5tFTw: F21 on Track, FESCo Membership Change, More DNF vs. Yum, Reading VM Logs, and Wiki Infoboxes (2014-06-17)

Tue Jun 17 22:04:51 UTC 2014

Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-06-17/>.

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 17th, 2014:

Fedora 21 Is Not Delayed
------------------------

It might seem a bit funny to report on something that’s *not*
happening, but this got picked up by some of the tech press so I
thought it best to clarify the actual situation. Short version: we’re
*not* currently planning any delay from the established target of
October 14th, 2014.

Longer version: the Fedora Server Working Group is writing new code
which will provide a programmatic interface (an API) for provisioning
servers with certain Server Roles. This doesn’t compete with existing
config management tools like Puppet, Chef, or Ansible — it provides a
framework that they (or the new Cockpit web GUI) can talk to. That’s
taking a little bit longer than planned, especially because new input
from the CentOS Simple Linux Server SIG was incorporated. However, at
last week’s meeting, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee,
which manages the overall schedule) decided to allow *just* this Server
Role Deployment Framework]framework] to land a little late in the
Fedora Alpha schedule, but with no delay to the rest of the project or
change to the overall F21 schedule.

  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server
  * http://fedoraserver-wgblog.rhcloud.com/primary-goals-for-fedora-server-in-fedora-21/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FrameworkForServerRoleDeployment
  * http://cockpit-project.org/
  * http://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/SLS
  * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-11/fesco.2014-06-11-17.02.html

Bill Nottingham Steps Down From FESCo; Kyle McMartin Steps Up
-------------------------------------------------------------

Long-time and almost omnipresent Fedora contributor Bill Nottingham
has started a new day job at open source config-management company
Ansible, and resigned his Fedora Engineering Steering Committee
seat in order to be able to focus on that. Our election policy
states that open seats are offered to previous runners-up, which
means Kyle McMartin is our newest FESCo member (although not, by
any means new to Fedora). Thank you Bill for years of work on
Fedora in FESCo and elsewhere, and welcome Kyle!

P.S. We use Ansible quite heavily in Fedora Infrastructure. Also:
Former Fedora Project Leader Greg DeKoenigsberg is also joining
Ansible, which already boasts quite the slate of former Red Hatters and
Fedora contributors. I’m looking forward to further collaboration
across our open source projects.

  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Notting
  * https://twitter.com/ansible/status/478518891665432576
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Development/SteeringCommittee/Nominations#Kyle_McMartin_.28kylem.29
  * http://www.slideshare.net/AdityaPatawari/ansible-33223245
  * http://www.ansible.com/management-team

DNF as Yum Replacement, Continued
---------------------------------

Last week, I wrote about a proposal to replace Fedora’s Yum package
manager with DNF. That proposal — targeting next year’s Fedora 22,
_not_ Fedora 21 this fall — is now officially on the table for
discussion. That discussion continues on the Fedora devel mailing list.
Although there are several long threads, it looks like people are
generally open to the idea and advantages of the new code, but there
are differing opinions on whether DNF should keep that name or become
“Yum 4” — or even take a new generic name like `package`. Feel free to
join in, although please remember to be constructive and to follow the
Fedora Project Code of Conduct (which, basically, boils down to “be
excellent to each other”.

  * http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-06-10/
  * http://yum.baseurl.org/
  * http://dnf.baseurl.org/
  * https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1312
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-June/thread.html
  * https://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct

Coming Soon to libguestfs: Smart Log Reading
--------------------------------------------

The systemd journal brings a lot of useful features, including
structured log formats and reliable connection of messages to the
services they came from. But, its binary log format can be less
convenient when you’re not working *on* the system where the logs
reside.

This is often the case when using libguestfs, an almost-magically-
powerful tool for working with virtual machine disk images. Developer
Richard W.M. Jones blogs about a new feature: virt-log. This command
automatically does the right thing with several different guest system
log possibilities, including understanding the journald format, knowing
that Debian-based systems use `/var/log/syslog` instead of our
`/var/log/messages`, and in the future will even read the Microsoft
Windows Event Log.

  * http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/journalctl.html
  * http://libguestfs.org/
  * http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/new-in-libguestfs-virt-log/

Add an Infobox to Your Fedora Wiki User Page
--------------------------------------------

Our wiki serves many purposes (maybe too many!), but one of the the
most useful is providing simple autobiographical and contact
information for contributors. A neat little thing I stumbled across
this week is the Infobox template, defined and documented at
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_user>. Follow these
instructions and add the template to your page for a clean, consistent
presentation of your Fedora-relevant details.

As a bonus, display your Fedora Badges with `{{ #fedorabadges: fasname }}`

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_user
  * https://badges.fedoraproject.org/
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/badges.png
  * https://badges.fedoraproject.org/user/mattdm

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