From April 06 to April 12

Across the project, the primary focus was on the upcoming Fedora 44 release, which was delayed due to several outstanding blocker bugs. The Quality, Releng, Workstation, KDE, and Server teams were all heavily involved in addressing these issues, holding blocker review meetings and encouraging community testing of a new release candidate to resolve the problems before the new April 21st target date. Beyond the immediate release, other common activities included the project-wide migration of repositories from Pagure to Forgejo, routine package maintenance and updates across multiple language SIGs, and future planning, with FESCo reviewing Fedora 45 Change Proposals and the Design team working on the F45 wallpaper.

📣 Announcements

This week, the Fedora 44 release was delayed. The Final Go/No-Go meeting was cancelled due to multiple outstanding blocker bugs, making the new target release date April 21st; contributors are encouraged to help resolve the blockers. On the infrastructure side, a planned 45-minute maintenance outage for the Fedora Matrix server (fedora.im) is scheduled for April 14th at 11:15 UTC. It was also discovered that posts to the devel-announce mailing list have not been copied to the devel list since February 17th, so subscribers may want to review the archives. In a successful migration, the compose-tracker and failed-composes repositories have been moved from Pagure to Forgejo.

The Fedora Code of Conduct Report for 2025 was published, indicating good community health with a continued decrease in incident severity, despite a slight rise in total reports from the previous year. The Community Update for Week 15 provided a summary of work from various teams, including the QE team's validation work for the upcoming F44 release, the Infrastructure team's maintenance on Zabbix monitoring and Ansible roles, and the Forgejo team's new documentation for webhook support.

Council

During its weekly meeting, the Council made a final decision on a long-standing ticket to relicense fedora-logos, rejecting the proposal based on legal advice concerning trademark law ambiguity. The Council also followed up on action items from its recent Strategy Summit. Progress is being made on a "Fedora Verified" membership model, with a community survey currently under review. New tickets will be created to advance discussions on external funding possibilities and to formulate an official Council statement on Konflux. A summary of the summit will be published on the Community Blog to keep contributors informed.

In forum discussions, a new topic provided feedback on the structure and tagging of Fedora bootc images with Konflux on quay.io, suggesting improvements for architectural clarity. Additionally, a user posted a question in a year-old thread asking for a list of available bootc images related to the proposal to integrate them into official Fedora releases.

Decisions

FESCo

During the FESCo meeting on April 7, 2026, the committee made several decisions. They approved an update to the nonresponsive maintainer process to better handle invalid email addresses and also fast-tracked a proposal to address issues with Fedora 44 package retirements. For a separate issue concerning changes to unused dist-git branches, FESCo decided to request clarification from the reporter before proceeding.

Two significant Fedora 45 Change Proposals were formally submitted for FESCo review this week, providing opportunities for community feedback. The first proposal, Use PAM In Chpasswd Newusers, aims to make these utilities respect system-wide password policies for improved security and consistency. The second, Setuptools 82+, involves a major update to python-setuptools that removes the pkg_resources module, which will require a number of packages to be updated.

Decisions

  • In the discussion on issue #3583 regarding changes to unused dist-git branches, FESCo agreed to ask the reporter for clarification on their request.
  • FESCo approved the proposed changes in issue #3586 to update the nonresponsive maintainer process, with the exception of removing the "watcher" section.
  • A Fast Track request to address delayed and broken processing of F44 package retirements was approved.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Quality team announced that several Python packages have been orphaned as part of an effort to reduce their scope. These packages include python-aniso8601, python-flask-caching, testcloud, python-pytest-xprocess, and python-flask-restful. This presents an opportunity for new maintainers to adopt them to prevent them from being retired, which would break dependencies for packages like copr-frontend.

In other discussions, community members assisted a contributor who was having trouble pushing changes, clarifying that the authentication process for pull requests for non-packagers uses a web-based git credential helper, not SSH keys. Additionally, a technical query about linking static Rust libraries against glibc was raised, with the discussion highlighting a known ABI compatibility issue and being redirected to the devel mailing list for broader expertise.

Ambassadors

The Ambassadors team had a quiet week with one forum topic discussing a recent event. Raphael Groner posted a report-back from Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2026, confirming that Fedora had a successful presence with a booth. The post includes links to pictures from the event, the event's wiki page, and the Fedora Badge for attendees. This highlights Fedora's continued engagement with the broader Linux community at in-person events in Germany.

