Fedora Weekly News 191
Pascal Calarco
pcalarco at nd.edu
Mon Aug 31 14:45:58 UTC 2009
* 1 Fedora Weekly News Issue 191
o 1.1 Announcements
+ 1.1.1 Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha Release
+ 1.1.2 Fedora 12 early branch now available
+ 1.1.3 Red Hat/Fedora/JBoss Developer conference in Brno, Czech Republic
+ 1.1.4 Upcoming Events
o 1.2 Marketing
+ 1.2.1 Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-08-25
+ 1.2.2 F12 Beta release
+ 1.2.3 Site Redesigns
+ 1.2.4 Fedora Insight updates
o 1.3 QualityAssurance
+ 1.3.1 Test Days
+ 1.3.2 Weekly meetings
+ 1.3.3 ABRT Test Day report
o 1.4 Translation
+ 1.4.1 Transifex v0.7 'Pyro' Released
+ 1.4.2 New Modules for Translation
+ 1.4.3 String Freeze Break Request for desktop-effects
+ 1.4.4 Priority of Packages Available for Translation
+ 1.4.5 New Members in Fedora Localization Project
o 1.5 Artwork
+ 1.5.1 Alpha Banner
+ 1.5.2 Download Survey
- Fedora Weekly News Issue 191 -
Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 191[1] for the week ending August
30, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.
We kick off this week's issue with the latest news on the Fedora 12
Alpha release from this past Tuesday, as well as detail on the upcoming
Red Hat/Fedora/JBoss conference in Brno, Czech Republic. News from the
Marketing team includes logs of the recent weekly meeting, Fedora 12
talking points development, and a Fedora Insight update. In Quality
Assurance news, detail from last week's Test Day, on Dracut, and the
next Test Day this week on Sugar on a Stick. Also much detail on this
week's QA meetings, and reporting on the ABRT Test Day. In Translation
news, detail on a new version of Transifex, and coverage of some
discussion of the prioritization of packages available for translation.
News from the Design team includes a new Fedora 12 Alpha banner and news
on a Fedora survey aimed to improve the usability of the Fedora download
pages. These are just a few items from this week's FWN!
If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see
our 'join' page[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list at redhat.com
The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up
with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora,
called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and
let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.
FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue191
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join
-- Announcements --
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project[1] [2] [3].
Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam
1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/
2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events
--- Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha Release ---
The breaking news of the week was "the Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha
release" [1] on Tue, 25 Aug 2009. "What's an Alpha release? The Alpha
release contains all the features of Fedora 12 in a form that anyone can
help test.", says Fedora Release Engineering team leader Jesse Keating.
On her brief announcement[2], she mentioned about the beta version of
F12[3], the due date of the final release of Fedora 12, the top features
for end users (i.e.: Better webcam support, Empathy as default IM
client, GNOME 2.27.90 beta and KDE 4.3,Network Manager Mobile Broadband,
Better Free Video Codec, PackageKit improvements, PulseAudio
improvements, Better power management, etc [4]), and the release notes
for further queries[5].
1. http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-August/msg00009.html
3. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_12_Alpha_release_notes
--- Fedora 12 early branch now available ---
"For those of you that wish to separate Fedora 12 stabalization work
from future development, we are now ready to process branch requests for
F-12." says Jesse Keating on Fedora development announcement[1]. To
request a branch, please continue to use the cvsadmin request method[2].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-August/msg00010.html
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/CVSAdminProcedure
--- Red Hat/Fedora/JBoss Developer conference in Brno, Czech Republic ---
Red Hat Brno office is organizing an open conference at Masaryk
University in Brno, Czech Republic on September 10th and 11th[1]. Radek
Vokál, Engineering Manager - Base Operating Systems Brno, has noted on
his announcement, "Conference is bringing presentations and hackfest
sessions/hands-on labs for skilled users, admins, Linux and Java
developers. The list of presentations has several interesting topics,
mostly covered be people directly involved in upstream development."
