Falls noch jemand Gratis-Tickets für den LinuxTag braucht, bitte unten kommentieren.

After months of – sometimes controversial – discussion I am happy to announce the new FAmSCo election guidelines. For those of you, who did not follow the discussion, here is a brief summary of the three most important changes:

More continuity

Instead of electing all seats once a year, we follow the example of the Fedora Board and FESCo and elect half of the committee every 6 months or with every release of Fedora. FAmSCo will not change over sudden and new members can easily catch up with their new duties by learning from others.

Easier filling of vacant seats

Every committee is in danger of members becoming inactive. This can happen to all of us for various reasons such as our dayjobs or personal problems. Under the old guidelines, we had to wait until 3 members left – even with 2 left the committee is hardly operational – and then call a supplementary election – which never happened even though some FAmSCo’s had only 4 active members. Now we are filling vacant seats when necessary, either with runner-up candidates from the previous elections or by appointing new members.

Wider electorate

The ambassadors represent the whole Fedora Project, this is why now not only ambassadors are eligible to vote for FAmSCo, but everybody who has signed the Fedora Project Contributors Agreement (FCPA) and is member of (at least) one other group in the Fedora Account System (FAS) is allowed to vote. This will not only strengthen FAmSCo’s position but also help candidates who are active in other groups of the Fedora project.

Last but not least the guidelines have been massively cleaned up.

We think that the new guidelines are a big improvement and want them to come into effect as soon as possible. Therefor we will have a special election for Fedora 18 (the next regular elections were scheduled for F19). All 7 seats in FAmSCo will be open for election. In order to make the transition to the new alternating terms, the top 4 vote-getters will serve 2 Fedora releases, the bottom 3 will have to run for re-election after one release.

More about the upcoming ambassadors elections to come later this week as part of the general Fedora 18 elections announcement or on the elections wiki page. Please help us building a better, stronger and more active FAmSCo by casting your votes.

If you have feedback or questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. We are looking forward for your input on the Fedora ambassadors mailing list or in the ticket in FAmSCo’s trac.

# semanage fcontext -a -t virt_image_t "/home/libvirt/images(/.*)?"
# semanage fcontext -a -t virt_var_lib_t "/home/libvirt(/.*)?"
# matchpathcon /home/libvirt/images/test
/home/libvirt/images/test system_u:object_r:virt_var_lib_t:s0

That’s not what we want, so we set the context for /home/libvirt/images again:

# semanage fcontext -a -t virt_image_t "/home/libvirt/images(/.*)?"
# matchpathcon /home/libvirt/images/test
/home/libvirt/images/test system_u:object_r:virt_var_lib_t:s0

Nothing has changed. Let’s start over again:

# semanage fcontext -d "/home/libvirt/images(/.*)?"
# semanage fcontext -d "/home/libvirt(/.*)?"
# semanage fcontext -a -t virt_var_lib_t "/home/libvirt(/.*)?"
# semanage fcontext -a -t virt_image_t "/home/libvirt/images(/.*)?"
# matchpathcon /home/libvirt/images/test
/home/libvirt/images/test system_u:object_r:virt_image_t:s0

So order does matter? And one has to remove contexts to set them again in the right order? That doesn’t scale. Imagine you have to remove contexts all the way up to your root directory…

I would expect something like “specific overwrites general” but definitely not “last come, first served”.

1. Document the new spins process in the wiki and implement it in Trac.
2. Finalize my draft of the new FAmSCo election guidelines.
3. Sign keys from the keysigning event and send them out to their owners.

Please bear with me if it takes me some time to get everything done because I am pretty busy with my dayjob.

1. Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community
2. Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community
3. It is extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on.

While we all agree that these goals are worthy, we realized that are problematic:

1. They are too vague. There is no immediate action that results from any of them.
2. They are impossible to achieve. We can always improve and therefor never really reach them.
3. They are hard to measure. Even if we make progress, we cannot measure it.
4. They cannot be enforced.

I think I need explain the last one a little: In addition to the the individual goals we listed examples. In order to make it easy to join Fedora, all our teams should have some documentation about how to join them. It would be easy to have the Board reach out to all groups and say: “We decided you need documentation on how to join your team. Please have it written by next week and report back to us.” But that’s not how it works.

Instead of enforcing things, we rather need to encourage and enable people. This means that we need to provide tools and manpower to get things done. In this example we would try to liaise a new contributor with a volunteer from the Documentation project and somebody from the group in question. These three people make a perfect team: The new contributor will ask the questions, the group member can answer them and the documentation writer can document is all in nicely for future reference. A win-win situation for everybody: The group gets documentation and hopefully more contributors in the future. The docs writer gains more insight into other parts of the Fedora project and the new contributor can work on something useful right from the start.

