From March 16 to March 22

A primary focus across many groups was the upcoming Fedora 44 release, with the Quality, Workstation, KDE, Server, and ARM teams all issuing calls for final validation testing to identify and resolve blocker bugs early. This effort included specific testing for new Raspberry Pi 5 images, a topic of discussion for the Packaging, Workstation, and KDE groups. In parallel, significant planning is underway for the migration from pagure.io to the new forge.fedoraproject.org, a major item for both the Council and the Packaging Committee, who are addressing challenges like CI/CD integration and managing open pull requests. Another strategic, cross-cutting topic was the "Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process" proposal, which was discussed by both the Council and FESCo.

📣 Announcements

A spam warning was issued after realistic-looking phishing emails were sent to mailing lists from addresses like test@lists.fedoraproject.org. These emails urged users to click a link to update their credentials to prevent password expiration. Community members are advised not to click these links. The discussion revealed this was a side effect of temporarily lifting restrictions on a mailing list for debugging purposes, and the infrastructure team is aware of the issue.

Additionally, two planned outages were announced. A 30-minute maintenance for Matrix services (fedora.im) is scheduled for March 26, 2026, at 11:50 UTC. A longer, five-hour outage for server updates and reboots will begin on March 25, 2026, at 22:00 UTC. This will affect many services, with some potentially experiencing extended downtime due to upgrades from RHEL-9 to RHEL-10.

Council

This week, discussions focused on the practical challenges of migrating from pagure.io and a new proposal for managing technological innovation. Regarding the decommissioning of Pagure.io, contributors from the Fedora Asahi SIG highlighted blocking issues, such as the need for COPR integration with forge.fedoraproject.org to trigger automated builds and a CI/CD solution for interacting with AWS. A solution was proposed for migrating tools not tied to a specific SIG by creating a new packager-tools organization. A draft Council policy for the new forge was also shared for context.

In a separate topic, Jef Spaleta's proposal for a Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process, which introduces a "Sandbox" for experimental projects, gained visibility with an LWN article. The author is now seeking concrete project examples to refine the process, particularly the criteria for moving between the "Sandbox," "Curation," and "Integrated" stages.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held a significant meeting focused on the final vote for the contentious change proposal to filter Fedora Flatpaks on Atomic Desktops. After final arguments concerning user expectations, Flatpak architecture, and the consequences of rejection, the proposal was narrowly approved. A key clarification was made immediately following the vote: the approval is strictly limited to Atomic Desktops, and any similar change for the standard Fedora Workstation would require a new, separate proposal. In forum discussions, another major change was approved for Fedora 45.

Several other F45 change proposals were formally submitted to FESCo for future votes, including an update to xmlsec, enabling IPv6-Mostly support in Network Manager, and adding a user-friendly DRM Panic Frontend. Additionally, new discussions were initiated around making updates transport-independent to bypass censorship, and the strategic proposal for a Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process continued to be refined.

Decisions Taken

• The change proposal to Filter Fedora Flatpaks on Atomic Desktops v2 was approved with a vote of (+5, 0, -3). This approval is strictly for Atomic Desktops only.
• The F45 change proposal to Restrict ptrace by default was approved.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee held a meeting focusing on the upcoming migration from Pagure to Forgejo. The committee discussed a plan to manage the large number of open pull requests by closing stale ones and asking submitters to reopen them on the new platform if still relevant. A major policy discussion also took place regarding whether to relax guidelines to allow conditionals for non-Fedora/EPEL distributions in spec files. While arguments were made for lowering the barrier to entry for cross-distro contributors, concerns about legibility and testability were also raised. A potential compromise is to create a "best practices" document for writing clean, multi-distro spec files.

In forum discussions, feedback was actively being gathered and discussed for new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5, with users reporting and troubleshooting various boot-related issues. Another topic saw continued discussion on the challenges of aligning Fedora's release cycle with KDE's update schedule, noting the historical context of Fedora's schedule being designed around GNOME.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare group's activity was centered around their main meeting, as the magazine meeting had no discussion. Key announcements included the success of the Fedora Badges Revamp project at FOSSAsia 2026 and its acceptance into Outreachy, a new Red Hat intern joining the project, and a proposal from the Fedora Council for a new "Fedora Verified" membership tier. The team also focused on administrative tasks, reviewing final costs and reports for past events like DevConf.IN 2026 and FOSDEM 2026, and closing the corresponding tickets.

