Across the project, many groups are focused on infrastructure migration and preparing for the next release. The most significant focus this week was the upcoming Fedora 44 Beta, with Release Engineering entering a freeze, the Quality and Server teams organizing testing and reviewing blockers, and FESCO deferring several incomplete changes to Fedora 45. A second major, cross-team effort is the ongoing migration of repositories and tickets to the new Forgejo instance, a task mentioned by the Infrastructure, Forgejo, UX, and AI teams, and underscored by the formal announcement of Pagure.io's decommissioning. Other common work includes routine package maintenance, highlighted by the KDE team managing the fallout from the recent Plasma 6.6 update and the EPEL team completing its mass branching for the next RHEL point release.

📣 Announcements

This week's Community Update for Week 9, 2026 details progress across several project areas. The Infrastructure team is continuing the migration of pagure.io repositories, while the CentOS Infra team worked on various fixes and storage extensions. Release Engineering is in a Beta Freeze and has provided the first beta release candidate to the QE team, which is now in the midst of Fedora 44 Beta testing and running a Kernel 6.19 test week. The RISC-V team made progress on unified kernels and investigating package build failures, and the EPEL team completed the mass branching for EPEL 10.2 in preparation for the next RHEL release.

The Forgejo team reported on their FOSDEM presentation and continued migration efforts, including creating new namespaces for the Join, NeuroFedora, and Fedora KDE SIGs. In AI developments, the ai-code-review tool was updated to use Gemini 3.1 Pro, and the team shared experiences using Claude for refactoring. The UX team also began using Gemini for meeting notes, posted an update on the F45 wallpaper process, and is actively migrating their tickets and assets to Forgejo.

FESCO

This week, FESCO held a meeting to review the status of incomplete changes for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A key outcome was the decision to defer several changes to Fedora 45 due to risk or lack of readiness, including the Protobuf 5.x/6.x update, the use of kmscon as the default console, and making package builds reproducible. The committee also discussed the "Restrict ptrace by default" change proposal. A decision was postponed because the proposed compromise — disabling the restriction if gdb is installed — was seen as potentially ineffective for most users, as abrt's dependency on gdb-headless would disable the feature on a majority of systems.

In the community forum, a discussion continued regarding the policy of updating KDE Plasma to major versions within a stable Fedora release. A user expressed frustration that the recent update to Plasma 6.6 caused system breakages, feeling it was more akin to a rolling release. Responses from the Fedora KDE team clarified that this update follows an established policy exception for KDE, and that extensive work was done to prepare for the release.

Decisions

• The change "Modernize Live Media (#2885)" will be deferred to Fedora 45.
• The change "Package builds are expected to be reproducible (#3386)" will be moved to Fedora 45.
• The change "Protobuf 5.x/6.x (#3336)" will be moved to Fedora 45 as it is considered too risky for Fedora 44.
• The change "Use kmscon as default VT console (#3513)" was backed out and will be moved to Fedora 45.
• The request in ticket #3570 concerning F42 was formally approved.

Packaging Committee

This week, the committee's discussions centered on packaging policies and technical challenges. A significant forum topic involved user feedback on the policy of updating KDE Plasma to major new versions within a stable Fedora release, which caused breakages for some users. The conversation clarified that this is an intentional, albeit exceptional, policy and that extensive work was done to prepare for the update. Another discussion explored the feasibility and benefits of packaging the React JavaScript library, with the consensus being that the JavaScript ecosystem's bundling practices are largely incompatible with Fedora's packaging guidelines, making it a significant challenge.

On the mailing list, packagers sought advice on specific issues. One ongoing thread dealt with the technical difficulties of uploading a very large (2GB+) SRPM to Koji/Copr, which was timing out due to its size. Another packager asked for guidance on the proper way for a package to modify another package's configuration file when drop-in directories are not a viable option. Finally, a request was posted for a volunteer to adopt and maintain the kew terminal music player package for Fedora.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation SIG held their regular meeting on February 24, which covered several significant topics. The group discussed the "Filter Fedora Flatpaks for Atomic Desktops" change proposal, the future of the ABRT tool (with its removal scheduled for discussion at the next meeting), and updates on accessibility bug reporting. A serious netinstall blocker bug related to the GNOME input stack was also raised. In the forums, a user added their voice to the ongoing discussion about the potential disabling of middle-click pasting in a future GNOME version. Finally, an announcement was made for the next meeting on March 3.