Even if there may not have been much progress of the strategic goals in the last year, I think we learned some very important lessons:

1. Pick goals that can actually be achieved.
2. Make sure you have a way to measure progress.
3. Pick your favorite project and champion it.
4. Don’t enforce guidelines but encourage and enable people.

Security updates

• apache: Security update to 2.2.21 fixes CVE-2011-3192.

Bugfixes

• imapd: The build error in imapd was fixed.
• kolab-webadmin: The ActiveSync configuration is back again.
• kolab-z-push: New version with bugfixes for various Nokia phones.
• z-push: New upstream version with many bugfixes.

New features

• none

For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.

Upgrading

The upgrade form 2.3.1 is straight forward, there is nothing special you need to care about. If you are upgrading from 2.2.4, please follow the instructions to upgrade from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 as outlined in the 1st.README file.

Downloads

Documentation and OpenPKG packages are available as shown on the download page. Binary packages for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (Squeeze/stable) and 5.0 (Lenny/oldstable) on x86 platforms can be found next to the sources. As soon as they have synced, you can also use the mirrors.

You can check the integrity of the downloaded files by importing our file distribution key and verify the OpenPGP signature and SHA1 checksums:

$ wget https://ssl.intevation.de/Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --import Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --verify SHA1SUMS.sig
 $ sha1sum -c SHA1SUMS

Bugs

Please report bugs in our bug tracker.

Hotel in Milan: 145 EUR

Hotdog costume on Ebay: 15 EUR

Fun at FUDPub: priceless!

Beefy Miracle live at FUDPub

Security Updates

• apache: Security update to 2.2.20 fixing CVE-2011-3192
• imapd: Security update to to 2.3.17 fixing CVE-2011-3208
• openssl: Update to 1.0.0e fixing CVE-2011-3207 and CVE-2011-3210
• php / apache-php: Security update fixing CVE-2011-1148, CVE-2011-1938, CVE-2011-2202 and CVE-2011-2483

Bugfixes

• dimp: No more blank mails in the preview pane. If you still have problems, please make sure to generate all required locales in both ISO and UTF-8 and delete the webclient cache /kolab/var/kolab/webclient_data/tmp/cache_*
• horde: All attachments are displayed again, preference woes were fixed and the memory limit was raised to aviod large Kolab objects to cause a white screen.
• imp: Umlauts in System folders are displayed correctly
• Kolab_FreeBusy: Triggering with only the localpart of user works again
• Kolab_Server: Just like in horde, the memory limit was raised to avoid white screens with large Kolab objects.
• Kolab_Storage: *Lots* of fixes, most notably shared calendars and address books with the same name can now be distinguished.
• kolab-webadmin: The folder listing in the ActiveSync config and the domain maintainer’s welcome page were fixed
• kronolith: FreeBusy list of event organizers in their event attendee view is working again
• openldap: Update to 2.4.26 fixing some memory leaks in slapd

New Features

• turba: organizationalUnit (ou) is displayed in the global address book as “department”

For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.

Upgrading

The upgrade form 2.3.2 is straight forward, there is nothing special you need to care about. Only if you are compiling packages yourself you need to recompile some due to the OpenSSL update as described in the 1st.README file.

If you are upgrading from 2.2.4, please follow the instructions to upgrade from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 as outlined in 1st.README.

Downloads

Documentation and OpenPKG packages are available as shown on the download page. Binary packages for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (Squeeze/stable) and 5.0 (Lenny/oldstable) on x86 platforms can be found next to the sources. As soon as they have synced, you can also use the mirrors.

You can check the integrity of the downloaded files by importing our file distribution key and verify the OpenPGP signature and SHA1 checksums:

$ wget https://ssl.intevation.de/Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --import Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --verify SHA1SUMS.sig
 $ sha1sum -c SHA1SUMS

Native packages

The native packages for Fedora, EPEL and Debian will be updated to 2.3.3 within the next week.

Bugs

Please report bugs in our bug tracker.

Fälschung

Unglaublich wie die Synchronisation einen Film verhunzen kann. Bitte unbedingt auf Englisch gucken!

Ein schwerer Schlag, den ich erst mal verdauen muss. Für mich hieß es die letzten 24 Jahre mehr oder weniger regelmäßig “Sonntag Abend gehört Paul E. Pop.” und ich weiß nicht, was ich jetzt nach dem Tatort machen soll.