Updated: April 30, 09:34 UTC

From April 27 to May 03

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

This week, the predominant focus across most teams was the successful release of Fedora Linux 44. Groups directly involved in the release process, such as Release Engineering, Quality, and Infrastructure, were occupied with final sign-offs, deployment, and concluding the pre-release freeze. For many other teams, including CoreOS, IoT, and Atomic, the release was also the central event, prompting discussions on follow-up tasks and support for the new stable version. With the release now complete, the collective focus is shifting towards post-release activities and planning for the Fedora 45 development cycle. This forward-looking work involves discussing new system-wide change proposals, planning new features and component updates for various editions, and addressing backlogs accumulated during the release period.

Announcements

This week's major news is the official release of Fedora Linux 44. The release brings updates across all editions, as detailed in the main announcement article. Fedora Workstation 44 ships with GNOME 50, which includes refinements to many core applications and new features like native Parental Controls. The Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop edition is updated to Plasma 6.6, featuring a new setup and login manager, and is now available preinstalled on Star Labs devices through the Fedora Ready program. Other notable system-wide changes include MariaDB 11.8 as the new default, improved OpenSSL certificate handling, and the inclusion of the NTSYNC kernel module to improve performance for Windows applications running through Wine.

Looking ahead, a change proposal for Fedora 45 suggests providing only versioned, parallel-installable libgit2 packages to make future updates safer and more transparent. For those interested in the future of immutable desktops, test images for sealed Fedora Atomic Desktops are now available, featuring a fully verified boot chain using UKIs and composefs, with a call for community testing and feedback. Finally, a new discussion has started around a blog post on "Throwing Random Arguments at System Binaries", which details a smoke-testing script that found reproducible crashes in core components like grub2 and perl, and invites community input on how to handle such findings.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held one meeting where they clarified the policy for release End-of-Life (EOL) dates, specifying that the EOL for a release N is tied to the schedule of release N+2 and only shifts if N+2 is significantly delayed. A lengthy discussion took place regarding the bug handling practices of the GNOME team, resulting in a decision to soften the language of their Bugzilla auto-responder. The committee plans to discuss the underlying issues further with the Workstation Working Group. Other topics included the resource constraints for the s390x architecture, which is being discussed at a higher level, and housekeeping on several older tickets. Additionally, a new Change Proposal for Fedora 45 was posted for discussion, suggesting a move to fully versioned and parallel-installable libgit2 packages to better handle its frequent ABI changes.

Decisions

  • The policy for release EOL dates was clarified: "The N release EOL date is initially set as the Early Target Date + 5 weeks of the N+2 release. If the N+2 release slips past the Final Target date #1, the N release EOL date is shifted in the same way." (#3597).
  • The first sentence of the GNOME Bugzilla auto-responder ("Bug reports for this component on Red Hat Bugzilla are not actively monitored.") will be removed to make it less hostile to users filing bugs. Further discussion on the topic will be held with the Workstation WG. (#3568).
  • Ticket #3583 concerning changes to an unused dist-git branch was deemed resolved and will be closed.
  • Ticket #2966, a long-stalled request for a new aiven-and-friends package group, was closed. It can be re-filed when a concrete proposal is ready.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation Working Group made several key decisions in their meeting on April 28. The group approved replacing gnome-keyring-daemon with the more modern oo7-daemon and also agreed to remove the remnants of ABRT for Fedora 45. Important discussions also took place regarding a proposal to enable a subset of Flathub by default and the need to automate appstream-data updates to improve GNOME Software's reliability.

In community forums, a developer issued a call for testers for a new implementation of Google Drive integration in GNOME. This is a significant opportunity for contributors to help restore a much-requested feature by testing it on Fedora 43 and 44. Additionally, there was a discussion providing user feedback on the confusing process for changing keyboard layouts in the new Anaconda installer, which is a known issue that developers are actively working to resolve.

Decisions

  • The replacement of gnome-keyring-daemon with oo7-daemon was approved.
  • The removal of ABRT remnants for Fedora 45 was approved.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

Server

The Server team held one meeting this week, focusing on post-release planning for Fedora 44 and future initiatives. A key topic was the strategy for Ansible support, where the group reached a consensus on the project's goals. As a first step, a contributor will create a playbook to automate the documented post-installation tasks. There was also a discussion about creating a "Beginners Guide to Fedora Server," with an agreement to initially target home lab users to make it more accessible. The team also reviewed the F44 release testing cycle, noting it went well but with a few minor, non-blocking issues still open, such as a partition table gap on ARM images and outdated "DVD" file naming.

Contributors interested in automation can get involved with the new Ansible project. Those with an interest in documentation and helping new users are encouraged to contribute ideas for the upcoming "Beginners Guide," which will be a major topic in the next meeting. The team also noted positive feedback from the Fedora 44 release party regarding a potential home server spin-off, indicating a growing interest in this area.