Decisions Taken

• The group approved dropping i686 builds for GNOME "leaf" packages (those without reverse dependencies on i686) to prevent future build issues, while retaining GTK for i686 due to its use by Steam.
• The intel-lpmd (Low Power Mode Daemon) service will be enabled by default in Workstation installs to improve power management.

KDE

This week, discussions in the KDE SIG focused heavily on the recent update to Plasma 6.6 in Fedora. A major topic of conversation was Fedora's policy of updating to new Plasma versions within a stable Fedora release, which caused frustration for some users due to broken plugins and themes, feeling it was too close to a rolling-release model. The Fedora KDE team clarified that this is an established policy for all supported Fedora releases. On the technical side, users discussed specific issues following the update. A persistent crashing bug with maliit-keyboard led to an announcement about its replacement. Other users shared their experiences with the Plasma 6.6.0 update, including display resolution problems with the new plasma login manager on Xorg. A minor issue with KDE Discover getting stuck on "Refreshing Flatpaks" was also reported, which later resolved itself.

Decisions Taken

• Due to persistent crashing issues, maliit-keyboard is no longer the default virtual keyboard. The new default on Fedora releases with Plasma 6.6 and newer is now plasma-keyboard.

Server

This week, the Server working group focused on organizing the testing plan for the upcoming Fedora 44 Beta release. In their weekly meeting, volunteers were assigned to test various configurations, including BIOS, UEFI, aarch64, and RAID setups. A mailing list post announced the availability of the beta candidate for this effort. The group also held initial discussions about a potential "Home Server Spin-off," particularly regarding the use of BTRFS, and agreed to create an issue template for their Forgejo instance.

Decisions Taken

• An issue template and chooser will be created for the Server WG's Forgejo instance.
• All findings, bugs, and documentation updates for the F44 Beta testing will be tracked in Forgejo ticket #186.
• The group will use the project's wiki page to collaboratively gather ideas for the "Home Server Spin-off" before the next meeting.
• The discussion on the "Streamlined Backup and Restore" project was postponed to the next meeting.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team's week was focused on monitoring, backlog refinement, and tooling improvements. In their main meeting, they discussed the ongoing Flatpak migration to quay.io and the challenges with its permission model. They also addressed recurring httpd issues on people01, likely caused by scrapers, and continued the migration of monitoring checks from Nagios to Zabbix. Daily standups covered ongoing work on public-inbox and pesign authentication, and a request for non-root log access was discussed but deferred due to security concerns. Frequent user logouts from the Forge platform were acknowledged as a known issue.

On the mailing lists, two new Ansible helper scripts were introduced: check-etc for identifying unknown files in /etc, and ansilog-playbook.py for easier log viewing. In community interactions, ISOC-IL offered to host a new Fedora & EPEL mirror, a user reported missing repositories in the grokmirror manifest, and an existing mirror announced a prolonged outage.

Decisions Taken

• The stale toddler-unretire-packages queue will be removed from RabbitMQ and its corresponding Nagios monitoring check will be disabled.
• The standupbot (#13169) will be rewritten as a maubot plugin rather than fixing the existing code.
• The proposal to add more detailed service information to the main status page (#12759) was declined, though the team is open to creating a separate, detailed Zabbix dashboard for contributors.

Releng

The Releng team's weekly meeting focused on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 Beta release and improving internal processes. There was a significant discussion about the best way to manage the ticket backlog, debating different approaches in Forgejo to find a process that works for the team. They also triaged several old tickets and identified ticket #13062 as a good candidate for creating custom Zabbix service checks. On the forums, logs from two Fedora 44 Blocker Review meetings (1, 2) were posted, where multiple proposed blockers and freeze exceptions were reviewed, with some being accepted, rejected, or deferred for further investigation. Additionally, a forum discussion was started suggesting a smarter bandwidth prioritization for DNF to improve the user experience during package downloads.

Decisions Taken

• The process for updating the GPG key on getfedora.org will be formally documented in the sop_create_release_signing_key SOP, as discussed in ticket #12884.
• Fedora 44 Beta Freeze Exceptions Accepted:
  • #2437985: Fix for VPN connections requiring "sudo".
  • #2440208: Fix for Plasma login issue in Kinoite.
  • #2440500: Fix for incorrect SVG texture heights.
  • #2441074: Update Krita to 6.0.0 beta2.
  • #2435519: Fix for OCR functionality in Spectacle.
• Fedora 44 Beta Blocker Accepted:
  • #2438907: A gnome-shell crash.
• Fedora 44 Beta Blocker Decisions Deferred:
  • #2439813 (KDE network install hang) and #2441941 (LUKS graphics break) were punted for further consideration and testing.
• Fedora 44 Beta Freeze Exception Rejected:
  • #2434041: A "fails to build from source" issue for the fish package was rejected as the package is still installable.

