Flock (You’re Not Too Late!), Unsigned Packages in F21, Security, Marketing, and Notifications (5tFTW 2014-07-29)

5TFTW

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. Here are the five things for July 29th, 2014:

Flock: Missed Registration? No problem!

Flock, Fedora’s big contributor conference, is just a week away, from August 6th to 9th in Prague. Registration closed a while ago, but we’ve gotten several inquiries about the possibility of late sign-up. The answer is: You are still very welcome. Just show up! You won’t get a badge, lunch, or a t-shirt, but those are really the main reasons we ask for preregistration. If you missed your chance for that but want to come anyway, please do!

Unsigned Packages in Fedora 21?

An important notice from Rawhide Watch — a blog devoted to those of us who run Fedora’s bleeding-edge development branch — but about Fedora 21. Earlier this month, F21 split from Rawhide, in order to go through the stabilization process that leads to the alpha, beta, and (coming this fall) official final release. Even though the alpha isn’t ready yet, many testers are trying out the new branch already, and have discovered that some packages are not yet cryptographically signed.

As Adam Williamson explains on in the blog post, ) this is perfectly normal. Until the alpha “freeze” (currently slated for August 12th, after Flock), whenever a packager builds a package, it goes right into the tree, rather than going through the normal updates process. Once we get to that freeze, though, the normal updates system will be activated and package updates will need to be pushed just as they are for stable releases.

Fedora Security Team

Fedora contributor Eric “Sparks” Christensen announced the new Fedora Security Team. Fedora has had a Security Special Interest Group for a long time, and of course emergency security response and everything else you’d expect, but in general, the security update process put the burden on the maintainers of each individual software package in Fedora. The new community team will serve as a new resource for those packagers, working with each package’s upstream project to find the right fix — either a backported patch or identifying an updated version — and with the packager to help get these fixes into place and out to users.

Fedora Marketing

Meanwhile, the Fedora Marketing SIG held a meeting to discuss group organization and plans for the Fedora 21 release. Since Fedora 21 is going to be a little different from business as usual, with Fedora.next and the Cloud/Server/Workstation products, we’ve got a lot to think about and plan in order to best promote what we’re doing to the world. Check out the meeting minutes for details and join us on the mailing list if you’re interested in helping out.

Fedora Contributor Notifications

We have a system called fedmsg, the Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus. Many of the tools we use in Fedora send messages to this bus, including the Koji and Copr package build systems, the Fedora Wiki, question and answer site Ask Fedora, Fedora Badges, and more.

From the command line, you can

yum install fedmsg

and follow all activity with

fedora-tail --really-pretty

(or, of course, less pretty if you prefer). Or, you can use datagrepper to search historical data. Now, the Fedora Infrastructure team is working on Fedora Notifications, which can trigger e-mail or IRC alerts for messages from various apps which match your username or other criteria. Mobile phone app alerts are in the works too.

Five Things in Fedora This Week

1 Comment

  1. Tomasz

    Certainly you meant “fedmsg-tail” instead of “fedora-tail”.

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