Fedora Beta Council

No, no, we won't have Beta Council, we're going to have final release from beginning (although implementation details has to be sorted out). It was just a coincidence - Fedora 21 Beta was released the same day as Council elections nomination period opened. Two announcements that had to go out yesterday.

Fedora Council nomination period is open by November 10th. If you're interested in to be a pioneer of the new Fedora and write history as member of the very first Fedora Council, please, add yourself to the Nominations page. If you know anyone, who would suit this role, talk to him, try to convince him to run for the seat. Two seats are available for community Elected Representatives. Another part of the Council is appointed but in a very clever way - by communities to serve specific roles (an Engineering Representative and an Outreach Representative). Then we have two appointed leadership roles - Fedora Project Leader and Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator. And two more members to help with diversity (Diversity Advisor) and secretary things (me aka Fedora Program Manager) but with limited voting scope. I really like the balance between appointed and elected seats and I hope to see a lot of folks running for Council seat!

Fedora 21 Beta is out. It was fun again, as always but we will work on a (I hope early) present for everyone delivered later this year. There are still a few things, that has to be sorted out but with very positive feedback on Alpha all around the Internet, we're on a good path. Currently, the plan is to release on December 9th.

That's all from me today, EON.

 

Summer 2014 FESCo Elections - nominations are open!

Just a quick post with an imporant announcement - special supplementary elections for FESCo are happening this month as we have to fill a few vacant seats. And nominations are officially open.

What does it mean? It's the best and unique opportunity to help steering Fedora from an engineering POV. FESCo decides on technical issues, upcoming Fedora Changes etc.

Nomination period ends on Monday, 7th of July, midnight (UTC). Hurry up!

And of course, big thanks goes to all three FESCo members who ends with these elections.

Summary of accepted Fedora 21 Changes - weeks 13/14

This is summary of FESCo's accepted Fedora 21 Changes for weeks 13 and 14 (2014-03-26 and 2014-04-02 meetings).

Reminder: the Change Submission deadline for System Wide Change is tomorrow (2014-04-08 23:59 UTC).

Accepted changes

System Wide Changes

Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

​​​Kernel modules that are not necessary in virtualized environments become optionally (un)installable.

Announcement

Optional Javadocs

Make javadoc subpackages of Java packages optional in guidelines and communicate this change to users.

Announcement

Ruby on Rails 4.1

Ruby on Rails 4.1 is the latest version of well know web framework written in Ruby.

Announcement

Java 8

Make Java 8 (provided by OpenJDK 8 which is java-1.8.0-openjdk) the default Java runtime. The current default Java runtime (Java 7, provided by OpenJDK 7, java-1.7.0-openjdk) will be obsoleted and removed.

This is essentially an upgrade to the latest Java and OpenJDK version. 

Announcement

PrivateDevices=yes and PrivateNetwork=yes For Long-Running Services

Let's make Fedora more secure by default! Recent systemd versions provide two per-service switches PrivateDevices?=yes/no and PrivateNetwork?=yes/no which enable services to run without access to any physical devices in /dev, or without access to kind of network sockets. So far this has seen little use in Fedora, and with this Fedora Change we'd like to change this, and enable these for all long-running services that do not require device/network access.

Announcement ​

notting has question to note: is disconnecting the netlink and audit namespace
truly required, or just merely a choice of what they decided to remove?

Self Contained Changes

Amplab Tachyon discussed at ​https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-March/197168.html

Amplab-Tachyon is a fault tolerant distributed file system enabling reliable
file sharing at memory-speed across cluster frameworks.

Apache Mesos discussed at ​https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-March/197180.html

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager for sharing distributed application
frameworks. This change brings Mesos to Fedora, which many have called a
micro-kernel for the data center.

Apache Spark discussed at ​https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-March/196967.html

Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing.
This change brings Spark to Fedora, allowing easy deployment and development of Spark applications on Fedora.

Improved Scala Ecosystem Support discussed at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-March/196964.html

Fedora now supports several essential parts of the Scala language ecosystem as well as building packages with sbt, the de facto build tool for the Scala community.

Scala proposal owners to work to develop packaging guidelines

DNSSEC support for FreeIPA discussed at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-March/197177.html

FreeIPA with integrated DNS server will support serving of DNSSEC secured
zones and automatic DNSSEC key maintenance.

This first version will have only the very basic functionality with limited
user interface and limited resiliency. Next versions (to be delivered in
Fedora 22 time frame) will improve resiliency and user interface
significantly.

NFS Ganesha File Server discussed at ​https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-March/196968.html

NFS Ganesha is a user mode file server that supports NFSv3, NFSv4, and NFSv4.1 including pNFS for distributed filesystems. It uses loadable filesystem driver modules to support its backend filesystems. It also integrates 9P.2000L file service

Rejected Changes

Security Policy In The Installer

There are many known tips and tricks how to make a system more secure, often depending on the use case for the system. With the OSCAP Anaconda Addon and the SCAP Security Guide projects, we may allow users choosing a security policy for their newly installed system.

