Updated: April 09, 08:38 UTC

From April 06 to April 12

This article is a draft, it has been entirely generated and has not been reviewed yet. It may contain mistakes.

Across the project, many groups were focused on preparing for the upcoming Fedora 44 release, with the Workstation, KDE, Server, Releng, and Quality teams all centered on testing the new release candidate and resolving blocker bugs, especially those impacting the initial user setup experience. A parallel focus was on package maintenance and policy, as seen in FESCo's process updates, the Packaging Committee's handling of orphaned packages, and security-driven updates being planned in EPEL and MinGW. Strategic and forward-looking work was also prominent, with the Council advancing discussions on membership models, FESCo reviewing proposals for Fedora 45, and the Design team finalizing the F45 wallpaper concept. Finally, infrastructure and process improvements were a common theme, highlighted by discussions on migrating tooling to Forgejo and addressing issues with mailing lists and public mirrors.

📣 Announcements

This week, the Fedora Code of Conduct Committee published its annual report for 2025. The report details a slight uptick in cases to 14, but notes a continued decrease in overall incident severity since 2020, attributing this positive trend to the community's mature self-moderation culture. The committee considers the community to be in a healthy state and welcomed three new members this year.

In infrastructure news, it was discovered that posts to the devel-announce mailing list have not been correctly copied to the devel list since February 17, 2026. Contributors are advised to check the devel-announce archives for any messages they may have missed. Finally, a planned maintenance outage for Fedora's Matrix services (fedora.im) is scheduled for April 14, 2026, at 11:15 UTC, and is expected to last approximately 45 minutes.

Council

This week, the Council held a meeting where they made a final decision on a long-standing proposal to relicense the Fedora logos, ultimately rejecting the change due to potential conflicts with trademark law. The council also focused on follow-up actions from their February Strategy Summit, assigning tasks to advance discussions on a "Fedora Verified" membership model, explore external fundraising options, and formulate a public statement regarding Konflux. Council members were asked to review a draft survey about the proposed membership model. Additionally, a forum discussion was initiated, suggesting improvements to the directory structure for Fedora's bootc images on quay.io to better organize them by architecture.

Decisions

  • The proposal to relicense the fedora-logos package was rejected. Following advice from Red Hat Legal, the Council concluded that the proposed change would create ambiguity and intersect messily with trademark law, while the current licensing does not impede the project's work.
  • It was agreed in the Council meeting that a summary of the recent Council Strategy Summit will be published on the Community Blog rather than the Fedora Magazine, to better target the core contributor community.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held one main meeting to discuss several policy and process updates. They approved a fast-track request to fix delayed and broken package retirements for Fedora 44. The committee also approved proposed changes to the nonresponsive maintainer process to better handle invalid email addresses, with a minor modification to retain a specific section. A discussion on changes to unused branches in dist-git resulted in a decision to seek clarification from the ticket reporter.

Two new change proposals for Fedora 45 were submitted for FESCo review, providing opportunities for community feedback. The first proposal, "Use PAM In Chpasswd Newusers," aims to make the chpasswd and newusers utilities respect system-wide PAM policies for better security and consistency. The second, "Setuptools 82+," plans to update the python-setuptools package, which includes breaking changes like the removal of the pkg_resources module, and outlines a plan to manage the transition for affected packages.

Decisions

  • Regarding issue #3583 on changes to unused dist-git branches, FESCo decided to ask the reporter for clarification.
  • The proposed updates to the nonresponsive maintainer process in issue #3586 were approved, with the exception of the removal of the watcher section, which will be kept.
  • A fast-track request to address delayed and broken processing of F44 package retirements was approved.

Packaging Committee

The Packaging Committee's discussions this week highlighted opportunities for contributor engagement. The Quality team announced it has orphaned several Python packages, including python-flask-caching and python-pytest-xprocess, due to a reduction in team size. This creates an immediate need for new maintainers to prevent breakage in dependent packages like copr-frontend. Another discussion provided clarity for new contributors on how to submit package updates, explaining that non-packagers should use the browser-based authentication flow set up by fedpkg for pull requests, rather than attempting to add an SSH key directly to src.fedoraproject.org.

A technical conversation on the mailing list regarding issues with packaging static Rust libraries that link against libc was also resolved. The problem was identified as a toolchain matter related to intentional glibc ABI compatibility symbols, and the discussion was moved to the devel list for broader input. No formal decisions were made by the committee this week.

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, the Diversity & Inclusion team focused on organizing the Fedora Mentor Summit @ Flock 2026. A planning meeting was scheduled to kick off the coordination for the summit's activities, which include a Mentor Match Lunch and a Contributor Recognition Award. The call for volunteers is still open, and anyone interested in helping is encouraged to join the upcoming meeting and review the planning issues on Fedora Forge.