Diversity & Inclusion

The Diversity & Inclusion team advanced the planning for the upcoming Fedora Mentor Summit @ Flock 2026. A kick-off meeting was scheduled to organize key activities for the summit, such as the Mentor Match Lunch and the Contributor Recognition Award. Community members interested in volunteering are invited to join the meeting and are encouraged to review the related issues on Fedora Forge beforehand to contribute effectively.

Decisions

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

Workstation / GNOME

This week's focus was on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A significant call for testing was issued for a potential F44 Final blocker where gnome-initial-setup may hang on systems with certain NVIDIA adapters. Community members with NVIDIA hardware are encouraged to help test the F44 RC-1.1 compose to verify the bug's status. A blocker review meeting is scheduled for April 13 to discuss this and other issues. Additionally, a technical discussion continued regarding Fedora's default behavior with multiple preferred IPv6 addresses, exploring how to improve connectivity on networks with non-persistent prefixes from ISPs.

The Workstation Working Group had both of its recent meetings canceled. The next meeting is scheduled for April 21 and has a full agenda, including topics like filtering the Fedora Flatpak repository, removing ABRT remnants, and replacing gnome-keyring-daemon with oo7-daemon.

KDE

This week, discussions within the KDE on Fedora community centered on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A candidate build, RC-1.1, was made available for testing, though it was clarified that it is not a true release candidate due to several outstanding blocker bugs. In preparation for the final release, a Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting was announced for April 13. Contributors were encouraged to participate by testing the candidate release and by reviewing and voting on proposed blockers before the meeting.

Server

This week's activity centered on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A Fedora 44 Candidate RC-1.1 was composed to encourage testing, though it was noted not to be a true release candidate due to several outstanding blocker bugs. Contributors are encouraged to participate in the upcoming F44 Blocker Review Meeting to help finalize the release.

A technical discussion continued on the forum regarding IPv6 address selection behavior in environments with non-persistent prefixes, where Fedora may not select the newest, functional address. The suggestion is for Fedora to default to using the newest address, similar to Android's behavior.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team's week was highlighted by a significant discussion on mirror quality, prompted by a user report about an unreliable public mirror in South Korea (KRFOSS). After reviewing evidence of instability and questionable practices, the team temporarily disabled the mirror. In their main weekly meeting, the team continued backlog refinement, notably deciding that the use of avatars on fedorapeople.org was not a sufficient reason to delay sunsetting the legacy OpenID infrastructure. Other topics included a discussion to move the weekly meeting time to 15:00 UTC to better accommodate daylight saving time changes, and an announcement for a planned Matrix outage on April 14th. The team also began a conversation about ensuring new user groups are correctly configured to require the FPCA and grant contributor status, identifying exceptions for older service groups.

Decisions

  • The weekly Infrastructure meeting time was moved to 15:00 UTC.
  • The KRFOSS mirror was temporarily disabled due to ongoing quality and reliability issues.
  • It was agreed that avatar usage on fedorapeople.org is not a sufficiently valid reason to postpone the sunsetting of Fedora's OpenID infrastructure.

Releng

This week's main activity centered around the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting on April 6th. The team reviewed several proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. Key discussions included issues with keyboard layout selection and WiFi configuration in the Plasma initial setup, and a problem with systemd-oomd.service not being enabled on some systems. Several bugs were accepted as release blockers, while others were accepted or rejected as freeze exceptions. An announcement was also posted for the next blocker review meeting scheduled for April 13th. Additionally, there was renewed interest in the proposal to integrate Fedora bootc base images, with a community member asking for a list of available images.

Decisions

During the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, the following decisions were made:

  • Accepted as Final Blockers:

    • Bug 2448283 and Bug 2453216: Combined keyboard layout issues in plasma-setup that could prevent users from completing the setup process.
    • Bug 2455469: Configuring a WiFi network via the Network pane in plasma-setup appears to not work.

  • Rejected as Final Blocker (but Accepted as Freeze Exception):

    • Bug 2453005: systemd-oomd.service is not enabled on some systems. While not a criterion violation, it was accepted as a freeze exception to apply a fix.

  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exceptions:

    • Bug 2438126: To fix two Moderate CVEs in fido-device-onboard.
    • Bug 2437415: To fix a FailsToInstall issue with the gala package.

