The Fedora Project: Where we {were,at,will be}

(re-jigged from LWE)

Colin Charles

colin@fedoraproject.org

http://www.bytebot.net/

Title

What is the Fedora Project?

Red Hat sponsored, community supported open source project

A merger between the Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux projects

Proving ground for new technologies

Core is a subset of RHEL

Not a beta testing ground for software that doesn't work

Development done out in the open by Red Hat engineers and members of the community

Concentration mainly around:

Core: the distribution, package set that includes ISOs upon release that happen about twice a year

Extras: additional packages to increase the productivity of Core users; works alongside Core

Legacy: security fixes for older releases of core packages

A little history

(and some predictions)

Core 1 – November 2003

2.4 based kernel, GNOME 2.4, yum inside

Core 2 – May 2004

2.6 based kernel, GNOME 2.6, SELinux, new OpenOffice.org, XFce 4, x86_64 official release, Xorg X11

Core 3 – November 2004

2.6 based kernel, GNOME 2.8, SELinux, Firefox, HAL/DBUS, gamin, LVM in anaconda

Core 4 – May 2005

Test2 should be out next week

Whats there to look out for in Core 4?

2.6.11/12 based upstream kernel (-ac based) – currently 2.6.11

GCC 4 (guaranteed rebuilds with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE)

GNOME 2.10

KDE 3.4

MySQL 4

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Xen

Package management

Faster boot time

PPC support – first time we have Core/Extras PPC officially

Smaller Core – removal of non-core items such as

Xemacs, Exim, bzflag, tuxracer, gpdf, etc...

More integrated Extras

fedora-extras.repo / fedora-extras-release package

GCC4

Cause of a lot of pain and misery initially

Still causes pain with Extras on !x86 arches

GCC 4.0 has Static Single Assignment (SSA) performance improvements — SSA's usefulness comes from how it simultaneously simplifies and improves compiler optimizations, by simplifying the properties of variables.

The -DFORTIFY_SOURCE extensions add both compile-time buffer overflow detection, and very low overhead runtime overflow protection. This is an excellent development tool to help improve the quality of code out there. For more information on this, refer to a posting made by Jakub Jelinek at http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-09/msg02055.html.

But will give us better overall code quality; first distribution to ship this with a complete rebuild too...

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/002dec04/features/gcc/

Package Management

PUP

Get it from CVS

Replaces system-config-packages

Uses YUM libraries directly

YUM

Uses sqlite as a database now

Is at least 33% faster than the metadata-based yum in FC-3

OpenOffice.org 2.0

We were initially not going to wait for it...

But there were some GCC4 delays; then the Java stuff started to work, and voila! We seem to have met the Fedora schedule

Why is it cooler?

OpenOffice.org Base

Templates included

Java stuff built against completely free Java compiler

Java stuff runs against completely free Java interpreter

Impress looks a lot more user-friendly

Evince

The new cool PDF reader

Uses Poppler back-end

Supports (cool!) hyperlink jumps

Xen

Hypervisor running under Linux (with a paravirtualised OS)

Guest OS requires changes but this gives higher performance

Will not do X (yet)

Privileged domain (xen0) – has direct access to hardware; Unprivileged domain (xenU) – talks to dom0 backend

Has no ACPI/APM support so your laptop’s won’t run as efficiently as it can

x86_64/ppc support is still “flaky”

Was disabled since FC4t1 came out; it sort of has been re-enabled

xm balloon 1 <total ram – guestOS ram>

SELinux and Xen do not get along

New Fedora Projects

Fedora Directory Project

Yes, after Netscape Directory was bough by RH, its now become the Fedora Directory Project

There’s a mailing list and its open currently for announcements

Quirks are being worked out as to how we allow things to happen... (so this is really pre-release news)

Fedora LiveCD Project

We want a LiveCD; its good for marketing

Stateless is somewhat dead

Look into Rookery and other LiveCD implementations

Mailing list isn’t public (yet)

Extras

From:	seth vidal <skvidal@this.email.is.censored.but.very.google-able>

Reply-To:	Development discussions related to Fedora Core <fedora-devel-list@redhat.com>

To:	fedora-devel-list@redhat.com, fedora-announce-list@redhat.com

Subject:	Fedora Extras, Fedora Core CVS Open!

Date:	Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:44:08 -0500 (13:44 MYT)

Want to be REAL sure you notice this:

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/002dec04/departments/fedora_status/

That's Right CVS is open - you need to run, don't walk, to:

http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com

It's all exciting - except for the boring parts.

Tomorrow morning we will have another exciting item for you but I'm busy typing things and colin is on an airplane and all the other slackers are sleeping or some such nonsense as that so you'll have to wait until the morning.

Deal.

It's a bright, shiny, new day. But the fog isn't quite lifted yet.