Decisions Taken

• Ticket #88 (Recognition Service) will be closed, with discussions continuing in more specific tickets.
• Ticket #91 (DevConf.IN 2026) was deemed complete and will be closed.
• Ticket #97 (FOSDEM 2026) was deemed complete and will be closed once the final reports are collected.
• The event request for Ticket #101 (20 Sesja Linuksowa) was formally approved.
• The event request for Ticket #102 (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2026) was formally approved.

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, the Diversity & Inclusion group's activity was centered around a celebratory forum discussion. In "It’s been a year since I joined Fedora Project," former Outreachy intern Cornelius Emase marked their one-year anniversary with the project. They expressed gratitude to their mentor and the community, noting their continued contributions to the DEI team and Fedora Join. The post was met with positive and encouraging responses from other community members.

Workstation / GNOME

This week's discussions focused on user experience with core components and preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A prominent call for testing was issued to encourage early validation and bug reporting for Fedora 44. There was significant feedback on the new Anaconda web UI installer, with users finding it difficult to perform advanced storage configurations. The Anaconda team engaged with this feedback, requesting specific use cases that are now difficult or impossible. Another discussion centered on Wayland, where users voiced frustrations about it being a regression from X11, while others clarified that many issues are related to the compositor and the ongoing architectural transition.

On the hardware front, a new idea was proposed to create a hardware quirks database to improve the out-of-the-box experience on specific devices. Community testing of new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5 also continued, with testers reporting some boot stability issues that are under investigation.

Decisions Taken

• The Workstation Working Group meeting scheduled for March 24 was canceled and rescheduled to March 31.

KDE

This week, the KDE group's discussions centered on release schedules and testing for the upcoming Fedora 44. A significant conversation was initiated about converging the release cadences of Qt, KDE Plasma, and Fedora to improve stability and security. The discussion explored the complexities of Qt's public maintenance policy and the feasibility of moving away from a rolling Qt release within Fedora, with arguments that rolling Qt provides necessary platform and Wayland fixes. In preparation for the new release, a call for testing Fedora 44 Final validation builds was widely circulated, urging contributors to test nightly composes early to identify blocker bugs.

On the development and testing front, feedback was sought for new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5, with testers reporting several boot hangs and SD card issues on the KDE variant. Additionally, a follow-up on the Kamoso webcam application identified that its poor performance in Fedora 43 was due to defaulting to a low-quality video format and framerate. The ongoing topic about issues following KDE updates also saw a comment clarifying that Fedora's release schedule was historically aligned with GNOME's, which contributes to the current friction.

Server

This week's focus was heavily on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A call for testing was issued to encourage the community to run final validation tests on nightly builds to identify blocker bugs early. In the weekly meeting, the group discussed the status of F44, concluding that all planned testing was complete with no major issues. Progress on the "Integrating LocalKDC" project for Fedora 45 was also reviewed, with a COPR repository now available for testing. Additionally, a new documentation project, a "Beginner's Guide to Server," was proposed to help new users after installation.

Decisions Taken

• The working group agreed that the Fedora Server 44 installation media are ready for release.
• A ticket will be created to start work on a new "Beginner's Guide to Server" documentation project.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team focused on planning for two upcoming outages: a system-wide update and reboot cycle scheduled for March 25 and a Matrix service maintenance on March 26. The team welcomed a new contributor, Ruilai Ma, who introduced himself at the weekly meeting and will start by fixing outdated documentation links. Daily standups involved triaging new tickets, troubleshooting issues with the asknot application in staging, and preparing for the next Fedora release freeze.

Key discussions during the weekly meeting included improving monitoring for PostgreSQL and OpenShift, investigating a Forgejo webhook issue, and refining the team's agile workflow. On the discussion forum, a user added their support to an existing request for a torrent file for the Everything Network Installer. A major decision was also made to change the team's support process.