  • Rejected as Final Freeze Exception:

    • Bug 2454664: A FTBFS (Fails to Build From Source) issue was rejected due to a lack of clear justification for an exception.

Quality

The Quality team's week was dominated by preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. The F44 Final Go/No-Go meeting was cancelled, resulting in a NO-GO decision for the April 14th target date due to several outstanding blocker bugs. The release is now targeting the following week, April 21st. A key blocker under discussion is a hang in gnome-initial-setup on certain NVIDIA hardware, and the team has put out a call for community members with affected hardware to help test and confirm if the issue persists in F44.

In the weekly blocker review meeting, several bugs were reviewed, with decisions made on blockers and freeze exceptions for the Final release. Additionally, as part of an ongoing scope reduction, the team orphaned several Python packages, including testcloud and python-flask-caching, and is looking for new maintainers. Announcements for the next Quality Meeting and Blocker Review Meeting have been sent out.

Decisions

  • Accepted Final Blockers
    • #2448283 and #2453216: Two plasma-setup bugs related to keyboard layout selection were accepted as blockers due to their combined effect making the setup process impossible for some users.
    • #2455469: A bug where configuring a WiFi network in plasma-setup does not work was accepted as a blocker.
  • Rejected Final Blockers
    • #2453005: A bug where systemd-oomd.service is not enabled on some systems was rejected as a blocker but accepted as a Freeze Exception.
  • Accepted Final Freeze Exceptions
    • #2453005: To allow a fix for the systemd-oomd.service preset.
    • #2438126: To include fixes for two CVEs in fido-device-onboard.
    • #2437415: To fix packages (gala, gala-devel) that fail to install.
  • Rejected Final Freeze Exceptions
    • #2454664: A failure to build from source (rust-add-determinism) was rejected due to insufficient justification.

Design

This week, the Design team's activity was centered on the ongoing development of the Fedora 45 wallpaper. The process is currently in the "Beta" wallpaper creation stage, which is scheduled to end on April 13th, after which a community feedback period will begin. The wallpaper's inspiration is Alan Turing, with design concepts exploring themes such as the "Enigma" machine aesthetic, mathematical patterns in nature (morphogenesis), and Turing's legacy. A contributor shared a photograph in the main F45 Wallpaper Process Update forum thread. Community members interested in providing feedback should watch for the "Beta" wallpaper release next week.

Docs

The Docs team held its weekly meeting with a major focus on the newly created Beginner's Guide to Fedora. The guide is pending a final review before being published, and the team is seeking community feedback via Ticket #8. Another significant topic was the ongoing migration to Forgejo. Most GitLab repositories are now migrated, but about 20 active repositories still need to be moved from Pagure. The team discussed the strategy for handling older, unmaintained documentation, leaning towards not migrating it to the main Forgejo organization to keep the focus on active content. The team also reviewed several new member applications and encouraged other contributors to apply.

Decisions

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

EPEL

This week, the EPEL SIG discussed a significant packaging challenge regarding an incompatible update for libgit2 in EPEL 10. The current version is outdated and no longer receives upstream security fixes, which also impacts the nix package. A direct breaking update was proposed but raised concerns about potentially breaking the buildroot due to its dependency python-rpmautospec. An alternative of introducing versioned libgit2 packages was suggested as a safer long-term approach, and feedback is being sought on the best path forward. In other news, a new version of the uv package was sent to testing for EPEL 10, which includes potentially breaking changes to its networking stack and TLS certificate handling. The weekly EPEL meeting was also held, covering routine issue tracking.

CentOS Hyperscale

This week, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG held its regular meeting. The main announcement was a reminder about the Call for Papers for the April 2026 CentOS Showcase, with a submission deadline of April 10. This was highlighted as a key opportunity for contributors to share their work with the broader community.

ELN

This week, the Fedora ELN SIG held its weekly meeting, focusing on a review of their current work board. Key discussion points included ongoing work on the fedora-release package, referencing a specific pull request and a related issue. The SIG also discussed improvements to tracking ELN builds as detailed in issue #214.

Atomic

This week, the Fedora Atomic Initiative meeting covered administrative planning, reviewed bootc and fedora-coreos adoption graphs, and discussed technical details like the potential use of chunkah in fedora-bootc images. The team also planned for a more interactive video call for the following week to facilitate deeper discussions.