Quality

This week, the Quality working group held a Fedora 44 Blocker Review meeting to assess proposed Beta blockers and freeze exceptions. Key discussions centered on a KDE network install hang and a graphics issue when typing a LUKS password; decisions on both were postponed to gather more information and clarify release criteria. The team also announced a Podman 5.8 Test Week scheduled from February 27 to March 6. On the mailing lists, members discussed F44 update problems related to initramfs generation and followed up on an issue where the F44 installer hangs on slow machines, for which a bug has now been filed.

Decisions Taken

• Accepted Beta Freeze Exceptions:
  • 2440500: A fix for incorrect SVG texture heights in gtk4, addressing a visible bug in the GNOME Tour window.
  • 2441074: An update for krita to fix a significant functionality problem in a default application on the Design Suite spin.
  • 2435519: A fix for the OCR functionality in Spectacle, a major new feature in a default KDE application.
• Rejected Beta Freeze Exception:
  • 2434041: A fix for a fish build failure (FTBFS) was rejected because the package remained installable.
• Delayed Decisions on Proposed Beta Blockers:
  • 2439813: A decision on whether a KDE network install hang is a blocker was postponed to allow for consideration of the release criteria.
  • 2441941: A decision on a graphics issue during LUKS password entry was postponed pending a call for wider testing to determine the scope of the impact.

Design

This week, the Design team advanced the process for the Fedora 45 wallpaper. Following a community poll, Alan Turing was chosen as the inspiration. A new discussion was started to brainstorm concepts, outlining three potential themes for exploration: the mechanical "Enigma" aesthetic focusing on cryptography; "Morphogenesis", inspired by Turing's work on mathematical patterns in nature; and "Light & Legacy", symbolizing his life and impact. The team is now in the sketching and rough draft phase, inviting community members to share ideas and providing a full schedule for the wallpaper's creation.

Docs

This week, the Docs team held a meeting focused on improving the experience for both new contributors and new Fedora users. A key discussion involved a plan to restructure the documentation for setting up a local authoring environment (Ticket #1) by breaking the work into five smaller packages to lower the technical barrier. The team also reviewed a draft for a new "Beginner's Guide to Fedora" (Ticket #8), which led to a decision on how to handle user-focused guides. Other topics included the ongoing Forgejo migration and promoting contribution opportunities. In forum discussions, a plan was announced to retire the obsolete "Ask Fedora SOPs" once new forum guidelines are finalized. Additionally, it was suggested that a popular guide on power management with powertop and tuned should be turned into a new Quick Doc.

Legal

This week, the Legal group received a forwarded status update on the project to convert package license fields to the SPDX format. The update from Miroslav Suchý highlighted that only 43 packages remain non-compliant, with a special focus on the final four packages in the ELN set. The message also informed maintainers about an updated license-validate tool and provided links to lists of remaining packages to help finalize the conversion effort.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group completed the mass branching for EPEL 10.2, enabling builds for the upcoming EPEL 10.3. A minor issue affecting Bodhi updates after the branching was quickly identified and resolved. The weekly EPEL meeting was a routine check-in to review open issues. On the mailing list, two key proposals were discussed: a request for an incompatible upgrade of python-django-allauth in EPEL 9, which surfaced a potential dependency conflict with FreeIPA's qrcode requirement, and a proposal to retire the end-of-life python-django3 package from EPEL 8 and 9 due to unpatched security vulnerabilities.

CentOS Hyperscale

During the weekly CentOS Hyperscale SIG meeting, the main topics of discussion were project management and upstream collaboration. A significant effort is underway to upstream Hyperscale features into Fedora to create a "Fedora ELN Hyperscale" variant, with progress tracked in a new issue. This initiative highlights the need for discussions with RHEL kernel teams about enabling btrfs. The group also announced that a new, more comprehensive script for monitoring member inactivity is now live and will be used to manage membership. Finally, the group noted the recent branching of Enterprise Linux 10.2.