While talking about the plan, he has said, "The plan is to base this
event on the great success we had with FUDCon last year." The JBoss
session will be focused on Portal, secure JEE programming etc at the
conference. Please visit the wiki for more details about the conference[2].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-August/msg00010.html
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DeveloperConference2009
--- Upcoming Events ---
Please, consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!
* North America (NA)[1]
* Central & South America (LATAM)[2]
* Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)[3]
* India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)[4][5]
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29_2
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29_3
4.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q2_.28June_2009_-_August_2009.29_4
5.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29_4
-- Marketing --
In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing
Contributing Writer: Chaitanya Mehandru
--- Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-08-25 ---
Meeting logs [1] and notes [2] for the 2009-08-25 Fedora Marketing
Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open
to the public. [3]
--- F12 Beta release ---
We're preparing the beta release schedule[4].
Mel Chua to write Talking Points job descriptions[5] and Rahul Sundaram
to write Beta Announcement ticket
--- Site Redesigns ---
Robyn Bergeron is drafting a list of market research tasks for F12
volunteers/
--- Fedora Insight updates ---
Robyn Bergeron to come up with the workflow details and instructions.
Mel Chua will be sending FI project status updates[6].
1.
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-08-25/fedora-meeting.2009-08-25-20.02.html
2. Log:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-08-25/fedora-meeting.2009-08-25-20.02.log.html
3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_meetings
4. https://fedorahosted.org/marketing-team/report/3
5. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_talking_points
6. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Insight
-- Quality Assurance --
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
--- Test Days ---
Last week's main track Test Day[1] was on Dracut[2], the new initrd
generation tool. There was a solid turnout of testers and developers.
Many cases were tested to work without problems, but some problem cases
were identified, and bugs were filed.
Next week's main track Test Day[3] will be on Sugar on a Stick, the
Fedora-derived USB stick distribution which features the Sugar desktop
environment that is the default desktop for the OLPC project. This Test
Day is being led by the Sugar developers. If you're interested in this
exciting and innovative desktop environment, please come along and help
test it! The testing will be on Sugar on a Stick v2 Beta, which should
be available in time for the Test Day. The Test Day will be held on
Thursday 2009-09-03 in IRC #fedora-test-day.
Next week's Fit and Finish[4] project Test Day[5] will be on Sectool[6],
the security audit and intrusion detection tool. The Fit and Finish team
are working throughout the Fedora 12 cycle to file the rough edges off
Fedora's desktop experience, so please come along and help them test!
The Test Day will be held on Tuesday 2009-09-01 in IRC #fedora-test-day.
If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12
cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in
QA Trac[7].
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-27_Dracut
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ABRT
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-03_SoaS
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fit_and_Finish
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-01_Sectool
6. http://fedorahosted.org/sectool
7. http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/
--- Weekly Meetings ---
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-08-24. The full log is
available[2]. James Laska led a post-Alpha release recap (on the
assumption the Fedora 12 Alpha would in fact be released on time). The
group agreed that the process had been handled quite well. Jesse Keating
was happy with the level of communication between release engineering
and QA. James felt the blocker bug review meetings had gone smoothly and
been a positive contribution. Adam Williamson thought the Alpha process
had flagged up the need for a better process for filtering Anaconda
updates into Fedora. James summarized areas of possible improvement: he
felt planned testing could be extended to areas beyond installation. The
group agreed, but generally felt that installation was the most
important area by a significant margin. James committed to trying to
extend the test plan to cover X.org testing for the Fedora 12 Beta
release. Will Woods pointed out that basic X functionality was part of
the Rawhide acceptance test plan, and suggested that the Rawhide
acceptances tests should be considered a prerequisite to the
installation testing.
Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He noted that
the automated tests were still running and sending results to the
mailing list[3]. He had fixed bugs in several of the tests, and improved
the subject lines of the result emails. He was still engaged in tracing
other bugs in the existing tests, and writing documentation for creating
tests and hooks. Jesse Keating pointed out that a new upstream release
of autotest was available, and committed to getting it packaged and made
available through the infrastructure team for testing. Adam Williamson
asked whether the current state of the project was sufficient for the
planned israwhidebroken.com website to be created. Will explained that
some bits were still missing, particularly a method for getting data
from autotest into the page.
