Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-22)

Tue Apr 22 21:02:34 UTC 2014

Reposted from
http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-04-22/

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. Here are the five things for April 22nd, 2014:

Making it easier to join Fedora
-------------------------------

The Fedora Join SIG is our special interest group dedicated to
improving the experience for new contributors. It’s been dormant for a
while, but it’s back with a bang thanks to Ankur Sinha, Amita Sharma,
Sarup Banskota, and others. A recent IRC meeting came up with a
couple of immediate ideas, including a Fedora site inspired by What can
I do for Mozilla?

If making Fedora more welcoming is interesting to you, join the mailing
list and help keep up the momentum.

  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG
  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-04-16/fedora_join_irc_meeting.2014-04-16-09.07.log.html
  * http://whatcanidoformozilla.org/
  * https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-join

Fedora Docs “Beats”
-------------------

Speaking of things you can do for Fedora… how about contributing
expertise in your area for the Fedora 21 release notes? I know F21′s
October release target seems a long way off, but there’s a lot to do
and the summer is going to fly by. Docs team leader Pete Travis
recently announced that F21 Beats are Open, noting:

> If you’re new to Docs, Beat writing is a good way to get
> started. Simply choose a package, service, or functionality
> that interests you and do a little research to see how will
> change in F21. You can check rawhide package changelogs, read
> the software changelogs in /usr/share/doc/$pkgname, scrape
> upstream mailing lists and commit logs, and /reach out to
> package maintainers or developers.

As always, Pete also provides great, non-intimidating guidance for new
docs contributors.

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/2014-April/015583.html

Fedora Workstation, and an alternate view — both part of Fedora!
----------------------------------------------------------------

Fedora Workstation developer Christian Schaller wrote a long blog post
explaining some of the mindset and background behind the upcoming
Fedora Workstation. If you care about Linux on the desktop, this is an
interesting read, whether you’re a GNOME fan or not (and whether or not
you agree). And if you *do* disagree, remember that that’s absolutely
okay too. Longtime Fedora contributor Stephen Smoogen (a self-described
“411 year old Linux administrator”) has a great blog post responding to
one particular Fedora Workstation decision and why he’s not worried.

Our “Fedora.next” efforts are additive rather than restrictive, and are
centered around our Friends Foundation; we may disagree on details, but
we can all work together to advance free software as a project.

  * http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2014/04/16/preparing-the-ground-for-the-fedora-workstation/
  * http://smoogespace.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-i-am-not-worried-about-lack-of.html
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-present-and-future-a-fedora-next-2014-update-part-i-why/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations

Fedora Atomic?
--------------

At last week’s Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced
a new initiative called Project Atomic. This isn’t really new
software, or a new operating system or distribution — it’s best
described as a pattern for putting together some pieces we already have.
Not surprisingly, a lot of these pieces were (and are) worked on by
Fedora contributors, including rpm-ostree, Docker, systemd,
and a new orchestration building-block called GearD (you can read
more about GearD on the OpenShift blog and of course you can
`yum install geard` to check it out).

So… (you may be thinking…) how does this fit into Fedora? Well, most of
these are parts that we have already been talking about in the Fedora
Cloud Working Group, and it may be that GearD provides one of the key
missing pieces. We’ve filed a Fedora 21 change proposal for a
specially-tailored Docker Host Image, and although we haven’t made any
decisions yet, it - looks like the Atomic patterns are very well
aligned with what we want to do (and overlap with what we are already
doing anyway), so that may end up being our “Fedora Atomic” cloud spin.

One of the pieces of Project Atomic that the Cloud WG *hadn’t* looked
at is Cockpit, a web-based server management GUI. The interesting thing
is that this is one of the key features proposed for Fedora Server, and
if we decide to include that part in our Docker cloud image, that will
be a point of coherence across the products. (See the Project Atomic
docs on what that might provide.)

  * http://www.redhat.com/summit/2014/updates/
  * http://www.projectatomic.io/
  * https://www.openshift.com/blogs/geard-the-intersection-of-paas-docker-and-project-atomic
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Docker_Cloud_Image
  * http://cockpit-project.org/ "Cockpit Project"
  * http://www.projectatomic.io/docs/cockpit/

Automatic Weekly Data!
----------------------

If I had been paying attention and knew about
<http://thisweekinfedora.org/> before I started doing these posts, I
might have named *this* something a bit less similar. Oh well! Names
aside, though, these articles and that site are actually complementary.
I pick out things to feature as they strike my attention, while This
Week in Fedora presents automatically-collected statistics every
Monday. You won’t really learn any *news*there, but you will find data
on all sorts of contributor activities, from package builds to user
creation to meetings logged. If you’re data-oriented, it’s an
interesting way to get a feel for the technical pulse of the community.

  * http://thisweekinfedora.org/

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