that unnecessary spam is not sent out. So feel free to make changes to bugs to verify proper working order. >

> We are asking for everyone to get involved as much as possible with testing and feedback on the beta releases to help us make this the most robust and stable release possible. > > Please file any enhancement requests or bug reports in our current Bugzilla system at . File them under the Bugzilla product and relevant component with the version 3.6. With everyone's help we can make this a great release. >

> Thanks The Red Hat Bugzilla Team"

Fedora 14 branching and dist-git roll out

Jesse Keating on Sat Jul 24 06:54:53 UTC 2010 announced,"Hey all! It's that time again, we're gearing up to branch for Fedora 14 this coming Tuesday! There is a major twist this time around, we're going to attempt a roll out of dist-git!

Dist-git is our replacement for the CVS system we are currently using. This is a pretty big deal, but we're going to try to make it as smooth as possible. In the next few days I'll be finalizing our git server setup and polishing up the user interface tool you all will be using to interact with the source control and build system.

The conversion will take a couple days, which means our normal short outage for branching will be a bit extended. I wish there was another way, but converting over 9K cvs repos into git repos does take sometime. I really feel that this move is worth the extended outage.

The tool you all will use to interact with git and the buildsystem is called "fedpkg". It comes from the fedora-packager package. There is a version of it available now in all active Fedora and EPEL releases, although it is built to work against our staging environment where we have been testing the setup for a while. This setup is slightly different than the final version, but you can install it and poke around the help system to get a feel for what's going on. Most of the make targets have made it over and are named the same; build, sources, srpm, etc... Many of the targets can take arguments and options. Where the make system used shell variables, fedpkg uses options and arguments. Each target takes a --help argument that will show any available options. Fedpkg does not yet have a man page, that may be coming soon.

We're also going to be working on wiki pages to document the new stuff and archive the old stuff. We're going to need help on this too, so if you want to pitch in, by all means!

As I mentioned above, this is an attempt. We are trying this pretty early, which I wouldn't normally do. However we have a good roll back plan. We are going to keep the CVS server as is, although turned read-only during and after the dist-git rollout. If something fails beyond reasonable repair with the dist-git attempt we will re-enable write access to the CVS server (after we branch it for Fedora 14). Otherwise we will keep it around, in some capacity, as a read-only reference point.

I'm certain we will run into some bumps along the way, and some wrinkles to iron out. I ask that you are patient with us as we work through these, and as we either get updates pushed out of fedpkg or make adjustments to the git repos on the git server. This transition has been a long time coming, and I'm really happy to be the one to make it happen. Keep in mind that this will be the first iteration of our transition, and it will operate mostly the same as dist-cvs did with a few improvements. Later on we will start to explore more interesting advancements such as automatic patch management with exploded sources, linking to upstream source repositories, automatic %changelog generation from git changelogs, or things I haven't even thought about. Most of all, we won't be using CVS any more and that feels really good to me.

If you're curious about how the new system will work or have concerns, or want to help, you can reply to this email thread or find me on IRC as "Oxf13" (that's an o, not a zero). If you run across bugs in fedpkg, you can file them in the fedora-packager hosted trac space or just find me on IRC as well.

Thanks again for your patience, both in waiting so long for us to make this move, and for bearing with us during the transition."

Fedora 14 Feature Freeze is tomorrow (2010-07-27)

John Poelstra on Mon Jul 26 20:59:07 UTC 2010 announced,"A friendly reminder that tomorrow, Tuesday, July 27, 2010, is Feature Freeze for Fedora 14.

Feature Freeze means that all accepted features for Fedora 14 must be *significantly* "feature complete", ready for testing, and have a current status.

If you have a feature that will not be feature complete by tomorrow that is okay. Simply change the wiki page category to Category:FeatureReadyForWrangler (edit text at the very bottom of the page) and include the reason and your plans in the commit comment. I'll see that your feature is targeted for Fedora 15 instead."

f14 boost-1.44.0 upgrade: pushed

Benjamin Kosnik on Tue Jul 27 17:19:25 UTC 2010 announced,"The boost maintainers have updated the boost package to the current release (1.44.0) in rawhide for F14. More info here:

Rebuilds for devel packages that require boost are mandatory, as SONAME was bumped. Help from package maintainers with rebuilding packages with boost dependencies is appreciated."

Outage: Build System - 2010-07-28 07:15 UTC

Jesse Keating on Wed Jul 28 07:05:27 UTC 2010 announced,"There will be an outage starting at 2010-07-28 07:15 UTC, which will last approximately 48 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run:

date -d '2010-07-28 07:15 UTC'

Reason for outage

dist-git migration and Fedora 14 branching

Affected Services

Buildsystem - CVS / Source Control

Unaffected Services

All others

Ticket Link

N/A

Contact Information

Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> or Oxf13 on IRC

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage."

Fedora User Announcements

The list,Fedora User Announcements, provides community assistance, encouragement, and advice for Fedora users.

Fedora Events

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 (June 2010 - August 2010)

• North America (NA)
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• 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.