Decisions

  • The initial planning meeting for the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 was scheduled for Friday at 4 pm CEST.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation Working Group canceled its meetings for both April 7 and April 14. However, an agenda was posted for the upcoming April 21 meeting, with key topics including filtering the Fedora Flatpak repository and replacing gnome-keyring-daemon with oo7-daemon. In development news, the Fedora 44 Candidate RC-1.1 was released for testing, though it was clarified that it is not a true Release Candidate due to several outstanding blockers.

A notable forum discussion revolved around Fedora's behavior with multiple preferred IPv6 addresses. A user reported that in networks with non-persistent prefixes, Fedora may attempt to use an old, non-functional address instead of the newest one, causing connectivity loss. The suggestion was made for Fedora to adopt a default behavior of always preferring the newest address, similar to how Android handles the situation.

KDE

This week, the KDE group's discussion centered on the availability of Fedora 44 Candidate RC-1.1 for testing. It was clarified that despite its "RC" (Release Candidate) designation, this build is not a true candidate for the final release due to several outstanding blocker issues. The build was composed primarily to ensure the release mechanism is functioning correctly and to encourage broader community testing from those who don't typically use the nightly builds. Contributors are invited to help with validation testing.

Server

This week, the Server group's activity centered on testing and a technical networking discussion. A call was made for community members to help test the Fedora 44 Candidate RC-1.1, though it was noted that this is not a true release candidate due to outstanding blockers. The weekly Server meeting was very brief, concluding after a roll call with no topics discussed from the proposed agenda.

A significant discussion continued in the forums regarding Fedora's behavior with multiple preferred IPv6 addresses. The issue concerns networks with non-persistent prefixes where Fedora may fail to select the newest, functional address, causing connectivity loss. The conversation explores whether Fedora should change its default behavior to always prefer the most recently acquired address, which could improve the out-of-the-box experience for users on certain ISPs. This presents an opportunity for networking experts to contribute to the discussion.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team's week was highlighted by a significant discussion regarding quality control for public mirrors, initiated by a user report on an unreliable mirror in South Korea. The report detailed issues with downtime, the use of consumer-grade hardware, and a CDN setup that caused problems, leading to a broader conversation about mirror standards. The team also began a review of group configurations in the Fedora Account System to ensure new groups consistently require the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA) and grant contributor status, seeking input on which groups should be exceptions.

In other news, a planned 45-minute maintenance outage for Fedora's Matrix services was announced for Tuesday, April 14th. The time for the weekly Infrastructure meeting was adjusted to better suit attendees after recent daylight saving time changes. Routine work continued in the daily standups, focusing on reviewing open tickets.

Decisions

  • The weekly Infrastructure meeting time was moved to 15:00 UTC.
  • The KRFOSS public mirror was temporarily disabled following user reports of instability and a lack of quality control.

Releng

This week, the Releng group's activity centered on the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting for the upcoming Final release. The team evaluated several proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions, with a focus on the initial user setup experience. Key decisions included accepting several bugs related to the KDE Plasma initial setup as release blockers, specifically issues with keyboard layout selection and Wi-Fi configuration that could prevent a user from successfully completing installation. The team also accepted freeze exceptions for a security vulnerability fix and package installation failures, while reviewing the status of previously accepted blockers.

Decisions

  • Accepted Final Blockers:
    • Bug 2448283 & Bug 2453216: Combined issues in plasma-setup related to keyboard layout selection were accepted as blockers, as their combined effect could make it impossible for some users to complete the setup process.
    • Bug 2455469: An issue preventing successful Wi-Fi configuration in the KDE initial setup utility was accepted as a blocker for violating basic functionality criteria.
  • Rejected Final Blocker / Accepted Freeze Exception:
    • Bug 2453005: A bug where systemd-oomd.service is not enabled on some systems was rejected as a blocker because it does not violate release criteria. However, it was accepted as a Freeze Exception to allow the fix into Fedora 44.
  • Accepted Freeze Exceptions:
    • Bug 2438126: A fix for two "Moderate" CVEs in the fido-device-onboard package was accepted.
    • Bug 2437415: A fix for the gala package, which was failing to install, was accepted.
  • Rejected Freeze Exception:
    • Bug 2454664: An update to fix a "Fails To Build From Source" (FTBFS) issue for rust-add-determinism was rejected due to a lack of clear justification for needing an exception to the freeze.

Quality

This week, the Quality team focused on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. During the F44 Blocker Review meeting, several bugs were discussed, with key decisions made on issues affecting the initial setup experience in KDE Plasma. Following the meeting, Fedora 44 Candidate RC-1.1 was composed and announced, providing a crucial opportunity for community members to engage in validation testing. It was noted that this is not a true Release Candidate due to outstanding blockers, but serves to test the build process and encourage broader testing.