Decisions Taken

• The formal on-call rotation was discontinued. The new procedure will be for users to file tickets for issues.
• In the Daily Standup on 2026-03-16, ticket #13202 regarding an Ipsilon login error was closed, as the issue will be resolved by the long-term migration to Keycloak.

Releng

During the weekly Releng meeting, the team addressed the urgent need to publish new OpenH264 builds for F44 and F45 before the final freeze, a process that requires coordination with Cisco. They also discussed a faulty branch deletion script and considered implementing optional AI code reviews, deferring a final decision to the next meeting. In the forums, a user added their support to an ongoing request to provide a torrent for the Everything Network installer.

Decisions Taken

• The branch deletion script must be fixed to correctly identify a branch as safe to delete before it is used; the team will not use a manual override.

Quality

This week, the Quality team focused heavily on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. In their main Quality meeting, the team reviewed the release status, concluding that while it looks decent, more community testing is crucial. This led to a public call for testing to encourage running Final validation tests early to discover potential blockers. The team also reviewed recently completed test events for i18n and podman and noted an upcoming CoreOS test week. On the mailing list, discussions included a user experiencing an upgrade issue from F43 to F44 Beta and a report of a boot failure on new Surface Pro 11 hardware.

The most significant event was the Fedora 44 Blocker Review meeting, where several proposed blockers and freeze exceptions were evaluated against the release criteria. The team made decisions on multiple critical bugs to ensure the stability of the final release.

Decisions Taken

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

• Bug 2391723 (shim-ia32 missing): Accepted as a Final Blocker.
• Bug 2444824 (GNOME Remote Desktop blank screen): Decision on blocker status was delayed, but it was accepted as a Final Freeze Exception.
• Bug 2444046 (Incorrect KDE launcher icon): Rejected as a Final Blocker, but accepted as a Final Freeze Exception.
• Bug 2443774 (dnf cli segmentation fault): Accepted as a Final Freeze Exception.

Internationalization

During the week, the Internationalization group held a meeting to discuss the progress of Fedora 44. Key topics included the successful implementation of Fedora 44 Changes and the conclusion of the i18n Test Week. The team reviewed the upcoming schedule, with the Final Freeze planned for March 31 and the target release on April 14. A significant number of bugs for Fedora 42 still need to be triaged. Additionally, a new release candidate for IBus 1.5.34 was announced and is now available for testing in Fedora 44.

Decisions Taken

• Change owners can start working on the release notes for Fedora 44.
• Team members were asked to triage the remaining bugs reported against Fedora 42.

Legal

This week's discussions centered on legal compliance and licensing complexities. A major topic was the response to new US state laws requiring an age verification API; while the original proponent noted their projects are now unlikely to implement it, another contributor strongly advocated for legally challenging the laws rather than complying. Another compliance issue arose concerning the inclusion of software from a developer based in Iran, which will require review by Red Hat's export compliance team. The group also continued to examine the relicensing of python-chardet after an AI-based rewrite; the current view is that while the relicensing may not be legally improper, the copyrightability of AI-generated code is a questionable area. Finally, a satirical proposal for a global censorship API was briefly acknowledged.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group's main focus was on package updates and repository management. The most significant event was the discussion and subsequent approval of an incompatible update for mongo-c-driver for EPEL 10.3, as detailed in both the weekly meeting and the mailing list. The update, which was pushed to stable, is required for a new PHP extension. Other topics included an update on the python-requests issue (#361), where the group is now waiting for Red Hat's response to a filed ticket. Additionally, a new epel/misc repository was created on forge.fedoraproject.org to handle issues that don't fit elsewhere, and an announcement was made about the rebasing of Asahi-related packages in EPEL 10 to support Apple Silicon Macs.

Decisions Taken

• The proposal to allow an incompatible update for mongo-c-driver for EPEL 10.3 (issue #362) was approved with a 6-0 vote.

ELN

During the Fedora ELN SIG meeting, the group discussed the status of their Forgejo migration, noting that the request for an eln organization is still pending. The main focus was on the bootc image, which is failing in CI despite successful local builds. A team member is investigating the failures, with a potential cause identified as trailing whitespace in a configuration file. An action was assigned to look into this specific issue.