David Pravec proposed creating a fedora-test-announce mailing list for
those who wanted to be informed of events such as Test Days, but did not
want to follow the traffic of fedora-test-list. Adam Williamson
suggested using the list to announce test composes and changes to
release schedules. Jesse Keating worried about the principle of creating
more and more mailing lists, and suggested posting announcements to
fedora-devel-announce instead, but James Laska said he had been asked to
stop posting Test Day announcements to that list in the past. In the end
the group agreed on the proposal, and David took responsibility for
creating the list.
James Laska asked for an update on Test Day status. Adam Williamson
reported that the Fit and Finish team's Printing Test Day[4] had gone
smoothly, from what he had seen. James linked to his report[5] on the
ABRT Test Day[6], and thanked David Pravec and Kamil Paral for
organizing the event. James also reported on the readiness of the
upcoming Dracut Test Day[7].
Adam Williamson raised the topic of the recently-introduced nightly live
builds of Rawhide[8], and asked the group to support him in publicising
their existence. Jesse Keating worried that the limited resources of the
server on which they are hosted would be put under serious strain if
they become too widely used. This led to another discussion of the best
way to distribute regularly updated large images to a mass user base. As
usual, no definite answers were discovered. Kevin Fenzi wondered if
DeltaISOs would help, but Jesse explained they would not, due to the
contents of a live image as compared to an installation image (live
images essentially contain one large file that is an image of an entire
filesystem, while installation images contain individual package files,
and hence are much more amenable to having their size reduced by DeltaISOs).
David Pravec wanted to improve on the reporting of results of Test Days.
He felt that having a results table which was essentially a set of
Bugzilla links at the bottom of each Test Day page was unnecessary
repetition of work. Adam Williamson pointed out that the results tables
for some Test Days contained significantly more information than simply
links to bug reports. David's suggestion was to automate the linking of
Bugzilla reports to the Test Day Wiki pages in some way. Adam felt this
might be theoretically possible, but technically difficult without
undesirable significant modifications to Bugzilla. James Laska noted
that reporting results to the Wiki pages was only ever intended to be an
interim solution, and the group was still officially committed to
implementing a proper test case management system, which should render
the problem irrelevant. In the meantime, James and Adam were both happy
to accept any improvements anyone could propose for the Wiki-based
system. David promised to work on providing a practical proposal.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[9] was held on 2009-08-25. The full
log is available[10]. Adam Williamson gave an update on the proposal to
add the semantics switchover to the QA team calendar. He noted that the
public Google calendar the QA team had run for a short time was now
mostly unused and had only been intended as a test. He further noted
that the Infrastructure group was still working on providing a
project-wide calendaring solution. Niels Haase clarified that he had in
mind the short lists of tasks and dates related to specific groups[11]
that are published by the release engineering team. Adam said he could
have the switchover added to these Fedora 13 schedules once they were
created.
Richard June gave an update on the kernel triage project. He had started
on his work of triaging wireless related bugs. So far he had found that
most reports were either very old, or were valid reports which already
included all necessary information and hence did not need to be triaged.
Adam Williamson suggested that he continue on wireless bugs for a while,
and if the same pattern persisted, try a different kernel component
instead. If several kernel components all seemed to be in the same
state, the value of continuing with the kernel triage project could be
re-evaluated.
Edward Kirk said that he was working on an SOP (standard operating
procedure) detailing all aspects of arranging the Bugzappers group
meetings, and asked the group if it had particular ideas or suggestions
about any part of the process. In general everyone agreed the current
process was good and was happy that Edward was working on officially
documenting it. Edward promised to submit a draft of the SOP to the
mailing list or a future meeting for review.