A new forum discussion was started seeking community input on adapting the Fedora-downstream-hardening package for immutable variants like Kinoite and Silverblue. The conversation explores the best methods for managing firewall rules and kernel parameters on a read-only filesystem, providing an opportunity for contributors with experience in these areas to help shape the security tool's development.

Decisions

  • A video call will be held next week on Google Meet to allow for more in-depth discussion. An agenda and calendar invite will be shared in the bootc Matrix channel.

CoreOS

This week's activity centered on the community project "Pyromaniac", a tool designed to enhance Fedora CoreOS by enabling modular and declarative server configurations. The project's author announced an update to the tool, highlighting more sophisticated command-line argument parsing in the latest release.

For those interested in contributing or getting started with the tool, a new example deployment is now available to serve as a template and source of inspiration. The project continues to seek beta testers and contributors to help build out libraries for common configuration tasks.

ARM

This week, the ARM SIG received an announcement for the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, scheduled for Monday, April 13th. The purpose of the meeting is to review four proposed blockers and two proposed freeze exceptions for the Final release. Contributors were encouraged to review and vote on the bugs ahead of the meeting to help shorten the discussion time.

Alternative Images

The Alternative Images SIG held its weekly meeting on April 9. The main topics of discussion were a review of the "Latest News" and an "Open Floor" session, which allowed attendees to bring up other subjects for discussion.

Cloud

This week, the Cloud SIG held its weekly meeting to sync up on several important initiatives. The team reviewed the ongoing work to update the Vagrant images and discussed the upcoming, project-wide migration from Pagure to Forgejo. They also checked the status of the Cloud Edition deliverables against the Fedora 44 release schedule.

For those looking to get involved, a call was made for cloud-based talk submissions to DevConf.us. There is specific interest in collaborating with contributors on topics related to using quadlets on Fedora Cloud.

Containers

This week, activity centered on a forum discussion about Fedora bootc images published with Konflux on quay.io. It was observed that these images lack a "latest" tag, which requires users to explicitly specify an architecture tag (e.g., amd64, arm64) to pull an image with tools like Podman. The author proposed improving the repository's directory structure to better organize images by architecture. This discussion presents an opportunity for contributors to provide feedback on how Fedora's bootable container images are structured and published.

Security

This week's main activity centered on a forum discussion about adapting the Fedora-downstream-hardening package for immutable variants like Kinoite and Silverblue. The developer encountered challenges with firewalld configurations and applying kernel settings on a read-only filesystem. Following community feedback, the approach was changed from modifying specific firewall rules to setting a stricter default zone, which simplifies the process and ensures compatibility across both mutable and immutable systems. Progress was made, with a new version ready for further testing.

The weekly security-sig meeting was an open floor for discussion, where attendees reviewed the current open tickets in the main Security Forge and the Security Docs Forge.

Decisions

  • The Fedora-downstream-hardening package will now harden the system's firewall by changing the default firewalld zone to a stricter one (e.g., public). This decision was made to better support immutable variants and simplify the implementation.

MinGW

A discussion concluded this week regarding the plan to update the mingw-libsoup package. The proposal, originally made in March by Sandro Mani, is to perform a direct, in-place update from version 2.74.3 to 3.6.6. This major version bump is motivated by the need to address numerous unpatched CVEs in the older version. This week, the plan received approval, clearing the way for the update to proceed. The dependent packages, mingw-libosinfo and mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, are not expected to be negatively impacted.

Go

The Go SIG held a brief meeting this week, focusing on the group's infrastructure. The main topic was the potential migration from Pagure to Forgejo, which would also include migrating the golist tool. An upstream Go development discussion was also shared during the meeting. The primary outcome was a decision to investigate the feasibility of this migration, which presents an opportunity for contributors interested in the group's tooling and infrastructure to get involved.

Decisions

  • An action was assigned to explore the migration of the group's infrastructure from Pagure to Forgejo, including the golist tool.

Haskell

This week in the Haskell SIG, Jens-Ulrik Petersen announced the upcoming retirement of the ghc-pcre-light and ghc-regex-pcre packages from Rawhide. This change is a direct result of the underlying pcre library, which these packages depend on, being removed from Rawhide. The more modern pcre2 library remains available.