Decisions

  • The group agreed on the objectives for Ansible support as described in the project wiki.
  • A volunteer will write an Ansible playbook to automate the official post-installation tasks as a proof of concept.
  • A detailed proposal for the "Beginners Guide" and home server initiative will be drafted for discussion at the next meeting.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The main event this week was the successful release of Fedora 44, which concluded the infrastructure freeze. The team announced the end of the freeze and is now addressing a backlog of pull requests and planning post-release tasks, such as upgrading builders and the wiki to the new release. The team also thanked contributors who worked on fixing secure-boot signing issues in preparation for the release.

A recurring topic in the daily standups was the high traffic from scrapers hitting services like the wiki and id.fedoraproject.org. To mitigate this, the team is considering placing id.fedoraproject.org behind Anubis, the project's bot detection service, and will test this solution in the staging environment. On the forums, a new discussion began on improving authentication for automation tasks by proposing the implementation of the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant in FAS as a modern alternative to Kerberos keytabs.

Decisions

  • The temporary RAM increase for the riscv-koji01.rdu3 builder will be made permanent in Ansible to handle high load. (Details)
  • Ticket #13298, regarding a "400 - Bad Request" error when logging into Fedora accounts, was closed as a duplicate of ticket #13280. (Details)
  • The OpenStreetMap error reported in ticket #13296 was identified as an issue that should be reported upstream to the MirrorManager2 project. (Details)
  • In response to a request for an account name change (#13290), it was decided that users should be advised to create a new account instead. (Details)

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering team held a very brief check-in meeting this week, primarily to confirm the status of the upcoming release. It was noted that the release was approved, staging was complete, and torrents were created and just needed to be seeded. A minor race condition in the f44-testing compose was also mentioned as a point of discussion. The meeting was kept short as a key member was just returning from vacation and all critical release tasks were on track.

Decisions

  • Patrik (patrikp) will chair the meeting on May 4th.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The main focus of the week was the successful sign-off of Fedora 44, which was scheduled for release the following day. The Quality team confirmed that common issues were well-documented and there were no major last-minute concerns. Looking ahead, the team is preparing to move the blockerbugs tracker from Pagure to Forgejo for the Fedora 45 development cycle. For community engagement, the Kernel 7.0 Test Week is currently underway, and Podman 6 Test Days are tentatively scheduled for mid-May. A community member also confirmed that a proposed fix for restoring Google Drive integration in GNOME is working well. Additionally, Adam Williamson shared his presentation on root-causing failures from LinuxFest Northwest.

Decisions

  • It was decided to revive the practice of compiling and publishing contribution statistics. Jaroslav Groman will lead the effort for the Fedora 44 cycle, with assistance from Kamil Páral.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

This week, the Websites and Apps team addressed a user report on the discussion forum regarding the getfedora.org website. Immediately following the release of Fedora 44, the site's main page briefly displayed Fedora 43 as the latest version, even though the download links correctly pointed to the new release. It was explained that such minor delays are common during a release due to various factors like CDN propagation and browser caching. The inconsistency was resolved very quickly.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Docs

The main discussion in the Docs group this week centered on the legal and practical challenges of documenting the installation of NVIDIA drivers. A contributor's attempt to add CLI installation instructions from RPM Fusion to the Beginner's Guide was blocked due to unspecified "legal issues." This raised questions about policy consistency, given that Fedora provides a GUI option to enable third-party repositories for these same drivers. The contributor argued that the current official documentation is unhelpful for users with NVIDIA hardware and that NVIDIA's own guides are not ideal for beginners, making a case for the Docs project to provide clear, reliable instructions to counter the many questionable tutorials available online.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization (i18n) group held its weekly meeting to review progress ahead of the Fedora 44 release. The main topics of discussion were the submission of release notes for Fedora 44 changes, noting that one set was still pending. Team members were also reminded to continue with bug triaging for Fedora 42. The team acknowledged the final Fedora 44 release candidate and looked forward to the official release on April 28th.

Decisions

No formal decisions were taken during this week's meeting.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

EPEL

In the weekly EPEL meeting, the main topic was the upcoming EPEL Steering Committee elections, which are starting now that Fedora 44 has been released. Troy Dawson, Carl George, Kevin Fenzi, and Jonathan Wright are up for re-election, and Diego Herrera announced his intention to run. The group also discussed the upcoming retirement of EPEL 10.1, which presents an opportunity for contributors to get updates into EPEL 10.2. Other topics included an update on the request for EPEL committee badges and an announcement about the retirement of the espresso package from EPEL8.

