Fedora Weekly News Issue 216

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 216^[1] for the week ending March 1, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for a few past FWN issues that one of our contributors has begun. Find it on the Internet Archive^[2] and have a listen!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page^[3]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora^[1] - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

↑ http://planet.fedoraproject.org

General

Máirín Duffy asked^[1] for a pony but really it was about "how us designers could continue to collaborate after the (London UX) hackfest was over. This has been a recurring issue, as us designers meet every year or so, at GUADEC, at UX hackfests, or at GNOME Boston Summits (or even other FLOSS events like LinuxTag) and we get some great collaborate work done during the events – but it peters off after we get settled in back home after the events." One other post from the hackfest was about a presentation^[2] on an icon usability study.

Matthias Clasen created^[3] a new dialog for setting a user's password, including visual password strength indicator widget.

Rajith Attapattu wrote^[4] about how to set up client and server certificates for use with Apache Qpid.

Richard W.M. Jones benchmarked^[5] ext2, ext3 and ext4 with and without LVM. Richard also cataloged^[6] all 267 commands that Guestfish now supports. And lastly, Richard introduced^[7] "Tech Talk Platinum Supreme Edition!" a new super-simple presentation software application.

Michael Tiemann explained^[8] why the IIPA's position toward Open Source is problematic and wrong. "The entire position taken by IIPA is unbalanced. It relies on outdated definitions, special interests and a fear of innovation and new business model opportunities. It blends them together to abuse an outdated mechanism of the US government with a condemnation that applies to the US itself."

Jeroen van Meeuwen experimented^[9] with rebuilding all of Enterprise Linus, including updates and Extras "in order to learn from it and take away a couple of notes on the subject". Find out what Jeroen learned.

For anyone interested in making UserDirs (i.e. ~username) work properly in Apache with SELinux enabled, Diego Búrigo Zacarão has ^[10] your solution.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-02-27 to 2010-03-05.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

One the most important things that happened on Marketing this week was the Fedora Insight Sprint that took place on February, 28th. As reported^[1] by Pascal Calarco there where advances in several areas and some interactive testing. This test included uploading some of beats from Fedora Weekly News to Fedora Insight. Congratulations for all those contributed in this sprint.

Nelson Marques started a document called Comunication Matrix^[2] which surely will help us at Marketing in many ways.

On March, 2nd, Marketing held its weekly meeting. You can see the log^[3] but the highlight was the slogan for Fedora 13. Later on the slogan was released by Nelson Marques^[4] so let's “Rock it!”

There was brought up the issue about promoting spins, and Paul Frields made clear that errors were made^[5], but we are moving forward and future talking points will include spins^[6].

All in all a busy week.

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Fedora release party in Dhaka

Rejaul Islam reports on an event Asian University, Dhaka (Uttara Campus), which became a release party for Fedora 12 last month.

Details can be found here: http://maktrix.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/asian-university-dhaka-fedora-12-release-party/

Campus Ambassadors up and running

The Fedora Project's Campus Ambassadors program is up and running, and is looking for participants. If you're a high school or college student who wants to help promote Fedora on your campus, this is the place for you.

For more information, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Campus_Ambassadors

Fedora 12 is here

With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team^[1].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA

Test Days

Last week's planned Test Day on the use of SSSD by default^[1] unfortunately had to be postponed. The new date will be announced in FWN when it is decided.

Next week's Test Day^[2] will be on webcams. Well, that's simple! We like webcams. We want them to work. If your webcam works, we would like to know this so we can celebrate and bask in the warm, contented glow. If your webcam does not work, this makes us very sad and we would like to make it work. So, if you have a webcam, please come along, run a few simple tests, and if it doesn't work, we'll do our best to change that! Testing will be very easy and you'll be able to use a live CD or an installed Fedora system to test. The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2010-03-11 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac^[3].

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting^[1] was held on 2010-03-01. The full logs are available^[2]. Adam Miller reported back on his proposal for managing membership of the QA group in FAS. He had created a draft proposal^[3] and started a mailing list thread^[4] on the topic. James Laska thanked him for his work. Edward Kirk wondered about the mentoring proposal, asking if mentors were already lined up. Adam said that was not yet arranged. He thought that any existing member of the group could be a potential mentor, and new members could be handled on a case-by-case basis. James asked if some groups document mentor responsibilities; Adam replied that he was not sure. They agreed to revisit the topic next week after further follow-up discussion on the mailing list.

James Laska reported that he and Adam Miller had forgotten to contact the sectool team regarding the security spin QA proposal, but would do so immediately following the meeting.

James Laska noted that the fourth Alpha release candidate build was now available for testing, and linked to the test matrices^[5] ^[6]. Adam Miller said he would try to run the desktop tests for Xfce. The group discussed the two potential blocker bugs that testing had so far uncovered, an update installation issue #567346^[7] and a traditional CD installer disc swapping issue #569377^[8]. They agreed that testing should continue to isolate the conditions that would trigger 567346, and that 569377 should be moved to blocking the Beta. The group also discussed two dependency issues Kamil Paral had noticed during installation validation but had not yet nominated as blockers, and agreed they did not need to block the release as they did not affect the packages on the physical media.

