Last chance for Flock registration
Flock is our big, annual contributor conference, where we get together to talk about what we’re working on and what we want to do in future releases, and also actually get in rooms together to hack on ideas. It’s also great fun, and a celebration of our “Friends” foundation.
This year, Flock will be held in Rochester, New York, from August 12-15. Anyone with interest in the Fedora community is welcome to come join us. We have a discount hotel rate, but reservations must be made by July 16. Go to https://resweb.passkey.com/go/FLOCK2015 to make yours, and also make sure to register at https://register.flocktofedora.org/ (so we can plan for food and events).
Fedora Globalization group
The Fedora Project overall has many different subgroups, in a sprawling and sometimes intimidating network not closely resembling an org chart. Recently, there’s been an effort to bring some clarity to different groups working on bringing Fedora to the entire world — Internationalization, Localization), and Language Testing Group. And there’s also the Zanata tool used for creating and maintaining translations. Under the new plan, these groups will unite under the banner of “Fedora Globalization”.
For more, visit the proposal wiki page, or join the mailing list conversation. This effort will make it much easier for new contributors to know where to join in, and enhance communications between the groups.
Weak dependencies come to Fedora!
You probably know that Fedora is built from RPM packages. And you probably know that Yum, DNF and GNOME Software take care of resolving dependencies — if something you want to install requires something else, those things are also installed. But where do those dependencies come from? Some of them are auto-detected, but others are added manually by the packager in the form of
lines in the spec files (the control files for creating RPMs).
But,
is a big hammer. If it’s there, the other package has to be on the system. When the other package is actually optional but useful to have, there’s a judgment call to be made — is the functionality so important that it’s worth requiring it to always be there? If Fedora were just one thing — a GNOME desktop environment, or a minimal cloud image, or a robotics platform — this would be easy. But it’s all of those things, and much more.
So, enter weak dependencies! These allow packages to Recommend or Suggest other packages. We’ve had the technical capability for a while now, but no policy — until this week. Guidelines for doing this were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee, so packagers can start using them now. Read more at Packaging:Weak Dependencies.
End of life, not end of world
With the end of support for Fedora 20, we’ve gone through our traditional procedure of closing all unfixed bugs for that release in our Bugzilla tracking system. This is always somewhat controversial — users went out of their way to file bugs, and it doesn’t seem fair to close them arbitrarily. But, we think it’s important because it’s honest. And, as a project, it helps us keep track of which bugs ended up this way, rather than being closed for other reasons. That’s why we have a special
status for end-of-life issues.
If an issue you care about and know is still unfixed got auto-closed in this way, please reopen it and change the release to a current version.
Continuous Builds with Koschei
This item is for Fedora packagers. We have a new service which can automatically rebuild your packages when dependencies change, and report on failures. That means that you can get warned early if a change to some library requires an adjustment, rather than only finding out when there’s a mass rebuild. (As a tangent, see this thread on rebuild failures from Adam Jackson.) The new service is called “Koschei” — read the annoucement, and the wiki page, and make sure to add your packages if interested (it isn’t automatic).
Vacation Next Week
I will be on vacation next week, so we’ll have another 5tFTW hiatus. It’s a busy time in Fedora, so expect 5tFTW back the week after that with a full installment.