Decisions Taken

• The SIG's issue tracker migration from Pagure to GitLab is complete.
• The group will begin cleaning up the list of inactive members using the new inactivity monitoring report.

ELN

During their single meeting this week, the ELN group discussed progress on adding ELN bootc images, with a draft merge request (!377) now awaiting review. The main topic was a proposal to create an ELN variant for the CentOS Hyperscale SIG. This would involve adding btrfs.ko to the kernel-modules-internal package for aarch64 to avoid a separate kernel build, a change the group generally agreed with as it fits within the ELN mission. Members were also asked to contribute ideas for future SIG goals to the relevant GitHub issue.

Decisions Taken

• The group agreed to move forward with the proposal for an ELN Hyperscale variant, and work will begin to upstream the required changes to Rawhide.
• The meeting for the following week was canceled due to conflicts; the next meeting is scheduled for March 10, 2026.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group's main focus was on the status of the Konflux pipeline migration. While the pipeline is currently unblocked, the full transition from Pungi is still waiting on a cluster redeploy and solutions for artifact signing. A key development was FESCo's approval of the artifact signing change proposal, which allows the team to proceed with the current setup for the F44 Beta. Other discussions included migrating repositories to the new Fedora Forgejo instance and the ongoing need to establish a formal working group to take ownership of the bootc base images.

A forum discussion was also initiated concerning the dbus-run-session tool, which was reportedly removed from recent Silverblue updates. The topic concluded with the user filing a bug report to investigate the issue further.

Decisions Taken

• The Konflux pipeline tests were made optional as a temporary measure to unblock builds.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team addressed a significant upgrade issue in the testing stream where nodes could get stuck due to a problem with Zincati; a workaround was published for affected users. The team also announced that Podman 5.8.0 is being shipped to the next stream to test the automatic migration of its container database from BoltDB to SQLite. A community video meeting was held to continue the discussion on expanding Ignition for Azure-specific configurations, with the recording and notes made available. Additionally, a forum discussion on CoreOS hardening was revived with a new post suggesting the use of nftables and a bastion host to improve SSH security in light of the recent XZ Utils backdoor.

AI & ML

This week, the AI & ML SIG held one meeting and had a minor update in a forum discussion. The main focus of the meeting was on consolidating the SIG's brand and identity, with a discussion on how to absorb several related but inactive SIGs to create a clearer entry point for new contributors. The group also reviewed the status of its migration to Fedora Forge, noting that it is nearly complete, and welcomed three new members who will assist with coordination. In the forum, it was concluded that there was not enough feedback to change the current meeting schedule for now.

Decisions Taken

• The SIG's repository for tracking issues on Fedora Forge was renamed from .profile to tickets.
• A request will be sent to the Fedora Design Team to create logo options to help finalize the SIG's brand identity.
• New members Justin Wheeler, Carol Chen, and Dominik Kawka were added to the SIG's permissions group on Fedora Forge.

Security

This week, the Security group held a meeting focusing on the ongoing discussion regarding the Security SIG and FAS (Fedora Account System) groups, with an action item for interested members to review the related issue ticket. A procedural suggestion was also made to use a consistent meeting name for better organization of logs. In forum discussions, a new thread on the SELinux mailing list raised an issue where SELinux policies in CentOS 10 are preventing QEMU virtual machines from starting after an upgrade, specifically due to qemu_var_run labels.

Go

During the weekly Go SIG meeting, the team welcomed new attendee Vít Smolík. Key discussions centered on package maintenance and updates. A renaming request was filed for golang-x-vuln to govulncheck to align with packaging guidelines. The group also noted that Go 1.25.7 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 42. Ongoing efforts include converting packages to the new vendoring format and addressing a list of broken or orphaned packages.

Decisions

• The renaming request for the prometheus package was approved.

Perl

This week's activity for the Perl SIG centered on package maintenance through pull requests. Discussions included a proposal to exclude a private key from the RPM documentation for perl-Net-SSLeay, which prompted a suggestion to also exclude the related test file. Work also continued on the update of perl-Net-Server, with several attempts to retrigger CI tests.

Decisions

• The perl-Net-DAVTalk package was updated to version 0.24.
• A pull request to conditionalize a load test for perl-XML-XPath was merged.

Other Discussions

• In a discussion about the upcoming decommissioning of Pagure.io, the Fedora Project Leader announced that contributors should begin migrating Fedora-related work to the new Forgejo-based service at forge.fedoraproject.org. It was noted that not all projects will be suitable for migration, and the Fedora Council is expected to release a policy statement soon to clarify the process and address concerns.

