From April 13 to April 19

Across the project, the overwhelming focus was on the final stages of the Fedora 44 release cycle. Following a Go/No-Go meeting, the release was delayed due to outstanding blocker bugs, primarily related to the installer. This decision triggered a widespread effort across many teams—including Quality, Releng, Workstation, KDE, Server, and ARM—to issue new release candidates and conduct intensive community testing and validation to resolve the blocking issues. While dealing with the immediate release, several groups also began planning for the future. A significant change proposal for Fedora 45 to build x86-64-v3 packages was a major topic for FESCo and ELN. Concurrently, FESCo also managed a significant issue in Rawhide by deciding to revert the disruptive OpenSSL 4.0 update to allow for better preparation. Other teams concentrated on community engagement, such as planning for Flock 2026, and refining internal processes like packaging guidelines and infrastructure automation.

Announcements

This week's main news concerns the Fedora 44 release. After a Go/No-Go meeting on April 16, the final release was declared a NO-GO due to outstanding blocker bugs. The new target release date is April 28, 2026. A correction was issued for the time of the next blocker review meeting, which is now scheduled for Monday, April 20th. Looking ahead, a change proposal for Fedora 45 was announced to build packages for the x86-64-v3 microarchitecture, which would improve performance on modern hardware.

The weekly community update detailed the ongoing work that led to these events, with the QE team focused on F44 final validation and blocker resolution. The update also covered progress on the migration to Forgejo, including new runners and automation; the F44 rebuild for the RISC-V architecture; routine maintenance and security fixes from the Infrastructure and EPEL teams; and the UX team's design work for the Flock 2026 conference.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held a significant meeting where the primary topic was the reconsideration of the OpenSSL 4.0 change in Rawhide. Due to ongoing issues, the committee decided to undo the change by untagging OpenSSL 4.0 and related builds, and appointed a shepherd to help the maintainers get the packaging in order for a future attempt. Other decisions included an update to the nonresponsive maintainer process and an approved exception to update neovim and libtree-sitter in Fedora 43 and 44.

In the forums, a major new Change Proposal for Fedora 45 was introduced to build x86-64-v3 packages alongside the existing baseline packages to improve performance on modern hardware. The ensuing discussion raised important questions about the impact on infrastructure resources, tooling support in DNF and COPR, and the need to support users on older hardware. Additionally, an update was posted to the older aarch64 automatic DTB selection change with a link to new, detailed installation instructions for Fedora 44 on arm64 laptops.

Decisions

  • The request to handle a nonresponsive maintainer was approved.
  • An update to the nonresponsive maintainer process to account for invalid email addresses was approved.
  • An exception to update libtree-sitter and neovim in Fedora 44 and 43 was approved, with a provision to allow rizin and its dependents to exclude s390x builds until they are fixed.
  • Regarding the OpenSSL 4.0 change, FESCo approved a four-step plan to undo the change in Rawhide. This includes untagging openssl4 and dependent builds, rebuilding missing packages, adding new provides to OpenSSL v3 packages, and setting up a COPR for further development.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee held a meeting to discuss the proposal to move to a new forge. In forum discussions, a user proposed changing the default confirmation for dnf install to 'yes'. While other contributors noted the potential risks, they also provided a local configuration workaround and suggested that this change request should be filed with the upstream dnf5 project.

Another significant discussion centered on the Pinta package being outdated in the Fedora repositories. It was clarified that updating the package is blocked because newer versions require network access during the build process to fetch dependencies, which is a violation of Fedora's packaging guidelines. This highlights an ongoing packaging challenge for applications with certain build systems.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

During the Mindshare meeting on April 16th, several key community announcements were made. The schedule for Flock 2026 is now live, and the community is invited to nominate contributors for the Mentor and Contributor Recognition 2026 awards. Additionally, annual Code of Conduct reports for 2023 through 2025 have been published, offering insights into community health. The committee also discussed several event support tickets, approving a small budget for swag at Flisol Blumenau 2026, while deferring a decision on the Nerdearla event pending more information. A discussion on providing tablecloths for events in EMEA and APAC resulted in an action item to create a guide for self-producing event materials.

Decisions

  • The request for a Fedora Booth and Speaker Participation at Nerdearla cannot be voted on until an event owner is identified, a wiki page is created, and a budget proposal is submitted.
  • A budget of approximately $50 USD was conditionally approved for swag at Flisol Blumenau 2026. The approval is contingent on receiving a confirmed timeline for local swag production and an outline of the planned "Fedora & AI" keynote.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Ambassadors

This week, the Ambassadors discussed an idea for a shared "Linux Desktop" booth at FrOSCon 2026 featuring Fedora, Debian, and openSUSE. The proposal, prompted by recent discussions in Europe about switching to Linux, was met with general interest. The conversation covered next steps, such as finding volunteers and seeking official support from the Mindshare Committee. It was also noted that coordination should happen within the existing Fedora FrOSCon planning channel to avoid duplicating efforts. Logistical questions were raised regarding how the shared space would be managed to ensure adequate room for all three distributions.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Diversity & Inclusion