Decisions

  • The same questions as in previous years will be used for the upcoming EPEL Steering Committee elections.
  • A reminder about the EPEL 10.1 retirement will be sent to the community.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN group's weekly meeting on April 28 was canceled due to a lack of attendance. Consequently, no subjects were discussed and no progress was made on ongoing work. The next opportunity for contributors to engage will be the upcoming meeting scheduled for Tuesday, May 5.

Decisions

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

During the Atomic meeting this week, which coincided with the Fedora 44 release, the team confirmed the successful migration of bootc image builds and CI to the new Konflux cluster. These development builds are now being pushed to quay.io/bootc-devel/. A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to the ongoing topic of artifact signing, including discussions on integrating the official Fedora signing infrastructure with Konflux and a forward-looking exploration of keyless signing models like sigstore. Additionally, a contributor seeking guidance on using bootc for ELN work was directed to the fedora-bootc channel for further assistance.

On the community forums, a user provided detailed feedback after installing Kinoite 44 on older hardware, highlighting a bug that prevents dual-booting two Atomic variants on the same disk and raising concerns about future UKI compatibility with older UEFI firmware. There was also a new question in a long-running thread about Fedora Silverblue Cinnamon, indicating continued community interest in different desktop environment variants.

Decisions

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team focused on the recent release of Fedora 44. An announcement was sent out detailing the rebase of the testing stream and highlighting several important changes, including updates to SELinux booleans, the location of SSH authorized keys files, and an automatic Podman database migration. The main topic of the weekly meeting was the future of memory management, specifically concerning systemd-oomd and swap-on-zram. After discussion, the team decided to align with Fedora defaults in the future but to postpone the change to allow for proper planning and documentation.

A key opportunity for contributors is the creation of a Fedora Change Proposal and associated documentation for enabling swap-on-zram and systemd-oomd for the Fedora 45 release. Emeric Chassagne (nemric) has volunteered to lead this effort.

Decisions

  • It was agreed to revert the accidental enablement of systemd-oomd in the current release cycle.
  • For Fedora 45, a formal Change Proposal will be submitted to enable both swap-on-zram and systemd-oomd by default. This will include documentation on best practices and considerations for users running Kubernetes.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The main focus for the IoT group this week was the successful release of Fedora 44, which is now the stable version. In their weekly meeting, the team discussed the necessary follow-up tasks, including re-enabling daily composes for the new stable release and reviewing the OpenQA test results. Opportunities for contribution are available in updating the Getting Started documentation for the new release and fixing an issue with the fedora-iot inspection script. The group also discussed the status of older releases, confirming the plan for Fedora 43 and the EOL actions for Fedora 42.

Decisions

  • Daily composes for Fedora 44 will be re-enabled now that the release is complete.
  • Fedora 43 composes will now only build the Generic Fedora bootc container.
  • The cronjob for the Fedora 42 generic container compose will be deleted to finalize its end-of-life process.

Learn more about the IoT team.

AI & ML

The main activity for the AI & ML group this week centered on the ongoing forum discussion about Figuring out NPU support in Fedora. A significant update was provided regarding Intel NPU enablement. Work is actively in progress to update the NPU driver and OpenVINO with an NPU compiler for the upcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake, Wildcat Lake) processors on Fedora Rawhide. This will add the NPU as a selectable device in OpenVINO, allowing it to run various AI models and expanding hardware acceleration capabilities within the distribution.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The weekly RISC-V SIG meeting covered the ongoing Fedora 44 rebuild, which has now built over 14,000 packages. On the hardware front, work is underway to debug a kernel boot issue on Eswin devices. The group also had a preliminary discussion about a potential future transition to the rva23 architecture profile, inspired by the x86-64-v3 change proposal. This would offer a significant performance increase and establish a modern baseline, but would require building a separate repository alongside the existing riscv64 architecture. This idea is still in early exploration, and the group is watching the progress of the x86 proposal as a potential model.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

This week, the Security group's activity centered on a forum discussion initiated by Siteshwar Vashisht regarding the latest static analysis scan of Fedora 45 Critical Path Packages. The report highlighted a total of 52,267 findings, with 1,419 being new since the Fedora 44 scan. Community members and package maintainers are encouraged to review these findings, prioritizing the newly identified issues for potential fixes upstream. The post also provides resources for recording false positives to improve future scans and links to raw scan data and documentation for OpenScanHub. This is a key opportunity for contributors to help improve the security posture of critical Fedora packages.

Learn more about the Security team.

Perl

This week's activity for the Perl group consisted of routine maintenance and updates for several Perl module packages. A series of pull requests were opened and merged to bump the versions of key modules, ensuring they are up-to-date with their latest upstream releases. The updates included perl-Encode, perl-XML-Parser, perl-PDL, perl-Log-Dispatchouli, and perl-Socket. The process was straightforward, with most pull requests being merged without extensive discussion. A brief exchange on the perl-Socket update involved clarifying the use of packit-ci commands for triggering tests.