Decisions Taken

• Once the bootc image builds successfully, it will be pushed to the fedora/eln namespace on Quay.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group's main activity was the Fedora Atomic Initiative meeting. Key discussions centered on the ongoing CoreOS convergence with Konflux, with the team identifying a "sealed uki composefs fcos" as a long-term goal. The group also discussed a blocked merge request aimed at adding ELN (Enterprise Linux Next) support to bootc base images. Other topics included an update that the group's "Birds of a Feather" session for Flock was accepted and a recap of several talks at the SCaLE conference that featured Fedora Atomic Desktops and FCOS.

In forum activity, a five-year-old topic about a Bluetooth file transfer issue was revived. A user linked to a related ongoing issue, and a moderator suggested creating a new topic due to the age of the original post.

Decisions

The following action items were decided upon during the meeting:

• @nimbinatus:matrix.org is to get clarity on the Konflux team's new cluster migration plan and update tracking tickets.
• @jcapitao:matrix.org will prepare and share an architecture document explaining how CoreOS will be built on Konflux.
• @nimbinatus:matrix.org will share the slides from the Fedora Hatch session at SCaLE.
• @jcapitao:matrix.org will review the merge request for adding ELN support to bootc/base-images to help unblock it.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team focused on preparations for the upcoming Fedora CoreOS 44 Test Week, scheduled to begin on March 23. In their weekly meeting, they confirmed the event's organization, including a live sync session and a promotional article. The team also discussed the Fedora 44 release, which is currently in a Beta freeze. Key technical topics included handling the GoLang 1.26 version bump and investigating the impact of the libdnf5 change on rpm-ostree.

Decisions

• The migration to build Fedora CoreOS on Konflux will be untied from the Fedora 44 release and will occur when the new cluster is ready.
• The team agreed that for fast-tracked package updates, passing CI and having been shipped in Fedora 43 is sufficient justification to add positive karma in Bodhi.

ARM

This week, the ARM group focused on testing for the upcoming Fedora 44 release and enabling new hardware. A call was made for contributors to run Fedora 44 Final validation tests on nightly builds to find blocker bugs as early as possible. In hardware-specific discussions, new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5 were made available for testing. Feedback highlighted several boot-related issues, including hardware interrupt timeouts and random hangs during startup, which are now being investigated. A separate issue was reported regarding a boot loop on the Surface Pro 11 (Snapdragon X Elite) with Rawhide, where the system freezes at the GRUB menu and reboots.

Cloud

This week, the Cloud group received a call to action regarding the upcoming Fedora 44 release. In a post titled "Call for testing: Fedora 44 Final validation tests (don't wait for candidates!)", Adam Williamson urged the community to begin running Final validation tests immediately on the latest nightly builds or the Beta. The main subject was the importance of early testing to discover and fix any potential blocker bugs well in advance of the final release candidates, which ensures a smoother release process. The announcement provided helpful links to test result pages and guidelines for reporting issues. No decisions were taken this week.

RISC-V

During the week, the RISC-V group focused on the upcoming Fedora 44 rebuild and future strategy in their weekly meeting. With a critical debuginfo bug now solved, work on Fedora 44 is set to begin. This resolution was also highlighted in a forum announcement which provided links to the non-official Fedora 43 images. Other key topics included renaming the kernel package to avoid confusion and the strategic decision regarding the push for primary architecture status. The group will discuss this informally at the upcoming Flock 2026 conference, where their talk proposal has been accepted.

Decisions Taken

• The "unified" kernel package has been renamed to the "omni" kernel to avoid confusion with the Unified Kernel Image (UKI) specification.
• The group agreed it is too early to submit a formal initiative for RISC-V to become a primary architecture. The topic will be discussed informally at Flock 2026, with a more serious discussion planned once more RVA23-based hardware becomes available.

Security

The Security group held one meeting, the security-sig, which focused on a proposal to integrate Package URLs (PURL) into Fedora packages. This integration, tracked in Jira ticket FRCL-23, is intended to improve vulnerability management. The group expressed support for the idea, seeing it as a beneficial emerging trend that could streamline vulnerability tracking, even though other distributions have not yet adopted it. It was also suggested that language ecosystems could build PURL generation into their RPM creation tools.

