Fedora Weekly News 191 - news - Fedora mailing-lists

31 Aug 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@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.htm...
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.ht...
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.htm...
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_20...
2. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_20...
3. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_20...
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_20...
-- 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.20...
2. Log: 
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-08-25/fedora-meeting.20...
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.20...
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-discussi...
--- end FWN #191 ---
Pascal Calarco, Fedora Ambassador, Indiana USA
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pcalarco