5tFTw: Board Meeting, Rawhide Rebuilt, Firewall Debate, ARM 64, and DNF as Yum Replacement, plus RHEL7 Bonus Item (2014-06-10)

Thu Jun 12 15:41:43 UTC 2014

Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-06-10/>.

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 June 10th, 2014 (and sorry for
the posting delay):

New FPL Board Meeting
---------------------

We held the first public Fedora Project Board meeting of my new tenure
as Fedora Project Leader yesterday, as an informal town-hall
discussion. You can read the summary or full log. We’ll be holding
these every two weeks. Usually, we’ll have an agenda based on decisions
to be made or (as suggested in this discussion, actually) with
representatives from different parts of the project talking about their
area of Fedora. But when we don’t have a pre-planned schedule, we’ll do
open floor like this for whatever people want to talk about. (In this
week’s case, it’s largely this: Fedora QA could use your help!)

  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-09/board.2014-06-09-17.00.html
  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-09/board.2014-06-09-17.00.log.html
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join

Rawhide Mass Rebuild
--------------------

Periodically, we do a “mass rebuild” of all of the packages in Rawhide,
our development branch. This makes sure that all of the software uses
the latest compilers and build macros. This is mostly an automated
process, but sometimes some software does not rebuild successfully. If
that software doesn’t get updated by its maintainers, and no one picks
it up, it will eventually be dropped from the distribution. Fedora
Release Engineer Dennis Gilmore posted a Fedora 21 Mass rebuild update,
including a link to the packages which need work. If any of these are
yours, please fix. Or if there’s something that you’re interested in
that isn’t rebuilding, considerer helping by becoming a co-maintainer.
(If you’re curious, the standard operating procedure followed for these
rebuilds is available on the Fedora wiki at Mass Rebuild SOP.)

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-June/199629.html
  * http://ausil.fedorapeople.org/f21-failures.html
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mass_Rebuild_SOP

Fedora Workstation and Firewalld
--------------------------------

In April, there was a large discussion over a proposal to drop the
firewall by default from Fedora Workstaion. The basic argument was
that the the current state of application integration with the firewall
service FirewallD isn’t adequate to provide a good user experience,
and that the security benefits aren’t really meaningful in actual
practice. Others disagreed, and ultimately, Workstation designers and
FirewallD developers met to figure out a solution. Developer Bastien
Nocera summarizes the resulting plan, which includes additional
automated testing, a new firewall zone, and adding network awareness to
GNOME’s “sharing” controls.

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-April/198041.html
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FirewallD
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-June/009862.html

Update on 64-bit ARM and Fedora 21
----------------------------------

Fedora contributor and ARM hacker Peter Robinson provides an aarch64
(arm64) on Fedora 21 update. Current ARM support in Fedora is 32-bit,
and focused mostly on low-cost consumer devices. The new 64-bit
“aarch64″ architecture promises an exciting future of low-cost,
energy-efficient, high-density servers — the “hyperscale” datacenter.
Peter says that progress is going nicely, with some porting work
remaining particularly around support of newer langages like Go and
server-side Javascript, but an overall status of “looking awesome”.

  * http://nullr0ute.com/2014/06/aarch64-arm64-on-fedora-21-update/
  * http://golang.org/
  * https://code.google.com/p/v8/

DNF Proposed for Fedora 22 (and user survey)
--------------------------------------------

DNF is an experimental package manager, similar to the current
Yum. It’s *largely* a drop-in replacement, promising faster
dependency-solving and (more critically) a new explicitly-defined API
designed to make it easier to develop higher-level software like GUI
tools an plugins. There was a great article in January on Linux Weekly
News about a *previous* long discussion on DNF, and that’s
recommended reading if you missed it before. But also, the DNF
developers are asking for user feedback on Yum features missing in
DNF, so please do register your feedback about what is important to
you. And there is a feature proposal, not for the upcoming Fedora 21,
but for next year’s Fedora 22, to replace the current Yum with DNF
(possibly as “yum 4″).

  * http://dnf.baseurl.org/
  * http://yum.baseurl.org/
  * https://lwn.net/Articles/580223/
  * http://dnf.baseurl.org/2014/06/06/vote-for-yum-features-that-you-miss-in-dnf/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ReplaceYumWithDNF

Bonus Item! RHEL 7 and Fedora
-----------------------------

You may have noticed that a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was
released — RHEL 7. Former Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has a
great blog post about the process by which Fedora serves as the upstream
for RHEL, and the history of some features of RHEL 7 in particular:
Fedora, Red Hat, RHEL 7, & Open Source. (Or: How RHEL 7 is literally
“Beefy.”)

  * http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/6/red-hat-unveils-rhel-7
  * http://robyn.io/2014/06/10/rhel-is-beefy/

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader