FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcements

retiring blogs.fedoraproject.org on 2011-07-01

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Greetings.

There has been some confusion and misunderstanding around blogs.fedoraproject.org recently. This email will hopefully clear them up.

At the Tempe Fudcon, the Fedora Infrastructure team determined that we should retire our blogs.fedoraproject.org service. The reasons for this were:

• We currently have no infrastructure members who are driving support of this service. (Fixing bugs, following upstream or improving the service).

• Wordpress has a long history of security issues, requiring frequent, custom patches or updates to keep it secure.

• Many other sites out there are providing blog services as their core mission, likely resulting in a more feature-full and compelling offering. Some of these sites like wordpress.com are commited to free software, like Fedora is.

• Usage of the service was quite low. We have 92 blogs, but only 39 of them had more than 5 posts. Only 6 of them had posts in the last month, and only 23 had posts in 2011.

While we are open to interested parties stepping forward to help us maintain the service, currently there is no compelling reason to keep the service running.

We will be happy to help any user wishing to transition their blog to another service. We will provide web site redirects and dumps of their posts.

Please contact fedora infrastructure (infrastructure at lists.fedoraproject.org) with further questions or concerns.

kevin"

Appointment to the Fedora Board and reminder of upcoming elections

Jared K. Smith announced,

"The Fedora Board consists of five elected seats and four appointed seats. In this elections cycle, there will be two openings for appointed Board seats and three opening for elected Board seats. As part of the normal Board succession process, one Board appointment is made before Board elections and the other is made after the election cycle.

I'm happy to announce that Guillermo Gomez has accepted the responsibility of serving on the Fedora Board. Guillermo has demonstrated his commitment to Fedora through his tireless efforts on a number of different fronts, including working on packaging, development, and ambassador programs. He has also shown his ability to mentor new contributors and help grow the Fedora community. I have no doubt that he'll continue these efforts while on the Board, and that he'll bring his perspective to help the Board as it makes decisions affecting the direction that Fedora takes. I would like to publicly thank Guillermo for his willingness to serve, and I hope the entire Fedora community will join me in welcoming him to the Board.

Guillermo will fill seat A4 (see the Board History for a list of the seats), which has been held by Stephen Smoogen for the past year. I'd also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Stephen for the work he's done on behalf of the Fedora Board.

Elections for the three open elected seats on the Board (as well as FESCo elections) will begin on June 2nd at UTC 0001, as shown on the Fedora wiki's Elections page. All community members are encouraged to cast their vote until the elections close at the end of the day (UTC time) on June 8th. Within a week or two of the end of elections, another appointment will be made for the remaining Board seat (seat A3). If you have interest in serving on the Fedora Board, please don't hesitate to contact me directly to indicate your willingness to serve.

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

FUDCon APAC now open for bids

Jared K. Smith announced:

"FUDCon (the Fedora Users and Developers Conference) is the premier Fedora event. We typically have a FUDCon event in North America, Latin America, and Europe each year. This year, I'm pleased to announce that we'll also be having a FUDCon event in the Asia-Pacific region.

I've confirmed that we have budget set aside for a FUDCon in the Asia-Pacific region, and I'm now soliciting bids for FUDCon APAC. Bids should be created on the Fedora wiki, and a link to the bid mailed to the fudcon-planning list. All bids should be completed by June 23rd. Soon after the bidding process has closed, I'll meet together with FAMSCo, the Ambassadors in that region, and our primary corporate sponsor to pick the winning location. After the location has been selected, we'll invite people to start registering and due to the details of our budget, the time frame for FUDCon APAC this year will likely be in either November or December. Next year, I'll work to try to spread the FUDCon events around a bit more evenly, so that we can have one FUDCon event roughly each quarter.

The bidding process is described in more detail at. Any interested parties are invited to submit their bids up until June 23rd. If you have any questions or concerns, please bring them up on the fudcon-planning mailing list.

I look forward to seeing your proposals!

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader "

Elections: Notice of change in voting period and correction of eligibility for the Board election

David Nalley announced:

"Hi folks,

Wanted to make you aware of a situation that was discovered last night and responded to this morning.

A number of people caught an issue in the eligibility configuration for voters in the Board Election. Per the Board's Succession Planning document this election is open to any person in the Fedora Accounts System who has completed the CLA. I mistakenly configured this election for CLA+1 which means that in addition to completing the CLA a person would have to be a member of an additional group. Members of the infrastructure team noted this and created a ticket in the Board's trac system late last night (no link as it's not visible to non-board members). That mis-configuration has now been corrected, and to ensure that we have not unduly disenfranchised any potential voters, the Board election period only has been extended by 24 hours from 08 June 23:59:59 to 09 June 23:59:59. Please note that the election period for the FESCo election remains unchanged.

I apologize for mis-configuring the election app, and thank the vigilant members of our community and infrastructure team who caught the issue so early in the process and helped to correct the problem in a timely manner.

Thanks,

David Nalley"

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

Reminder: Fedora Engineering Steering Committee election town hall is today

Robyn Bergereon announced,

"Greetings!

As previously announced, the town hall for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) is today, May 31, 2011.

The town hall will be taking place at 1800 UTC (2pm US-Eastern).

For information on how to participate, please see

Further information about the elections, including the schedule and process, can be seen here

There are 5 seats open in this FESCo election, and 8 candidates. Please consider attending the town hall today, and bringing your questions to be asked of the nominees during the course of the town hall.

A summary and the IRC log will be posted and linked from the wiki after the discussion, if you're unable to watch it live.

FESCo candidates and their information can be seen here

Cheers,

Robyn"

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

Tom Callaway announced:

"Here is this week's change to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

---

The systemd guidelines on naming unit files have been amended to tell packagers how to make compatibility symlinks for alternate service names should their service have had a different name in the past.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Systemd#Naming

---

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

Many thanks to the Fedora Community, 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"

Outage: Upgrades/Reboots - 2011-05-31 18:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Outage: Upgrades/Reboots - 2011-05-31 18:00 UTC

There will be an outage starting at 18:00 UTC on 2011-05-31, which will last approximately 2 hours. During this time there may be very short outages of services as machines are updated and rebooted into new kernels.

Machines will be rebooted in an order that allows for least disruption to services.

In many cases, there will be no noticeable downtime due to redundancy and fail-over.

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

date -d '2011-05-31 18:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

System updates/Reboots.

Affected 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 Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.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/
• Smolt - http://smolts.org/
• Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
• Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
• Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
• Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Unaffected Services:

Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2790

Contact Information:

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

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.