FWN/Beats/Developments

Developments

In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.

Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley

Presto A-Go-Go !

Thanks to some hard work by Fedora Infrastructure folk Luke Macken, Seth Vidal, Bill Nottingham and Josh Boyer Fedora 11 will come Presto-enabled contrary to last week's gloomy forecast.

Paul W. Frields described the potential saved download bandwidth as "[t]ypically [...] in double digits, but I’ve heard of cases already (using our development branch Rawhide) where people were saving 90% or more of their download time."

PPC as a Secondary Architecture

The 2009-05-07 FESCo summary reported that there is interest in moving PowerPC to secondary architecture status. David Woodhouse suggested that it would be interesting to hear from existing secondary architecture teams on the problems they had experienced. To date there are no secondary architectures ready to ship in Fedora.

Retiring Packages

The decision of the 2009-05-07 FESCo meeting to orphan packages from de-activated maintainers led Toshio Kuratomi to advertise that PackageDB will soon be able to retire packages.

RawERhide ?

Jesse Keating asked: "How is it we have 182 stable updates pending for F11 already? How have these seen any testing by a wider audience? Are we really just not bothering with updates-testing anymore? Do we not care about distro stability?" An interesting thread discussed the ways in which developer workflow and the availability of updates for testing can be re-aligned to each other. Among the complications discussed were the need to provide a way to upgrade for a previous release and the coupling of DVD image preparation with a release.

Till Maas replied that updates-testing requests for Fedora 11 had apparently not been processed and Kevin Kofler argued that the chances were high that packages which built succesfully on an earlier release would build on a later one. This was disputed by Jesse Keating. David Cantrell and Seth Vidal shared their experience of users not responding to requests to test and comment on updates provided in Bodhi.

A debate over the problems caused between the mismatch between the rolling, continuous nature of development and the need to freeze packages in a known state to produce a release received substantial contributions from Ralf Corsepius, who argued that Release-Engineering should change the workflow considerably. Jesse Keating responded with a defense of the current system which emphasized the need of maintainers to adhere to the current workflow and "good development practices."

Richard W.M. Jones was in favor of rolling releases.

Michael Schwendt explained the problems arising when the updates-testing repository was not used as intended.

Michal Hlavinka proposed breaking the freeze solely for the updates-testing repository shortly before the GA release.

There's a lot more in this thread beyond the ability of your correspondent to summarize adequately. It's worth a read for anyone trying to understand how and why Fedora is produced.

Crypto Consolidation

Adam Goode asked whether NSS was ready to provide TLS support. Adam referenced the Crypto Consolidation project (see also FWN#107).

Dan Winship confirmed that for the present NSS was best used directly with applications rather than by other libraries. Robert Relyea provided a detailed response to Adam including the hopeful sounding news that some of the issues around NSS_Init may be fixed in a few months.

Intel Moblin Pushing Proprietary Poulsbo ?

Last week's thread about the significant amount of Fedora-originating code being rolled into Intel's Moblin2 platform without much kudos or thanks continued. Questions were asked about why Intel was not providing code for the Poulsbo graphics chipset (common in many netbooks) except via obscure repositories. The appearance of ex-Red Hatter Arjan van de Ven, who argued in defense of binary blobs in these drivers, occasioned some wry commentary.

When Adam Williamson pointed to a "huge new pile of crack [...] in the Ubuntu Mobile special-sauce repositories [...]" Dan Williams asked: "What makes the Poulsbo team so special that they are exempt from the upstreaming policy that every other part of Intel seems to follow so well these days?" Later discussion suggested that it ought to at least be possible to produce a "[...] basic native accelerated 2D driver which doesn't depend on all the horrible proprietary crack [.]"