• A user on the buildsys list reported that mock builds are failing on CentOS 10 at the useradd mockbuild step. The error message suggests a failure to prepare a new subuid entry, and the user suspects an issue with mock itself on the new OS version.

• A request was made for a provenpackager to help with an update to the kdsingleapplication package. The update involves an SONAME bump, which necessitates a rebuild of seven dependent packages. The requester has already performed a successful test build in COPR.

• An incompatible upgrade for python-django-allauth in EPEL 9 was requested to support SSO for the mailman web UI. The update introduces a dependency conflict with python3-ipalib, which hardcodes a requirement for an older version of python-qrcode-core. The packager is seeking discussion and EPSCo approval before proceeding.

• A developer outlined a major refactoring plan for the wine-mono package. The proposed changes include adding WpfGfx support, unbundling numerous dependencies like FAudio and SDL3, splitting the package for individual architecture installation, and applying patches from the main mono package.

• A proposal was made to provide LLVM libcxx builds for MinGW to improve binary compatibility with MSYS2's CLANG64 and CLANGARM64 environments.

• A discussion was started regarding the limitations and crashes of the Anaconda Web-UI. The author detailed issues encountered during multi-boot installations with multiple LUKS-encrypted partitions, such as the inability to handle different LUKS passwords and difficulties distinguishing partitions, and is seeking to gather an overview of existing problems and potential solutions.

• An update on the SPDX license conversion effort noted that only 43 packages remain non-compliant. A brief discussion followed on how to correctly interpret the provided statistics to identify the specific packages that still need work.

• A thread was started to address an intermittent boot hang in Fedora 44 observed during openQA testing, primarily on aarch64. The system stalls after initrd-switch-root, and the issue appears to be a timing-related race condition, as enabling debug logging makes it disappear.

• Other discussions this week included a request for help with the MinGW zlib-ng transition, a request for a list of SPDX-converted packages needing re-review, a proposal to switch MinGW to the UCRT runtime, a discussion about prefixing RPM macros that start with a newline, a follow-up on making Protobuf & gRPC static-only, the submission of a change proposal for a DRM Panic frontend, and a continued discussion about the removal of virtual provides from texlive and the usability of the Discourse forum's email integration.

Package updates

• An announcement was made for an upcoming ABI-incompatible update of usd (OpenUSD) to version 26.03 in F45/Rawhide and F44. The update includes an SONAME bump, and the dependent package blender will be rebuilt in a side tag.
• A heads-up was given for the upcoming updates of Qxmpp to 1.14.2 and Kaidan to 0.13.0 in F43 and F42.
• The mac (Monkey's Audio Codec) package is being updated to version 12.35, which includes an SONAME bump. Its consumer, aqualung, will be rebuilt, and a build dependency will be dropped from xmms2.
• The z3 package will be updated to version 4.16.0 in Rawhide, which includes an SONAME bump. The dependent package prusa-slicer will be rebuilt, and the maintainer is also considering the update for F44.
• Following a previous announcement, the builds for the update of octave to version 11.1.0 have started in a side tag for F45.
• The mass rebuild for the major update of mongo-c-driver to version 2 has completed, and the update has been submitted.
• The rebuild for the OCaml 5.4.1 update uncovered a code generation bug on aarch64 affecting virtualization packages. The issue is suspected to be in the OCaml compiler itself, and the discussion also touched on the implications of the --enable-frame-pointers configuration option.

Orphaning packages

• A non-responsive maintainer check was filed for Neil Hanlon, as the xastir package has open pull requests and is failing to build from source (FTBFS) in F42 and newer.
• The maintainer confirmed that the packages belonging to the nwg-shell stack, including nwg-bar, nwg-dock, and SwayNotificationCenter, have been orphaned as they are no longer needed by the Miracle SIG.
• The dt package was orphaned by its maintainer due to a lack of time. It was immediately adopted by another contributor who had already created a pull request to fix its FTBFS issue.
• In a reply to the weekly orphaned packages report, a contributor requested to adopt and un-retire the rust-textdistance package.
• The maintainer of the lmdb package announced their intention to hand it over. A member of the 389 Directory Server team, whose project depends on lmdb, expressed interest in taking over maintenance, with a colleague offering to co-maintain.