Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-01)

5TFTW

No-foolin’ items for this week: Wayland and Gnome 3.12, Flock and F21 planning deadlines, infrastructure downtime, and the Docs team starts a cookbook.

5TFTWFedora 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.

I know it’s traditional for the Internet to be useless today, but, despite the temptation, I’m sticking to the facts. So, here we go for April 1st, 2014:

Trying Wayland (and Gnome 3.12)

Wayland is the upcoming successor to the X11 graphics protocol which powers our desktops. It’s not done yet, but you can try it first in Fedora. You’ll need to be running Rawhide (Fedora’s development branch). In theory, it should work on Fedora 20 with Gnome 3.12, but from this mailing list thread, it looks like that’s not working yet.

Wait, Gnome 3.12 on Fedora 20, you ask? Yes; although F20 shipped with 3.10, 3.12 is available for those of you who are a little adventurous but not so brave as to run Rawhide, via Richard Hughes’ Gnome 3.12 COPR. See this article for instructions.

Infrastructure downtime today

What better time for major upgrades than April Fool’s Day? If you notice that some Fedora infrastructure services are unavailable later this evening, it’s no joke, just planned work, including an upgrade to Koji, Fedora’s package and image building service. (This will improve the process by which we generate cloud images, and is a step towards the more-automated future we need for Fedora.next.) The work should happen between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (

date -d '2014-04-01 21:00 UTC'

in your local time). Downtime announcement and details.

Last call for Flock talk proposals

Flock is our big annual development and planning conference, held this year in Prague from August 6th–9th. The deadline for talk proposals is April 3rd — that’s Thursday. So if you are thinking of something, it’s time to put those thoughts in writing. Note that there is some funding available for travel and hotel subsidies; it’s not guaranteed, but we want as many contributors there as possible, so if you have a need, there is a box to check at registration time.

Fedora 21 change plan deadline

Speaking of deadlines… the Fedora Change Proposal deadline is April 8th, a week from today. These change proposals are our primary means for coordinating development across the project, so particularly if you want to do something which affects other areas, get it in now. FESCo (Fedora’s technical steering committee) reviews and approves each proposal and may accept late entries (especially for “self-contained” changes), but it really helps to know sooner rather than later.

Note that these proposals are largely statements of intent to do something, not orders for someone else to. As a community project developed by volunteers, we don’t have a mechanism to force anyone do anything, so if you want to make something happen and can’t do it all yourself, discuss on the Fedora devel list (or the appropriate SIGs) and get others inspired to sign on as collaborators.

Fedora Docs starts a Cookbook

The Fedora Docs team does an excellent job of producing our book-quality documentation, but we have a unfilled need for easy-to-contribute-to howto and quickstart articles. The Docs team recently held an Activity Day focused on finding a solution, and Pete Travis (a.k.a. “randomuser”) describes the results: The answer we settled on is what will become the Fedora Cookbook, and it is a process as much as a book. Anyone can submit a ‘recipe’ for the Cookbook […] using provided templates, and Docs volunteers will review, mark up, submit for translation, and publish.

There’s a lot more in Pete’s post, so if this is an area of interest to you, and especially if you’ve been wanting to contribute but aren’t sure how, don’t miss it.

5tFTW note

This is the third installment of this series, and I’m still calibrating a few things. I’m aiming at a wide audience, but I’m not quite sure how much explaining I should do of general Fedora knowledge. Is it helpful for me to (as above), give a quick explanation when I talk about Rawhide, Flock, or FESCo? Or, does that just increase the word count for no reason? Let me know.

Also, as always, tips on what’s going on in your part of Fedora are appreciated — e-mail them to me directly, or ping me on IRC.

Fedora Project community Five Things in Fedora This Week

2 Comments

  1. Matthew, thanks for these posts. The openness of the Fedora Project in general is one of its many attributes. I really do feel like I’m part of this community and that Fedora is a community effort.

    Both these “Five Things” posts and the Fedora.next posts (and that process in general) are really helping users figure out what’s going to happen in the project in the months ahead.

    I really do believe that this kind of outreach helps bring people over to Fedora, and I thank for you for it.

  2. Richard Turner

    I agree with Steven Rosenberg, these articles are interesting and informative. I’ve been using Fedora on and off since the beginning, and Red Hat before that, but not being involved in the development process I don’t know about it’s governance model. E.g. I’ve gathered what FESCo does from context, but never knew what the name stood for. I think you’re pitching these articles just right; thanks.

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