Decisions

Perl

This week's activity in the Perl SIG centered on routine maintenance and updating of various Perl module packages. Several pull requests were opened and promptly merged to bump version numbers for modules including perl-DBD-Pg, perl-XML-Parser, perl-Locale-Codes, and perl-DateTime-Format-ISO8601. Additionally, a previously opened pull request to add Cassandra support to perl-Apache-Session-Browseable was revisited and merged. All discussions were related to these package updates, indicating a focus on keeping the Perl ecosystem current within the distribution.

Decisions

The following pull requests were merged, updating their respective packages:

Python

This week, the Python SIG discussed packaging enhancements and guideline clarifications. An announcement for pyproject-rpm-macros 1.19.0 introduced a new -d option for the %pyproject_buildrequires and %pyproject_wheel macros. This feature simplifies spec files by allowing packagers to specify a build directory directly, avoiding the need for pushd/popd commands. A separate thread discussed how to handle .dist-info metadata for a Python application migrating its build system to Meson. The guidance provided was that for applications that are not standard pip-installable packages, including this metadata is not strictly required, even if files are installed into Python's sitelib. This highlighted a potential grey area in the packaging guidelines that may be clarified in the future.

Other Discussions

  • A discussion was started about replacing mcelog with rasdaemon by default for hardware monitoring. The original poster argued that rasdaemon is more modern and actively maintained. A response noted that neither package is installed by default, questioning the need for a change.
  • A user shared an AI-generated analysis of their boot sequence, which identified several issues including irqbalance errors, a race condition with systemd-sysctl, and warnings from unset environment variables in systemd units. The community provided feedback on the suggested fixes, questioning a proposal to add modules to the initramfs and pointing out a likely AI "hallucination" regarding systemd syntax.
  • In the ongoing discussion about the Outreachy 32 Fedora Guide, which provides a step-by-step process for applicants interested in the SLM/LLM project, a new message was posted thanking another contributor.
  • The topic Navigating the Fedora community, a guide for newcomers explaining the purpose of different Fedora websites like the Fedora Accounts System, Fedora Forge, and Fedora Discussion, saw continued interaction with a new thank-you post this week.
  • As part of an Outreachy task, a contributor posted a detailed comparison of various OCR engines like Tesseract, EasyOCR, and RapidOCR. The findings covered language support, platform compatibility, and performance, concluding that for historical manuscripts, the font style has a greater impact on accuracy than the OCR engine's language support itself.
  • A discussion was initiated to explore if Ramalama makes AI "boring" by simplifying the process of running models locally. The post explains that Ramalama is a command-line tool that treats AI models like containers, discusses its use with various registries, and touches upon controlling model hallucinations with temperature settings.
  • A user shared a fix for a memory crash (std::bad_alloc) in the Docling tool that occurred during batch processing of PDF files. The issue was traced to a single complex PDF with large tables, and the workaround was to process that file individually. The thread also included advice on installing and using the tool within a Fedora environment.
  • It was announced that the migration of the compose-tracker and failed-composes repositories from Pagure to Fedora's Forgejo instance was completed. The old Pagure repositories were set to read-only.
  • Other topics discussed this week include a training session on Z Architecture, a linking issue with static Rust libraries and libc, a call for testing on an F44 blocker related to gnome-initial-setup on NVIDIA hardware, and a major effort to introduce OpenSSL 4.0 in Rawhide which was temporarily reverted due to issues with co-installability, file conflicts, and incorrect versioning of the pre-release package.

New contributor introductions

Package updates

  • A packager announced an update to Monkey's Audio Codec (mac) that includes an SONAME bump and plans to rebuild its dependency.
  • An imminent SONAME bump for LibRaw was announced to fix a CVE, with a list of dependent packages that will be rebuilt in a side tag.
  • An unannounced SONAME bump in the libcpuinfo package was reported to have caused broken dependencies in Rawhide. The discussion highlighted that this could have been avoided by following packaging guidelines for listing shared libraries.
  • After a packager missed a SONAME bump in a qwt update, they announced they would rebuild the broken dependencies.
  • In the thread for the fmt library SONAME bump, the new version was built in a side tag and a request was made for a provenpackager to rebuild the 68 affected packages. It was also noted that spdlog would need an update to handle an ABI break.
  • A packager who updated xapian-core to version 2.0.0, breaking dependencies, asked for guidance. The community explained the correct procedure: use a side tag to rebuild all dependencies before submitting the group of packages as a single update.

Orphaning packages

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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