James Laska reviewed a topic from the Bugzappers group, where a decision had been taken to rebase open Rawhide bugs to Fedora 13.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral gave an update on the AutoQA project. Will noted that he had sent some proposed development guidelines to the mailing list, emphasizing the use of git and suggesting small patches be submitted to the list using git-send-email. He also suggesting creating personal branches in the main public repository for anyone wanting to work on large changes. The plan had been broadly accepted, and Will planned to codify it on the AutoQA wiki soon. Will reported no progress on the dependency checker test this week, as he had been working on other things. He recapped that a working depcheck script was already available^[9] and just needed some basic testing, but the next step was to work out exactly what the test subjects should be: testing individual updates is not useful, rather some way to discover which group of updates will be pushed as a set is needed so that the set can be tested. He would work on this and report back to the next meeting. Kamil reported that the group had held another design discussion^[10] for the planned results database, and he was working on some use cases which would be available^[11] later. Josef Skladanka had provided a draft visualization^[12] of the system. James Laska noted Liam Li's progress on automated DVD installation^[13], using dogtail to pass kernel parameters into the installation. He was also looking into having the automated installation set up the necessary environment for subsequent automated GUI testing.

Kamil Paral asked how a serious bug in an accepted feature^[14] should be considered in regard to the release criteria. James Laska did not have a definitive answer, but for now recommended documenting it as a common bug.

No Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-03-02 as there were no items needing discussion.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2010-03-08 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held (if necessary) on 2010-03-09 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 13 Alpha

Adam Williamson represented QA at the Alpha go/no-go meeting^[1] held on 2010-03-04 and also attended by release engineering and development representatives. The group agreed that Alpha RC4 passed the release criteria^[2] and could be released as Fedora 13 Alpha.

Fedora 12 update problems

Matthias Clasen started a discussion^[1] about the known PackageKit bug^[2] which has caused some Fedora 12 users to have problems attempting to do the first post-install update with PackageKit, asking what could be done to ensure the problem did not occur in Fedora 13. Adam Williamson tried to explain^[3] that it was currently difficult to absolutely protect against this type of problem, as there is a catch-22 involved: if PackageKit has a bug which prevents update installation working for some reason, shipping an update for PackageKit cannot resolve the problem as it will be impossible to install the update. Matthias explained^[4] that he was in this case considering the symptom rather than the cause, and was asking if potential updates could be tested in batches via AutoQA before being released.

yum-langpack Test Day recap

Rui He posted a recap^[1] of the 2010-02-25 yum-langpack Test Day^[2], thanking those who had attended and listing the bugs that had been uncovered by the testing. Jens Petersen thanked her^[3] for her work on the event.

Updates-testing karma reporting script - fedora-easy-karma

Till Maas announced^[1] his new tool fedora-easy-karma^[2], which greatly asssists in the process of filing feedback on packages in updates-testing via Bodhi^[3]. Many group members thanked Till for the script and reported success in using it. Adam Williamson documented the tool on the QA Tools wiki page^[4] and the page on updates-testing^[5]. Some testers reported bugs in the script, which Till promptly addressed. Till also noted^[6] that he had built a package for the script and filed a review request^[7] to have it added to the repositories.

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N

Upcoming Fedora 13 Tasks for Translations

In addition to the Final software translation period (including translation and review) that ends on March 23rd 2010), new tasks related to translation would be on track are on schedule for the upcoming week. These include translation of beta release notes (11th March-5th April 2010), coordination with fedora-devel requesting for new builds of all packages that have been translated (16th March-23rd March 2010)^[1].

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/2010-March/007058.html

Transifex v 0.8 Release and translate.fp.org Upgradation

FLSCo chair and Transifex developer Dimitris Glezos announced^[1] the release of Transifex v.0.8, code named Magneto. This release includes new features like Translation Teams, Translation Reviews, Timeline, advanced Notifications features, Subversion over https etc.

In response to a query regarding the upgradation of the transifex version in use on translate.fedoraproject.org, Dimitris suggested^[2] a direct upgrade to v. 0.8 instead of v. 0.7.4 which has been staged and is being tested currently . However, Paul W. Frields voiced his concern^[3] that this move may hinder the current upgrade process that is expected to solve most of the reported problems faced by the translation team. This was supported by FLSCo member Noriko Mizumoto^[4]. Piotr Drag^[5] pointed that the 'Translation Team' feature in v.0.8 is currently not implementable in for transifex instance to be used in translate.fedoraproject.org.

Paul Frields, also suggested that the bugs reported against the staged instance be collected and the blocker bugs be marked to help the Fedora Infrastructure team take decisions for the actual productization^[6]. Currently, Fedora Infrastructure is on a freeze for the Fedora 13 Alpha release.

Translated String Missing from gnome-packagekit

In response to a query posted^[1] by Danish translator Kris Thomsen about the location of the string 'Add/Remove Software' (System => Administration => Add/Remove Software from the main panel), Domingo Becker pointed out^[2] that although the the translation for this string existed in the gnome-packagekit package (hosted in the GNOME repositories), the translated version is not being used on the User Interface. Ville-Pekka Vainio informed^[3] that this problem was most likely being caused due to an error in the gnome-packagekit build process, due to which the respective .desktop file is being improperly generated. This has been filed as a bug earlier and has been discussed with the package maintainer Richard Hughes. Currently, the error persists in the development version.

New Members in FLP

Dmitry Drozdov (Russian)^[1], Cheng-Chia Tseng (Traditional Chinese)^[2], Illias Romanos (Greek)^[3] joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

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