5tFTW: F21 Alpha, Shellshock, Schedule Docs Update, Flock 2015 Locations, and a Fedora User Committee idea (2014-09-26)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-09-26/>.

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 September 18th, 2014:


Fedora 21 Alpha Release!
------------------------

Of course, this week’s big news is the release of Fedora 21 Alpha — the
first formal test release on the way to an early-December final
release. This will be our first release with distinct Cloud, Server,
and Workstation products — a first phase of Fedora.next. Read the F21
Alpha release announcement, and download the flavor you’re interested
in (or launch the cloud image in EC2).

A gigantic thank you and congratulations to all of the Fedora
contributors who made this happen!

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora.next
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F21_Alpha_release_announcement
* http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
* https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=us-east-1#LaunchInstanceWizard:ami=ami-20268848


Shellshock and Fedora
---------------------

And then, this is our *other* big news. By now, this has been
well-covered *everywhere*, but if you haven’t seen it yet, check out
articles tagged `shellshock` on Fedora Magazine to keep your system
safe.

If you’re curious, read my "Shellshock: How does it actually work?"
article, where I attempt to give a satisfying level of detail in a way
that anyone can understand. Also, the Red Hat security blog has a nice
post-incident FAQ, with a lot of other background and information, and
explains the reasoning behind the patch Red Hat developed (which is the
one we are using in Fedora).

You might also be interested Dan Walsh’s blog entry on how SELinux
helps contain this attack — it’s not perfect, but when an exploit is
in the wild, it’s important to have meaningful layers of protection.

And! I’ll be live on the Linux Action Show this Sunday, talking
about Shellshock and other things.

* http://fedoramagazine.org/tag/shellshock/
* http://fedoramagazine.org/shellshock-how-does-it-actually-work/
* https://securityblog.redhat.com/2014/09/26/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-shellshock-bash-flaws/
* http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/71122.html
* http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/tag/linux-action-show/


In Which Adam Fixes Everything
------------------------------

Fedora QA Community Monkey (no, really, that’s his title) Adam
Williamson apparently does not need to sleep, and in the midst of all of
the Shellshock fun, spent about 36 hours straight cleaning up some of
the documentation in the Fedora wiki around our release schedule and
process. Some of this is only of interest if you’re deeply involved in
Fedora development or QA, but if you’re following Fedora prereleases
(like the alpha!) — and possibly if you have been confused previously —
it’s all a lot better now, with more consistent names and documentation
that actually reflects reality. Take a look at

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Milestone_freezes

and about three dozen interlinked pages which are now all nicely
consistent and much more beautiful than they were before. This is a
great example of how "just do it!" works in wikis and open source in
general — some discussion on IRC and mailing lists, but no waiting to
act. Thanks to Adam for seeing a mess and making it better!

Flock Possibilities
-------------------

Flock (our big annual contributor conference) will be held in North
America next summer — but where? We have four bids, all in the United
States:

* Salt Lake City, Utah
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flock2015-SaltLakeCity-proposal

* Colorado Springs, Colorado
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flock2015-ColoradoSprings-proposal

* Rochester, New York
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flock2015-Rochester-proposal

* Cape Cod, Massachusetts
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flock2015-CapeCod-proposal

The Flock planning team is working on putting together a side-by-side
feature and cost comparison, and will soon be running a straw poll to
find the preferences of potential attendees.

Robyn on Distros and DevOps — and User Communication
----------------------------------------------------

Former Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has an interesting blog
post about "distros and silos, devops and open source". She talks about
several things (all worth reading), but one of the most interesting is
the suggestion she floats for a User Committee. What do you think?
Would a Fedora User Committee help improve our communication and break
down silos?

* http://robyn.io/2014/09/24/distros-and-silos-devops-and-open-source/

----

Repost note: for the past couple of months, I've just been posting this
to the magazine and not reposting to mailing lists. The mailing list
posts weren't getting a lot of response. I'm trying it again this week,
though — let me know if it's useful to have it here. You can also
follow using the RSS feed at <http://fedoramagazine.org/tag/5tftw/feed/>.

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