It’s been a relatively quiet week. Snapshot support in virt-manager, automatic latest-code repos with dgroc, Fedora Plasma KDE-based product proposal, and Fedora Atomic Initiative.

5TFTWFedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This new feature will highlight interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It won’t be comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. So, here we go for March 25th, 2014:

Snapshot support in virt-manager

Virt-manager is a GUI for managing virtual machines on your local system or remotely. It’s handy for intermediate/advanced users or for sysadmins who are not in the mood for the command line. With version 1.0, now in Rawhide and updates for F20, virt-manager now supports snapshots. Developer Cole Robinson has a blog post with details and a walkthrough of the new GUI. (A similar feature may come to Gnome Boxes in the future via Summer of Code work.)

From upstream code to packages in a repo, automatically every day

Fedora’s new Copr system lets any Fedora contributor easily maintain and publish a repository of whatever software you want, as long as it falls within our legal guidelines. (*cough* Fedora PPAs *cough*) But what if that’s not automatic enough? What if you want to track a fast-moving upstream without having to update source RPMs constantly? Prolific Fedora hacker Pierre-Yves Chibon (“pingou”) presents dgroc, for “Daily Git Rebuild On Copr”. It basically does just what it says — takes care of the updating and building in Copr, so you can focus on the software rather than the packaging.

Fedora Plasma? A proposal from the KDE SIG

The Fedora KDE SIG has been working on a proposal for a Fedora Product based on KDE Plasma Desktop, with a primary focus on education and scientific users. Contributor (and board member) Rex Dieter sent a request for feedback to the Fedora Project Board today; if accepted, this will join already-planned Cloud, Server, and Workstation products. The discussion around this will be interesting to follow. Most people in the project agree that products in the Fedora.next framework should be held to a high standard, and that we shouldn’t have endless proliferation, but how, where, and when we draw that line is not settled.

FPL Robyn Bergeron on Fedora, Red Hat, and the Future

Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has a new blog post,
Fedora, Red Hat, and investing in the future, with thoughts on Red Hat’s investment in our project, Fedora’s value to Red Hat, and the Fedora.next plans.

Fedora Atomic

Since this week has been a little slow, I’m going to cheat a bit and pull something big from the backlog. Fedora developer Colin Walters has launched a new project called Fedora Atomic. This system constructs git-like trees from existing official Fedora RPMs, and moves operating-system deployment from managing packages to managing these trees, with (as the name suggests) fully-atomic updates and rollbacks. It’s still in early development, but moving quickly, and the Fedora Cloud SIG is considering using it for some special-purpose images (including a minimal Docker host). Sound interesting — or scary? Learn more.


Thanks to Stephen Gallagher for content suggestions this week, and Joe Brockmeier for proofreading. If you have tips for the next week, please send ’em to me.