In other news, as part of an ongoing effort to reduce scope, the team orphaned several Python-related packages (python-aniso8601, python-flask-caching, testcloud, python-pytest-xprocess, and python-flask-restful). This presents an opportunity for interested contributors or other teams to adopt and maintain these packages.

Decisions

During the F44 Blocker Review meeting, the following decisions were made:

  • Accepted as Final Release Blockers:
    • #2448283 and #2453216: Combined issues with plasma-setup keyboard layout selection making it difficult for users to complete setup.
    • #2455469: Configuring a WiFi network via the plasma-setup Network pane does not work.
  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exceptions:
    • #2453005: systemd-oomd.service is not enabled on some systems. This was rejected as a blocker but accepted as a freeze exception to allow a fix.
    • #2438126: To address a moderate severity CVE in fido-device-onboard.
    • #2437415: To fix packages (gala, gala-devel) that fail to install from the release repositories.
  • Rejected as a Final Freeze Exception:
    • #2454664: A "Fails to Build from Source" bug for rust-add-determinism was rejected due to insufficient justification for an exception.

Design

This week, the Design team's work continued on the Fedora 45 wallpaper, which is inspired by Alan Turing. The project is nearing the end of the "Beta" wallpaper creation phase, with a community feedback period scheduled to begin on April 13th. The current design explorations are centered around three main themes: the mechanical aesthetic of the Enigma machine, the mathematical patterns of Morphogenesis found in nature, and the concept of "Light & Legacy" to honor Turing's life. A new image was shared in the main F45 Wallpaper Process Update forum thread this week. Contributors are encouraged to get ready for the upcoming feedback stage to help refine the final wallpaper.

Docs

During the weekly Docs team meeting, the main topic was the new Beginner's Guide to Fedora. The team is ready to publish it and link it from the main documentation website, pending a final review and the migration of the "pages" repository to Forgejo. Community members are encouraged to provide any last-minute feedback on Ticket #8. The team also reviewed the status of the migration to Forgejo, noting that while most repositories are moved, about 20 from Pagure still need attention. A plan is needed for handling old and archived content before the Pagure.io sunset. Finally, three new member applications (#23, #24, #25) are awaiting final approval.

Decisions

  • The team agreed that the language used in the new Beginner's Guide is suitable.
  • The Beginner's Guide will be linked from the front page of the Fedora Docs website once it is published.

EPEL

This week's main discussion in the EPEL community centered on a proposal for a significant, potentially breaking update to the libgit2 package. The current version in EPEL 9 and 10 is outdated and no longer receives security backports from upstream. An update to version 1.9.2 is needed to address these security concerns and also to fix a severe CVE in the nix package for EPEL 10. The Request for Comments on the epel-devel mailing list seeks community feedback on whether to proceed with an incompatible update, which would also require a coordinated update for python-pygit2.

The weekly EPEL meeting was a routine check-in that covered open issues and pull requests without any major decisions being made.

CentOS Hyperscale

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG held its regular meeting this week. The primary topic was an announcement regarding the Call for Papers (CFP) for the April 2026 CentOS Showcase, with a reminder that the submission deadline was April 10. This provides an opportunity for contributors to present their work to the wider community. No other major topics were discussed or decisions made.

ELN

This week, the Fedora ELN SIG held its regular meeting to review the current work board. The main focus was on the eln-extras repository. The group discussed tracking packages that fail to build in this repository (issue #469) and reviewed a pull request to add the eln-extras repository file to the main fedora-release package (PR #402). This work aims to make eln-extras more formally available. Additionally, the team identified a need to improve documentation by adding a README file to the eln-build-fixtures repository (issue #214), which offers an opportunity for contributor engagement.

Atomic

This week, the Fedora Atomic Initiative reviewed adoption graphs for fedora-bootc and fedora-coreos, indicating community growth. The team also discussed a technical proposal to add chunkah to fedora-bootc images. Separately, a new forum discussion was started seeking community input on adapting the Fedora-downstream-hardening package for immutable variants like Kinoite and Silverblue. This is an opportunity for contributors with experience in immutable systems to help address challenges related to the read-only filesystem.

Decisions

  • A video call will be held next week on Google Meet to facilitate discussion. An agenda will be created and shared in the bootc channel beforehand.

Containers

This week, the Containers group saw the start of a new forum discussion regarding the structure and tagging of Fedora bootc images with Konflux on quay.io. It was noted that the images lack a "latest" tag, which makes pulling them with default Podman commands difficult as users must first manually discover the architecture-specific tags. The author suggested improving the repository's directory structure to make images easier to find and use, proposing separate paths for architecture-specific images. The topic is open for community feedback on this potential usability improvement.

