Fedora Project Status Report

by Greg DeKoenigsberg

FUDCon 1

FUDCon 1 was a great success. Held in the Photonics Building on the campus of Boston University on February 18, over 100 people attended the day's sessions about Fedora. Subsequent FUDCons are already in the planning stages, and more information on these will be available as progress is made.

Thanks are due first and foremost to the folks at Boston University, without whom none of this would have happened: Matt Miller, Pam Andrews, Aaron Caine, Jeffrey Albro, Paul Stauffer, and many others.

A special thanks to members of the community who committed their time to making FUDCon a reality: Seth Vidal, Jack Aboutboul, Colin Charles, Jesse Keating, and many others. Extra bonus points to Jack, who also wrote about his experiences at FUDCon for this month's issue.

Thanks also to the many Red Hat engineers who put together excellent presentations on short notice and participated in the forums and BOFs at both FUDCon and LinuxWorld.

Finally, thanks to the hundred-plus individuals in the community who came to participate in the ongoing discussion of Fedora's present and future.

FUDCon video

Download the video: [QuickTime] [RealPlayer]
Stream the video: [RealPlayer]

Announcing the Fedora Extras steering committee

The Fedora Project has established the Fedora Extras steering committee. This committee is composed of a mixture of Red Hat employees and community participants and will guide the day-to-day operations of the Fedora Extras project.

The initial members are:

• Warren Togami, founder of the original Fedora Project and Red Hat employee
• Cristian Gafton, technical lead of the Fedora Project, member of the Fedora steering committee, and Red Hat fellow
• Greg DeKoenigsberg, community relations manager for Red Hat
• Dave Lawrence, maintainer of bugzilla.redhat.com and QA team lead for Red Hat
• Jeremy Katz, technical lead of the Anaconda project for Red Hat
• Tom "Spot" Callaway, technical lead for Fedora Extras packaging guidelines, Aurora Linux project leader, and sales engineer for Red Hat
• Colin Charles, maintainer of the Fedora marketing list and community contributor
• Seth Vidal, creator/maintainer of yum and community contributor
• Damien Nade, maintainer of rpm.livna.org and community contributor
• Jesse Keating, maintainer of the Fedora Legacy project and community contributor
• Enrico Scholz, community contributor
• Michael Schwendt, community contributor
• Ville Skytta, community contributor

The Fedora Extras steering committee meets weekly; the agenda items are available for review. Minutes of the meetings are distributed on fedora-announce-list.

Fedora Extras status

Since the establishment of public CVS for the Fedora Extras project, 37 packagers have joined the project, and over 700 packages are currently under maintenance. New maintainers are welcome; the process for becoming a maintainer for Fedora Extras is documented at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras_2fCvsAccess.

There are a number of packages in Fedora Extras that are currently without maintainers. These are listed at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras_2fOrphanedPackages. The process for claiming maintainership of an orphaned package is also documented here.

The build system continues to undergo development work. Seth Vidal and Thomas Van Stichele are spearheading the build system efforts, and the current build system code is being used to build devel packages.

Tom "Spot" Callaway is working with RPMForge members to come to consensus on guidelines for consistent packaging conventions. Draft documents on Package Naming and Package Building are available for comment. The discussion around these guidelines is ongoing; packagers who are interested in participating in this discussion should join the fedora-packaging mailing list.

Fedora Core 3 status

Fedora Core 3 was announced to fedora-announce-list on November 8, 2004. Since that date, Fedora has been successfully downloaded from the Torrent more than 198,000 times.

Since Fedora Core 3's initial release on November 8, at least 220 newly updated packages have been released. New package releases are announced on fedora-announce-list.

Fedora Core 4 status

The first test version of Fedora Core 4 should be available any day. Check in with http://fedora.redhat.com/ for the latest news about this release.

About the author

Greg DeKoenigsberg is the Community Relations Manager for Red Hat.