Edward Kirk suggested having meetbot announce Bugzappers meetings in
related channels shortly ahead of the meeting. Kevin Fenzi and Adam
Williamson worried that this might annoy people, and also considered the
dystopian possibilities of a world where all projects announced all
their meetings in all relevant channels. The proposal was not taken further.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-08-31 at 1600 UTC in
#fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-01 at
1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings/20090824
3. http://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/autoqa-results
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-18_Fit_and_Finish:Printing
5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-August/msg00609.html
6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-20_ABRT
7. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-27_Dracut
8. http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/
9. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
10.
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-08-25/fedora-meeting.2009-08-25-15.06.log.html
11. http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/
--- ABRT Test Day report ---
David Pravec and Kamil Paral reported[1] on the ABRT Test Day held on
2009-08-20, with a list of all bugs reported during the Test Day and
their current statuses. They were happy with the success of the Test Day.
1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-August/msg00609.html
-- Translation --
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n)
Project[1].
Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
--- Transifex v0.7 'Pyro' Released ---
Dimitris Glezos announced[1] the availability of Transifex 0.7, code
named 'Pyro'. This release includes the online translation editor
'Lotte' (Lightweight Online Translation Editor), fine grained
permissions to allow maintainers to control user access to the
repositories, translation submission to a mailbox, publican like I18N
support and many other features.
Transifex is used for the Fedora Localization Process infrastructure,
however an upgradation to 'Pyro' is subject to Fedora Infrastructure
freeze and other related decisions.
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00116.html
--- New Modules for Translation ---
Two new modules, Multimedia-menus[1][2] and ABRT[3] have been added to
translate.fedoraproject.org last week.
1. https://translate.fedoraproject.org/projects/multimedia-menus/master/
2.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00130.html
3. https://translate.fedoraproject.org/projects/abrt/master/
--- String Freeze Break Request for desktop-effects ---
Owen Taylor put forward a string freeze break request[1] for strings in
desktop-effects, primarily for the changes made to desktop-effect would
allow users to switch the GNOME desktop to use GNOME Shell which would
be available as an optional component for Fedora 12. This request was
approved by the Fedora Localization Project.
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00123.html
--- Priority of Packages Available for Translation ---
A question raised[1] by Noriko Mizumoto about the inclusion of the new
'multimedia-menus' package in the 'Various' collection has led to a
discussion about classification and prioritization of the packages
listed for translation. Piotr Drąg explained[2] that the 'Fedora-XX'
collection generally housed the traditional Core+Extras list and put
forward a suggestion to re-organize the translation groups, since the
Core+Extras principle was not followed in Fedora any longer.
Xavier Conde and Domingo Becker from the Brazilian Portugeuse and
Spanish teams respectively, suggested[3][4] a classification of all the
existing modules based upon priority that would allow completion of the
more important modules first.
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00131.html
2.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00141.html
3.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00142.html
4.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00155.html
--- New Members in Fedora Localization Project ---
Iestyn Pryce[1] (Welsh) and Fernando Gonzalez[2] (Spanish) joined the
Fedora Localization Project last week.
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00161.html
2.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-August/msg00175.html
-- Artwork --
In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team[1].
Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
--- Alpha Banner ---
After a reminder[1] from John Poelstra about the upcoming scheduled
tasks, with the closest item being the website banner for the Alpha
release. Martin Sourada replied[2] pointing to the two existing
undecided candidates "I think we should make a choice now" and Máirín
Duffy improved[3] one of them, which is used now on the website "I did a
version with different lettering, I hope it's okay:".
1.
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-August/000906.html
2.
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-August/000908.html
3.
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-August/000932.html
--- Download Survey ---
Studying the usability and with a website redesign on the agenda, Máirín
Duffy conducted on her blog a survey about the ways people download
Fedora[1] and she followed with results[2] and some conclusions[3].
Expect a better, more useful download page on the Fedora website.
1. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/how-do-you-get-fedora/
2. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/getting-fedora-survey-results/
3.
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/getting-fedora-survey-result-discussion/
--- end FWN #191 ---
Pascal Calarco, Fedora Ambassador, Indiana USA
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pcalarco
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