Security

The Security group's activity this week centered on a forum discussion about adapting the Fedora-downstream-hardening package for immutable variants like Kinoite and Silverblue. The package, currently at version 0.6, is nearing readiness for mutable systems, but faces challenges on immutable ones. The author is seeking input from the community on how to handle modifications to firewalld zones and apply kernel hardening settings on a read-only filesystem, which are key blockers for supporting Kinoite and Silverblue. This presents an opportunity for contributors with experience in immutable systems to assist before the package is submitted for review.

MinGW

The primary discussion this week was the conclusion of a proposal to update the mingw-libsoup package. To address numerous unpatched security vulnerabilities, the package will be updated directly from version 2.74.3 to 3.x. This plan was agreed upon and will proceed, affecting its dependents mingw-libosinfo and mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good.

Decisions

  • The mingw-libsoup package will be updated in-place to version 3.x to resolve outstanding CVEs.

Go

During the weekly Go SIG meeting, the main topic of discussion was the potential migration of group tooling from Pagure to Forgejo. The group is considering moving the golist tool as part of this effort. A contributor has been tasked with exploring the migration process. A link to an upstream Go development discussion was also shared for context.

Decisions

  • It was decided to explore the process of migrating the golist tool and other resources from Pagure to Forgejo.

Perl

This week's activity for the Perl group was focused on routine package maintenance. All discussions revolved around updating the perl-DateTime-Format-ISO8601 package to version 0.19. Michal Josef Špaček opened and subsequently merged three separate pull requests (#7, #8, and #9) to apply this update, ensuring a key date and time formatting module remains current in the distribution. No other subjects were discussed.

Decisions

  • The perl-DateTime-Format-ISO8601 package was updated to version 0.19.

Python

A new version of pyproject-rpm-macros (1.19.0) was announced on the python-devel mailing list. This release introduces a new -d (directory) option for the %pyproject_buildrequires and %pyproject_wheel macros, which simplifies packaging for projects with multiple Python components in different subdirectories. Packagers should be aware that using this new option in a spec file makes it incompatible with older versions of the macros. The update is available for all Fedora releases and is planned for CentOS Stream 9 and 10.

Other Discussions

  • In the discussion about Using Rasdaemon as default instead of Mcelog for hardware monitoring, a proposal was made to replace mcelog with the more modern and actively maintained rasdaemon. It was noted that neither is installed by default, giving users a choice, and a question was raised whether mcelog is still required for older CPUs that rasdaemon may not support. No decision was taken.
  • A user shared a fix for a memory crash in the docling tool in the topic Docling memory crash (std::bad_alloc) while parsing multiple PDFs Fix. The problem, caused by a complex PDF during batch processing, was solved by processing the file individually. The discussion clarified that this was not a Fedora package issue, as the tool was being used on Windows, and the topic was moved to a more suitable category for mentored projects.
  • In the thread devel-announce posts not also send to devel since 2026-02-17, Kevin Fenzi informed the community about a technical issue preventing posts to the devel-announce list from being cross-posted to the devel list since February 17, 2026. He advised developers to check the devel-announce archives for missed communications while the infrastructure team works on a fix.
  • A packager sought help with linking errors in the thread Static rust libraries - libc issue. The issue occurred when linking an application against a static Rust library that depends on the libc crate and its termios symbols. It was explained that this is expected behavior, as the Rust libc crate uses older glibc symbol versions for ABI compatibility, which are not available in the static libc.a archive.
  • In the discussion Guidance needed: xapian 2.0.0 update breaks dependencies, a packager received detailed instructions after a major update to xapian-core broke dependencies and was untagged. The correct procedure was outlined: test dependent package rebuilds in COPR, use a Koji side tag for the official rebuilds, and submit a single Bodhi update with all necessary packages.

Orphaning packages

  • In the thread Is rizin still maintained?, the package maintainer for rizin was asked about the package's status due to unaddressed pull requests and multiple open security bugs. Following a lack of response, a non-responsive maintainer ticket was filed.

Package updates

  • An update to Monkey's Audio Codec (mac) to version 12.63, which includes a mac soname bump, was announced. The update fixes a CVE, and its only dependent package, aqualung, was successfully rebuilt.
  • A major update for the fmt library to version 12.1.0 was announced in Announcing fmt library soversion bump. This update requires a rebuild of 68 dependent packages due to a soversion bump. The discussion also highlighted that spdlog would experience an ABI break and would need to be updated to version 1.17.0.
  • A maintainer announced a missed qwt soname bump in a recent qwt 6.3.0 update. The maintainer will rebuild the affected packages to fix the broken dependencies.

New contributor introductions

  • In Self Introduction: Mario Fernandez, Mario Fernandez, a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, introduced himself as a new contributor who will be working with the eBPF SIG.

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading. If you want to contribute to Fedora, check out the Join Fedora page.

This summary has been AI-generated and then manually edited. If you see errors, please open a ticket, email aurelien@bompard.org or reach out to @abompard:fedora.im on Matrix.

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