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 Development News

The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements

• Policy or process changes that affect developers.
• Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
• Tools changes that affect developers.
• Schedule changes
• Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements

• Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
• Discussion
• Anything else not mentioned above

Outage: Wiki, Insight, Smolt, Wordpress, Zarafa database outage - 2011-05-04 20:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced,

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-05-04 20:00UTC, which will last approximately 2 hours.

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

date -d '2011-04-21 20:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

The database backend for several services is being moved to new hardware and upgraded. This will result in an outage of services using that database server. Note that some services should move quickly and downtime on them will be small. The wiki should be up reasonably quickly, but smolt may be down for much of the window.

Affected Services:

• Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
• Smolt - http://smolts.org/
• Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
• Fedora Blogs - http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/
• Zarafa - http://admin.fedoraproject.org/zarafa

Unaffected Services:

• BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
• Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
• Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
• GIT / Source Control
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
• Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
• Email system
• Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
• Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
• Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
• Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
• Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
• Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
• Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
• Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
• Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
• Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/

Ticket Link:

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above."

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

Tom Callaway announced,

"Here are the latest changes to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

---

A new set of guidelines have been written for handling systemd in packages:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines:Systemd https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Systemd

---

A new set of guidelines have been written for packaging Octave packages: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Octave

---

Some clarification was added to the Guidelines section on Macros. Previously, it said:

"Use macros instead of hard-coded directory names (see Packaging:RPMMacros )."

Now, that line has been replaced with:

"Packagers are strongly encouraged to use macros instead of hard-coded directory names (see Packaging:RPMMacros ). However, in situations where the macro is longer than the path it represents, or situations where the packager feels it is cleaner to use the actual path, the packager is permitted to use the actual path instead of the macro. There are several caveats to this approach:

• The package must be consistent. For any given path, within the same

spec, use either a hard-coded path or a macro, not a combination of the two.

• %{_libdir} must always be used for binary libraries due to multi-lib,

you may not substitute a hard-coded path. "

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Macros

---

The Guidelines covering MinGW packaging have been updated for Fedora 16. The previous guidelines still apply for older Fedora releases (Fedora 15 and older) and all RHEL releases.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW_Old

---

The Packaging Guidelines have been updated to allow the use of /run and to clarify that directory hierarchies not listed in the FHS are not allowed unless listed in the Packaging Guidelines.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Filesystem_Layout

---

In the past (pre rpm 4.4), it was necessary to have a %defattr section at the beginning of each %files section, but this is now the default and no longer necessary to explicitly include.

The guidelines have been updated in numerous places to remove references to hard-coded %defattr sections.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#File_Permissions

---

The Scriptlets for GSettings have been updated to:

%postun
if [ $1 -eq 0 ] ; then
    glib-compile-schemas %{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas &> /dev/null || :
fi

%posttrans
glib-compile-schemas %{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas &> /dev/null || :

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#GSettings_Schema

---

These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to Christopher Aillon, Richard W. M. Jones, Erik van Pienbroek, Lennart Poettering, Orion Poplawski, Julian Sikorski, and all of the members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here

Thanks,

~spot "

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, 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 (March - May 2011)

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM):
• 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.