-sv

Extras

Something we've talked about since the conception of the Fedora Project. Formerly fedora.us, but we promised a few deliverables:

CVS

http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/

/cvs/dist; /cvs/extras; /cvs/fedora (might require :ext: access for that)

build system

In CVS; its a mach+yum combo (/cvs/fedora)

repositories

http://fedoraproject.org/extras/

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/

QA/Bugzilla

And its slowly coming to form.

What we've achieved (till now...)

Got a core bunch of community members that are contributing to various items

Fedora Extras

CVS for Core/Extras is ready

External contributors are contributing to Extras already

just look at fedora-extras-commits

First ever Fedora Users and Developers Conference (18th February 2005)

Packaging Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingGuidelines

FESCO Meetings and Public Schedule: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraExtrasSchedule

Creation of FESCO and the Boston Meeting

What happened

Gathered a few people into a room...

Got some random call-in's...

Brought out the baseball bats...

and eventually...

sorted some things out

while we had lots of coffee and Krispy Kreme

What came out of it

Assumptions, action items, and goals

Some of which were:

Build system in Raleigh; got moved to Arizona, to a co-lo

Core and Extras needed the same build system

release early, release often – Extras will have a different/simpler/open build system

Core packages must not depend on Extras at all

Other architectures that need supporting (like PPC or Sparc) need Extras build boxes

Wiki/slash type system on fedora.redhat.com

Want: single spec file to manage a package across all kinds of Fedora's, or RHELs; we need packaging guidelines

More goals

(and you'll see progress for this almost real soon now)

Build system for Extras will be out in public CVS

we want it to be easily replicated on developer machines

Extras system, needs to be track-able, for security reasons

virtualization is something we are thinking about

Regular meetings with the relevant people, with published meeting minutes will be available

We are going to COMMUNICATE!

Action Items

Say it again: we need a build system. CVS module should be available soon.

Gain further internal (Red Hat) acceptance for resources/scheduling, minimizing blindspots to the community

Leadership document is to be re-written

Databases and Bugzilla automation to automate approved packages, entries, states – workflow management

Packaging guidelines

How can we bless external sites – legal liability

Website in CVS for external contributors

Legacy terminology fixed; Alternatives removed

fedora-maintainers@redhat.com; fedora-maintainers-readonly@redhat.com

need to be a package maintainer to be on it

Fedora Security

Fedora Extras Steering Committee

Newly created

Mixture of Red Hat and community members

There'll be a list, and a form of communication that people (YOU!) can contact the Steering Committee

Warren Togami

Cristian Gafton

Greg DeKoenigsberg

Colin Charles

Seth Vidal

Enrico Scholz

Michael Schwendt

Ville Skyttä

Dams Nadé

Dave Lawrence

Jeremy Katz

Tom 'spot' Callaway

Jesse Keating

The FUD we're not about

Not a beta testing dumping ground

You'll never find bad, unmaintained software

We aim to provide one utility for the job as the default; yet we'll still provide choice

Slow rate of change

we want at least 2-3 releases a year; we've successfully achieved 2/year

Commercial support/SLAs

never by Red Hat

never by The Fedora Project

fedora-marketing might create a vendor list of sorts

CD vendors: http://fedora.redhat.com/download/vendors.html

Boring!

The Community

http://fedoraproject.org/

a wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

fedora people: http://fedoraproject.org/people/

extras, developer e-mail aliases, other random project things we need ASAP

FedoraNEWS.ORG - http://www.fedoranews.org/

FedoraFAQ - http://www.fedorafaq.org/

Fedora Forums - http://www.fedoraforum.org/ - OFFICIAL FEDORA USER SUPPORT FORUM

http://www.fedorazine.com/

http://www.fedoratracker.org/

probably lots more...

Some statistics

fedora-list: 6,800 members

fedora-devel-list: 1757 members

fedora-test-list: 2300 members

fedoraforum.org – 17,980 members

Over 1860 commits to fedora-extras-commits list already

And growing daily...

FUDCon II

At LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany from 24th - 25th June 2005

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to fudcon-cfp@fedoraporject.org.

Submission deadline: Friday, April 22nd, 2005

Notification of decision: Friday, May 6th, 2005

Final version deadline: Friday, May 27th, 2005

FUDCon I was a great success; http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/

The people that make a difference

Seth Vidal

Cristian Gafton

Greg DeKoenigsberg

Warren Togami

Havoc Pennington

Paul Nasrat

Jesse Keating

Jack Aboutboul

Jeremy Katz

Michael Schwendt

Thorsthen Leemhuis

Dams Nade (Anvil)

Jef Spaleta

Elliot Lee

Bill Nottingham

Michael Tiemann

Peter Jones

Tom 'spot' Callaway

Dave Lawrence

Jay Turner

Ville Skyttä

Stephan Gael (Pix)

Matthias Saou

Thomas Vander Stichele

Enrico Scholz

Phillip Compton

Miloslav Trmac

Colin Charles

Thank you

Questions?

Colin Charles

colin@fedoraproject.org

http://www.bytebot.net/

2005-02-14T20:17:29