Decisions

• An action was assigned to q5sys to update a link in the meeting details to point to the group's new issue tracker.

Other Discussions

• An announcement was made for a scheduled 30-minute maintenance on fedora.im and Matrix services, starting on 2026-03-26 at 11:50 UTC.
• Ben Beasley announced the un-retiring of python-rply and python-rnc2rng. Although not actively maintained upstream, they are required for a dependency chain involving bidscoin and are considered to have no good maintained alternatives.
• A question was raised about whether Flatpak could be vulnerable to a similar root exploit recently found in snapd, which involves race conditions and complex link systems within the sandbox.
• A thread that originated on the Ubuntu and Debian mailing lists about implementing a censorship framework for legal compliance was forwarded to the Fedora list, with a Fedora contributor expressing hope that the entire proposal was satirical.
• Adam Williamson sent out a call for the community to run Final validation tests for Fedora 44 on the nightly composes or the Beta release, rather than waiting for the final candidates, to identify and address blocker bugs as early as possible.
• Jerry James is seeking reviewers for the rocq and rocq-stdlib packages, which are part of an effort to update the Coq stack (renamed to Rocq). He offered to do multiple reviews in exchange for help with these two.
• Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek requested a review for the sso-mib library, which is used for Single-Sign-On with Entra Conditional Access. Neal Gompa quickly accepted the review.
• Milan Crha proposed creating a gnome-srpm-macros package to deduplicate common RPM macros used in GNOME packages, such as tarball_version and major_version. The idea received positive feedback, with suggestions to use Lua for some macros to provide earlier error checking.
• A discussion was started about whether Fedora should ask the KDE project to move to a 6-month release cadence to align with Fedora and Qt. It was clarified that Qt's community edition support cycle is a key factor, and Fedora will likely continue rolling Qt updates regardless of Plasma's schedule to provide necessary platform fixes and Wayland improvements.
• In a follow-up to a request for sponsorship, new contributor Jaylon Christy mentioned their interest in programming with Java and C++ and their intent to find a suitable SIG to contribute to.
• Other topics discussed this week include a call for new maintainers for OpenStack client packages, an issue where Koji appears to truncate changelogs when using %autochangelog, a request to update the unmaintained ABRT faf server for F43 and F44, the process for a mass review request for related data packages, and how to handle a noarch package that has arch-specific build dependencies for its tests.

Package updates

• A new version of ghostscript, 10.07.0, is coming to Rawhide. This update includes breaking changes, such as the removal of the .tempfile operator and two deprecated functionalities, DisableFAPI and SCANCONVERTERTYPE.
• Jonathan Wakely announced a correction to the license tags for several boost subpackages to more accurately reflect the licenses present in the code headers. The changes will be merged into Rawhide and likely backported to F44.
• Version 2.27.0 of tuned has been released.
• The update to VTK 9.6, which does not provide ABI stability, has been filed in Bodhi along with rebuilds of its dependencies.
• Following the libvpx 1.16.0 ABI break, a request was made to coordinate the rebuild of remaining dependent packages in the side-tag to unblock other updates.
• After adopting the n2n package, the maintainer updated it from a 2011 version to v3.1.0, which also involved updating the license tag to reflect multiple licenses.
• To address builds broken by LLVM 22, a plan was proposed to create a python-clang compatibility sub-package in llvm21 and update affected packages like mupdf to use it, avoiding the need for a separate Fedora Change proposal.
• A discussion took place about updating Mesa to version 26.0 in Fedora 44, despite it being late in the release cycle. The consensus was to proceed with the update before the final release, and a FESCo ticket was filed to formalize this decision.

New contributor introductions

• Ananya Nalavathu introduced herself as the new Community Architect at Red Hat, joining from Cork, Ireland.
• Ruilai Ma (Ray) joined the community and expressed interest in giving back to the project, potentially using system administration skills.
• Sarika Sharma introduced herself and asked for guidance on getting started as a package maintainer or with other beginner-friendly tasks.
• Mark Harmstone introduced himself as a new contributor from the Meta kernel team working on btrfs and announced he has packaged his btrfs-dump tool for Rawhide.