Decisions

  • The perl-Encode package was updated first to version 3.22 and subsequently to version 3.24.
  • The perl-XML-Parser package was updated to version 2.58.
  • The perl-PDL package was updated to version 2.104.
  • The perl-Log-Dispatchouli package was updated to version 3.101.
  • The perl-Socket package was updated to version 2.041.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

A new version of pyproject-rpm-macros (1.21.0) was announced, introducing a significant change to how Python packages are built. The update adds validation for extras passed to the %pyproject_buildrequires -x macro. This change will cause builds to fail on Fedora 45+ and RHEL 11+ if a non-existent extra is specified, improving build reliability but potentially breaking existing packages. On older releases, it will only emit a warning. About 30 packages are affected, and maintainers have been notified to merge the provided fixes.

Decisions

  • The pyproject-rpm-macros will now validate extras passed to %pyproject_buildrequires -x against project metadata. Builds specifying a non-existent extra will fail on Fedora >= 45 and RHEL >= 11.

Learn more about the Python team.

Other Discussions

  • An announcement was made for the Fedora Mentor Summit Lunch and Learn @ Flock To Fedora 2026, an in-person, drop-in event designed to foster mentoring within the community. Attendees can join designated tables based on areas of interest to connect, share experiences, and build relationships over a meal. A poll is available for participants to vote on their preferred topics before May 15th, 2026.
  • A package maintainer encountered and resolved a checksum mismatch issue while trying to build a new release of the diffuse package in Koji. The problem, which did not occur in local or COPR builds, was traced to the source URL in the spec file. The issue was fixed by changing the URL from codeload.github.com to github.com, which produced a tarball with the correct checksum.
  • A discussion continued regarding the potential complete removal of ABRT in Fedora 45. With the retrace server being non-functional for recent Fedora releases and no developers available to maintain the project, it was noted that ABRT is effectively abandoned. The consensus is leaning towards exploring alternatives or starting a new, more focused crash-reporting project rather than attempting to modernize the current ABRT implementation.
  • A discussion was initiated to gauge interest in building and testing alternate kernels and pre-built binary kernel modules for Fedora. The goal is to improve the user experience, especially for those needing out-of-tree drivers for hardware like NVIDIA GPUs. The conversation explored the use of COPR for distribution, the complexities of Secure Boot signing, and the potential benefits of providing stable, long-term support kernels to enhance Fedora's reputation for stability.
  • The Fedora CoreOS testing stream has been rebased to Fedora Linux 44. Key changes include updates to SELinux booleans, a new location for SSH authorized key overlay files, an automatic migration of the Podman database from BoltDB to SQLite, and the consolidation of nfs-utils-coreos functionality into nfs-client-utils.
  • A system-wide change proposal was submitted to provide only fully versioned packages for libgit2. This change aims to simplify dependency management and allow different versions of libgit2 to be parallel-installable, making it easier to introduce newer versions in older Fedora and EPEL releases without causing breakage.
  • A new package, fedora-active-user, has been created and submitted for review. This script replaces an old, unmaintained tool used in the non-responding maintainer process and queries various Fedora services to check for a user's recent activity.
  • A discussion was started about when to introduce libical 4.0 into Rawhide. This is a major update with API changes that prevent it from being installed alongside the 3.x series. Maintainers of dependent packages, such as Evolution and KDE PIM components, were contacted to coordinate the transition.

Package updates

  • An update to libcbor to version 0.14.0 is planned for Rawhide, which includes a SONAME bump. Maintainers of qemu have already rebuilt their package, while fwupd was found to no longer require a rebuild.
  • The flint package will be updated to version 3.5.0, which includes a SONAME bump. Dependent packages will be rebuilt in Rawhide.
  • A heads-up was given for an upcoming update of the usd (OpenUSD) package to version 26.05 in Rawhide. This update is ABI-incompatible and includes a SONAME bump, and the dependent blender package will be rebuilt accordingly.
  • A follow-up was posted on the plan to land OpenSSL 4 in Fedora 45. After the initial attempt was rolled back, a new strategy involves using a COPR for mass pre-builds and fixing build failures for a critical subset of packages. A "flag day" is planned no later than June 24th to merge the changes into Rawhide before the mass rebuild.

Orphaning packages

New contributor introductions

  • Luigi Pavan (lpavan) introduced himself to the community. Having recently joined the packager group, he will be co-maintaining koji-flatpak, fedora-flathub-remote, and fedora-third-party as part of his work on the Flatpak ecosystem.
  • Aaron Chan (aaroncyew) is seeking a sponsor for a pull request related to the intel-npu-driver package and is requesting access to several packager and contributor groups.

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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