5tFTW: Fedora Council, L10N Zanata, FUDCon LATAM, Taskotron, and Retrace improvements (2014-10-17)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-10-17/>.

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that
goes on. 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
October 17th, 2014:


Introducing the Fedora Council
------------------------------

Last week, the Fedora Project Board unanimously approved its
replacement, a new top-level leadership and governance body we’re
calling the *Fedora Council*. Read more about it in John Rose’s
announcement message, and our previous Fedora Magazine article about
upcoming elections.

This didn’t happen overnight — Christoph Wickert, Toshio Kuratomi, Josh
Boyer, and others have been talking about this and working on related
proposals for the last couple of years, and Toshio and Haïkel Guémar
led a great session at Flock — Fedora’s big annual planning conference
— this August. We’ve been thinking about and discussing what to do ever
since, and now it’s time to put the result into action!

  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-governance-proposal-approved/
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-council-elections-coming-soon/
  * http://flock2014.sched.org/event/9d2f47d741d92f1ddf559bb918dcb2d1


Translation team switches to Zanata
-----------------------------------

Fedora’s L10N team — the *L-10-N* is short for localization, because
there are 10 missing letters there — does an amazing job of translating
our software to dozens of different languages. (If you’re a Fedora user
who speaks a language other than English, this is a great and fun way
to get involved, by the way — see the steps to join in the Fedora
Localization Guide.)

All of this work is accomplished using some specialized tools. For a
long time, Fedora has used Transifex, a project by Dimitris Glezos
which actually grew out of Fedora. Unfortunately, recent versions of
Transifex are not open source. As a project, we always prefer to work
with open source tools whenever possible, and the L10N team started a
project to migrate to a different and completely free and open source
tool, Zanata.

Last week, all translation teams for different languages discussed and
voted whether to move ahead with this, and the result was 19 “Go” votes
and none against. With the active contributor community overwhelmingly
in favor, it’s an easy decision to go forward, and according to the
plan, the new “stage 1″ service should be live any day now.

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/Guide
  * https://www.transifex.com/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N_Move_To_Zanata
  * http://zanata.org/
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/2014-October/011635.html


FUDCon Managua 2015
-------------------

This year’s FUDCon — that’s Fedora User and Developer Conference — in
Latin America will in in Managua, Nicaragua next week. Organizer
Neville Cross tipped off 5tFTW with a few particularly interesting
notes:

- Robotics will rock FUDCon: Valentin Basel will present on a
  Fedora-based robot, and lead a session on building from parts.
  (See this video from FUDCon Panamá 2011.)

- Small computers will be big: the FUDCon team is bringing
  Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards to demonstrate.

- FUDCon on TV: The Fedora revolution *will* be televised!

  * http://roadtofudconlatam.org/robotic-will-rock-fudcon/
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Q9aMywkg8
  * http://roadtofudconlatam.org/small-computers-will-be-big-at-fudcon/
  * http://roadtofudconlatam.org/fudcon-and-fedora-on-tv/


New QA Automation framework goes live
-------------------------------------

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, the Fedora 21 cycle has been one of
our longest ever. We did this on purpose, and one of the primary
reasons was to give our Quality Assurance team time to work on tooling
and infrastructure rather than just cycling through tests over and
over. This has borne fruit, and our new QA automation framework
Taskotron has gone live, replacing AutoQA] for checks on package
updates.

Right now, the effect on end users and developers is very small, but
the change will enable many more important features in the near future,
including user-submitted tests to run automatically. This will
increasingly offload repetitive testing tasks so that humans time can
be focused where it’s most valuable, resulting in an even better Fedora
going forward.

  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Taskotron
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2014-October/123327.html


Upgraded Retrace Server includes CentOS collaboration
-----------------------------------------------------

This is another infrastructure thing which sounds kind like it might be
boring but which also will pay off in a better, more bug-free Fedora.
The Retrace/ABRT Server debugging tool which generates useful
information from automated crash reports. This has been upgraded with
newer hardware, enabling a few changes which directly benefit Fedora
developers and users.

First, if a package is updated and the same crash doesn’t occur for two
weeks, those issues are automatically closed, reducing bug noise and
overload. Second, these reports are now cross-referenced with those
from CentOS 7, allowing us to collaborate on debugging and fixing
problems And third, it is, of course, much, much faster.

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-October/203371.html


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