Announcement

Please consider re-proposing as a kickstart-only change.

Getting closer to Fedora 21 (schedule)

As a follow up to my previous post, we're now getting closer to the Fedora 21 schedule. It's still not there and "no earlier than" type until we collect all proposed Changes (and will take a look on the scope of the release). But it should give you some overview - (no earlier than) October 14th is the date we are aiming for!

Why October? It gives us a bit more time to think about Fedora.next and actually work on it as there are changes planned that needs time to settle down. Also we will get back to May/October release dates and it allows us to sync with a few prominent upstreams (and get out of sync with other top upstreams probably ;-). At least for now :).

Current Fedora 21:

• Tue 2014-04-08 Change Proposals Submission Deadline
• Tue 2014-07-08 Change Proposals Freeze (Testable|Complete) - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-07-08 Branch Fedora 21 from Rawhide - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-07-22 Alpha Change Deadline - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-08-05 Alpha Release Public Availability - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-08-26 Accepted Changes 100% Complete Deadline - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-08-26 Beta Change Deadline - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-09-09 Beta Release Public Availability - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-09-30 Final Change Deadline - no earlier than
• Tue 2014-10-14 Final Release Public Availability (GA) - no earlier than 

For more details and future changes - see FESCo ticket #1178.

One more thing - this is friendly reminder that Change Proposals Submission Deadline is coming pretty soon (three weeks now), so make sure to propose your changes as soon as possible to avoid long queues waiting for FESCo decision (and killing me with wrangling everything day before deadline ;-). Thanks a lot!

End of (not my) life

Fedora's End of Life process creates a lot of discussion every time the magic script is executed. It's a life! Some folks do prefer notification emails sent from Bugzilla, another half dislike that spam (for Fedora 18 it's eliminated a bit). Clone versus reopen wars. As the script itself is pretty dumb and runs CSV file generated from Bugzilla, races occurs... And of course - the existence of the process itself. We can let bugs open without any attention or we can admit, we don't have enough man power to fix them all. Or both :). It's all up to discussion - we're open to any ideas, it's still open on devel list and FESCo ticket and we're trying to make sure it's not going to eat more kittens than it should.

But let's take a look on EOL from perspective of number of bugs closed. I was running the script from Fedora 14 up to Fedora 18 (with exception of Fedora 15 - Spot was doing it), so it's now possible to draw a simple chart and a lot of people were curios for stats.

As you can see, F14, F16 and F18 looks pretty similar. Approximately 6-7 thousand bugs, with F17 being exception.

Fedora 14 - 6370 bugs, 2012-08-16
Fedora 15 - no data, Spot was running script
Fedora 16 - 6805 bugs, 2013-02-12
Fedora 17 - 8208 bugs, 2013-07-30
Fedora 18 - 6445 bugs, 2014-02-05

I don't have total numbers of bugs right now, would be nice to see comparison but Bugzilla refuses to talk to me... 502... Also I tried to correlate numbers to Abrt bugs - looks consistent, no surprises (if you're interest in, I can share). And I'll let up to you to come with resolution what figure above means for us ;-).

Update: Bugzilla now talks to me again, so here is Total/EOL/Abrt bugs chart.

Where's Fedora 21 schedule?

I got this question several times last few days - "hey, you're the schedule wrangler, you have to know" - as usually this time, we are working pretty hard on the next Fedora. And Heisenbug was finished almost month ago - EOL is nearing. But this time we are in a bit different situation - there are several working groups trying to redefine, how Fedora should look like in the future and it does not make sense to create schedule. We need resolution from this effort. It's planned for January.

Is Fedora 21 going to be released in the old model way, or new one? Hard to answer right now. But there's one date - F21 is not going to be released earlier than in August (and I'd say late August). See FESCo ticket. What's the reason? As otherwise we would try to hit May timeframe? Short answe: we want to give the opportunity to the teams that are smashed by release windmills to work on tooling. Especially as the Fedora.next proposal stands on more automation to be able to deliver more products. Especially for QA and release engineering. Of course this time could be used by anyone! Also there was FESCo decision to steer release cycle and cadance at least for short term upcoming release to stick together. In the future, we can end with different release schedules for different products but automation and lot of preparation is prerequisite for it.

Other note - somehow connected to Fedora 21 release cycle, raised by Sirko. What will be the code name for Fedora 21. And again short answer: null. Not null as null string but null. Fedora Board decided to end release names process. It does not mean "no more release names" but it's up to community or working groups, if anyone wants to step into the role of Name Wrangler and helps running this process. Or reform it in any way.

January is going to be very interesting month from the point of future Fedora releases - stay tuned!

Btw. I can see a lot of people and teams missing information on what's going on, it's really hard for anyone to follow all working groups and what they are proposing, what FESCo decides, where's the schedule etc. Too much happening and I'd really like to see better coordination. As Base WG member I came with the idea of broader project meeting - WGs and other teams representatives to brief on status, work on coordination. Unfortunately, one more meeting during F20 release cycle would mean divorce :), so let me take a look on it again.