Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-05-27)
Matthew Miller
mattdm at fedoraproject.org
Wed May 28 00:38:12 UTC 2014
Reposted from
http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-05-27/
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 May 27th, 2014:
Flock Schedule!
---------------
Flock is Fedora’s annual contributor conference, held this year in
Prague on August 6th through 9th. The schedule is now up on sched.org.
The organizers reserve the right to make tweaks as needed, but this
should mostly be the final schedule.
Last year’s conference was amazing, and I think this year will be even
better. There are a lot of great talks, hackfests, and workshops
planned over a busy four days, with a vibrant “hallway track” and fun
social events (yet to be detailed). In general, we will get a lot of
real planning and solid work done, all built on top of Fedora’s
“Friendship” foundation. If you’re a Fedora contributor and not sure if
you should come, *you should*. Register now at the Flock site.
Thanks to everyone who proposed talks and to everyone who voted on
those proposals. And thanks to Flock organizers Josh Boyer, Tom
Callaway, and Ruth Suehle, who used those votes as the primary source
for the difficult jigsaw puzzle that is putting together the schedule.
Thanks also to Miro Hrončok and Jiri Eischmann for working out venue
logistics.
* http://flocktofedora.org/
* http://flock2014.sched.org/grid/
Fedora 21 Schedule Reminder
---------------------------
Speaking of schedules… as we get to the end of May, it seems like a
good time to give a reminder of the Fedora 21 schedule. The summer is
going to go fast! So, a refresher:
- **June 6:** *Mass Rebuild.* This means that Release Engineering
will cause every package in the distribution to be rebuilt from
source, with the newest compilers and toolchains. Package
maintainers need to be prepared to fix any problems that are
exposed. (Packages that don’t build and aren’t updated will
eventually be dropped from the distribution.)
- **July 8:** *Change Freeze* and *Branch from Rawhide*. The first of
these means that any official change proposals for F21 need to be
a) substantially complete and in a testable state and b) enabled by
default (if that’s the plan for that change). We have a rather
large change set planned for this release, and many of those
changes involve big new Fedora.next ideas. The second means that
Fedora 21 will become a distinct repository from Rawhide, our
rolling development tree. That means that any changes packagers
make that are intended for F21 will go through the normal package
updates process — and it means that testers can decide if they want
to divert their systems to the upcoming release, or to keep on
Rawhide to follow the bleeding edge of what will eventually become
the release *after* next.
- **July 22:** *Alpha Change Deadline* and *Software String Freeze*.
The change deadline basically means that except for accepted fixes,
everything that’s going to land in the alpha release should be
there already. And the string freeze means that packages for which
Fedora is the upstream should stop making user-visible changes so
that translators have time to work.
- **August 5:** *Alpha Release*. The Fedora 21 Dress Rehearsal — we’ll
get real picture of what the upcoming release will look like (and
- **August 26:** *Beta Change Deadline*, *Changes 100% Complete*, and
*Software Translation Deadline*. Similar to the deadlines for
Alpha, but more so. Proposed changes which are off-track at this
point may need to be scaled back or delayed until the next release.
- **September 9:** *Beta Release*. Everything will be shaping up, and
we’ll be more concerned with polish than development. If you have
an idea for a big change at this point, that’s awesome — the
Rawhide development tree continues to be open for business so
progress can continue.
- **September 30:** *Final Change Deadline*. All the last changes
should be in.
- **October 14:** ***Fedora 21 Final Release!*** Fedora Cloud, Fedora
Server, Fedora Workstation, and all the spins and the rest will go
into the world.
All of these dates are officially expressed as “no earlier than”. As
always the schedule may… flex… a little bit, but generally we aim to
actually hit these targets. That gives us just 20 weeks from now — mark
your calendars!
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/Schedule
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/ChangeSet
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_update_HOWTO
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
Fedora.next Preliminary Branding
--------------------------------
The Fedora Design Team is working on a plan for presentation of the
three different Fedora products we’ll be releasing this fall as part of
the Fedora.next initiative. Each of these will need their own logo, but
they also need a coherent look that ties them together as part of the
overall Fedora Project. Fedora Contributor Máirín Duffy kicks off the
process with some starting-point designs, which you can see at read
about at her blog.
What do you think? What ideas do you have?
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design
* http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-present-and-future-a-fedora-next-2014-update-part-ii-whats-happening/
* http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2014/05/22/fedora-next-brand-concept-1/
Fedora 21 Test Planning
-----------------------
Those three products will also need testing; that’s one of the reasons
the schedule is longer than the typical six months. Fedora Quality
Assurance “Community Monkey” Adam Williamson wrote a draft test plan
for Fedora 21 in general, outlining different areas of work and
responsibilities. If you’re interested in helping (or just curious),
read Adam’s message about this draft and join the conversation on the
Fedora Test Mailing List.
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Adamwill/Draft_Fedora_21_test_plan
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2014-May/121396.html
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/
Help Wanted (Soon) for Software Collection Package Reviews
----------------------------------------------------------
Software Collections is a way to package software into RPMs which sit
in `/opt`, outside of the main part of the distribution. The main use
case of Software Collections (SCLs, for short) is to have a stack of
software which moves at a different speed from the distro proper — in
RHEL or CentOS, that usually means faster, but in Fedora, it could be a
way to provide consistent runtime environments across multiple
releases.
Specifically, we’re planning to have a Ruby 1.9.3 with Rails 3.2.8 SCL
in Fedora 21 as a first experiment, led by Fedora contributor Marcela
Mašláňová. Since F21 will have Ruby 2.1.x with Rails 4.1, this will let
users with code that isn’t ready for the new version update to newer
Fedora — but port their own code on their own schedule
The Fedora Packaging Committee has been working on draft guidelines,
and the remaining big hurdle is that the 60-some new packages will need
to go through the standard review process. The plan is to make this as
painless as possible, by organizing an online activity day to crank
through them. If you’ve done some package reviews (and ideally if you
know Ruby), and are interested in helping, watch the Environments and
Stacks mailing list for more soon.
* https://www.softwarecollections.org/
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Ruby193_in_SCL
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Toshio/SCL_Guidelines_%28draft%29
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/env-and-stacks
--
Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project -- <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
"Tepid change for the somewhat better!"
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