Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-01)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from
http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-04-01/

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series
highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week.
It isn't comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links
to each. I know it's traditional for the Internet to be useless today,
but, despite the temptation, I'm sticking to the facts. So, here we go
for April 1st, 2014:


Trying Wayland (and Gnome 3.12)
-------------------------------

Wayland is the upcoming successor to the X11 graphics protocol which
powers our desktops. It's not done yet, but you can try it first in
Fedora. You'll need to be running Rawhide (Fedora's development
branch). In theory, it should work on Fedora 20 with Gnome 3.12, but
from the mailing list thread, it looks like that's not working yet.

 * http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
 * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-March/009543.html

Wait, Gnome 3.12 on Fedora 20, you ask? Yes; although F20 shipped with
3.10, 3.12 is available for those of you who are a little adventurous
but not so brave as to run Rawhide, via Richard Hughes’ Gnome 3.12
COPR. There's a Fedora Magazine article with instructions, too.

  * https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/rhughes/f20-gnome-3-12/
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/running-gnome-3-12-on-fedora-20/


Infrastructure downtime *today*
-------------------------------

What better time for major upgrades than April Fool's Day? If you
notice that some Fedora infrastructure services are unavailable later
this evening, it's no joke, just planned work, including an upgrade to
Koji, Fedora's package and image building service. The work should
happen between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (`date -d '2014-04-01 21:00 UTC'` in
your local time).
 
 * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2014-March/003204.html


Last call for Flock talk proposals
----------------------------------

Flock is our big annual development and planning conference, held this
year in Prague from August 6th–9th. The deadline for talk proposals is
April 3rd — that's Thursday. So if you are thinking of something, it's
time to put those thoughts in writing. Note that there is some funding
available for travel and hotel subsidies; it's not guaranteed, but we
want as many contributors there as possible, so if you have a need,
there is a box to check at registration time.

 * http://flocktofedora.org/
 * https://flock-lmacken.rhcloud.com/submit_proposal


Fedora 21 change plan deadline
------------------------------

Speaking of deadlines... the Fedora Change Proposal deadline is April
8th, a week from today. These change proposals are our primary means
for coordinating development across the project, so particularly if you
want to do something which affects other areas, get it in now. FESCo
(Fedora's technical steering committee) reviews and approves each
proposal and may accept late entries (especially for "self-contained"
changes), but it really helps to know sooner rather than later. Note
that these proposals are largely statements of intent to do something,
not orders for someone else to. As a community project developed by
volunteers, we don't have a mechanism to *force* anyone do anything, so
if you want to make something happen and can't do it all yourself,
discuss on the Fedora devel list (or the appropriate SIGs) and get
others inspired to sign on as collaborators.

 * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2014-April/001345.html


Fedora Docs starts a Cookbook
-----------------------------

The Fedora Docs team does an excellent job of producing our
book-quality documentation, but we have a unfilled need for
easy-to-contribute-to howto and quickstart articles. The Docs team
recently held an Activity Day focused on finding a solution, and Pete
Travis (a.k.a. "randomuser") describes the results: 

  The answer we settled on is what will become the Fedora Cookbook, and
  it is a process as much as a book. Anyone can submit a 'recipe' for
  the Cookbook [...] using provided templates, and Docs volunteers will
  review, mark up, submit for translation, and publish.

There's a lot more in Pete's post, so if this is an area of interest to
you, and especially if you've been wanting to contribute but aren't
sure how, don't miss it.

  * http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
  * http://blog.randomuser.org/posts/open-books.html

5tFTW note
----------

This is the third installment of this series, and I'm still calibrating
a few things. I'm aiming at a wide audience, but I'm not quite sure how
much explaining I should do of general Fedora knowledge. Is it helpful
for me to (as above), give a quick explanation when I talk about
Rawhide, Flock, or FESCo? Or, does that just increase the word count
for no reason? Let me know.

Also, as always, tips on what's going on in your part of Fedora are
appreciated — e-mail them to me directly, or ping me on IRC.


-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
                                  "Tepid change for the somewhat better!"