The weekly diversity-team meeting was canceled due to low attendance. Participants were instead directed to engagement opportunities in the Fedora Mentor Summit. A significant forum discussion was initiated about improving the Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD) interviews. The conversation centered on making the interviews less templated and more personalized to better showcase contributors as individuals. The goal is to create more compelling human-interest stories that could improve contributor retention and make the project more welcoming to newcomers, including younger people. The thread also briefly touched on the idea of featuring user stories and the age requirement for a Fedora Account.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week's focus was heavily on the upcoming Fedora 44 release, with two release candidates, RC-1.2 and RC-1.3, being made available for community testing. A significant testing effort was requested for a gnome-initial-setup hang on NVIDIA hardware, which appears to be resolved in the latest builds thanks to community feedback and developer investigation. Another call for testing was made to investigate issues with encrypted installations on certain modern laptops. Opportunities for contribution were highlighted with the announcement of the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting. Additionally, the agenda for the next Workstation Working Group meeting was revised to focus on a Fedora Magazine article, GNOME Software updates, and establishing a rotating chair for the group.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week's focus was heavily on the upcoming Fedora 44 release, with announcements for Release Candidate 1.2 and RC-1.3 calling for community testing. A specific request was made to test encrypted installations to investigate potential graphics issues at the LUKS passphrase screen. Contributors are also invited to the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting.

A significant issue arose for Fedora 43 users: the update to KDE Gear 26.04 is currently blocked due to a dependency on a new major version of gpgme, which conflicts with Fedora's stable release update policy. Various solutions are being explored, but for now, the update is on hold. Additionally, a discussion continued regarding feedback on the bug reporting workflow, with clarifications on how KDE's DrKonqi and Fedora's ABRT reporting tools are intended to coexist.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The main focus for the Server group this week was the upcoming Fedora 44 release. During the weekly meeting, the team discussed release testing, the status of various Ansible projects, and the idea of authoring a "Beginners Guide to Fedora Server". In the wider community, announcements were made for two Fedora 44 release candidates, RC-1.2 and RC-1.3, calling for contributor help with validation testing. A specific request was made for testing encrypted installations to investigate potential blocker bugs related to graphics at the LUKS passphrase screen.

Decisions

  • John and Jocelyn will take over the chair for an Ansible topic in the next fedora-server meeting.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team held its regular daily standups and its main weekly meeting, focusing on ticket reviews and planning. Key announcements included that the Fedora 44 final freeze is in effect and that team member nirik will be out until April 27th. The team also began refining older tickets from the backlog. On the mailing list, automated notifications were sent to administrators of Communishift projects, reminding them that their projects will be disabled and deleted one month after the next Fedora release as part of the standard post-release process.

Two significant discussions took place on the forums. A new topic was started proposing a plan to support automation with FAS authentication using the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant, which would allow for more secure, self-service automation for contributors. Additionally, a heated discussion continued regarding the quality and reliability of a public mirror in South Korea. Users reported persistent technical issues and questioned the operator's practices, while the operator denied the claims, leading to a broader community conversation with more evidence and perspectives being shared.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Releng

This week's activity for the Releng group centered on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 final release. The weekly meeting covered scheduled tasks and reviewed a few specific tickets. The most significant event was the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, where several proposed blockers were evaluated and a number of freeze exceptions were approved to incorporate important fixes for bugs and CVEs. A community discussion also highlighted that the F44 release schedule may need updating.

Contributors are encouraged to participate in the next Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting on April 20th. You can review and vote on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions ahead of time to help streamline the process.

Decisions

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

  • Rejected as Final Blockers:

    • #2455855: Storage editor fails to prevent mounting btrfs / subv over /home subv (Accepted as Freeze Exception).
    • #2456353: flatpak-1.17.4 update, as the associated CVEs were rated 'Moderate'.
    • #2457639: The background logo is too transparent.
    • #2456896: Raspberry Pi 4 KDE fails to boot into GUI, deemed likely a hardware-specific issue.

  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exceptions:

    • #2455855: Storage editor footgun.
    • #2457573: KDE Frameworks 6.25.0 + Plasma 6.6.4 update.
    • #2456893: CVE fix for nix.
    • #2455362: xdg-desktop-portal opening wrong initial directory.
    • #2457805: Background Apps missing in GNOME 50.
    • #2456557: CVE fix for LibRaw.

Learn more about the Releng team.

Quality

This week's focus was the Fedora 44 release cycle. Following a blocker review meeting and the official F44 Final Go/No-Go meeting, the decision was made to delay the release due to several outstanding blocker bugs, primarily related to the Anaconda installer. In response, two new release candidates, RC-1.2 and RC-1.3, were released for community testing to help resolve these issues.

The main opportunity for contributor engagement is testing the new Fedora 44 release candidates to ensure all blockers are resolved before the next Go/No-Go meeting. A specific call was made for testing encrypted installations due to reports of graphics issues on certain hardware. On a positive note, community testing confirmed that a long-standing bug causing gnome-initial-setup to hang on NVIDIA hardware appears to be resolved in the latest builds. The weekly Quality meeting also mentioned a potential test day for an upcoming Podman release.

Decisions

At the F44 Final Go/No-Go meeting and the F44 Blocker Review meeting, the following decisions were made:

  • Fedora 44 Release:

    • Fedora Linux 44 Final was declared a NO-GO for the April 21st target date.
    • The release is postponed, with the new target date set for Tuesday, 2026-04-28.
    • The next Go/No-Go meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 2026-04-23.

  • Accepted Blocker Bugs:

    • 2458907: Installation failure in Anaconda.
    • 2458901: Anaconda crash when rescanning an incomplete spanned btrfs volume.

  • Rejected Blocker Bugs:

    • 2457333: Corrupted Grub environment block.
    • 2441941: Graphics issue when typing LUKS password on Dell XPS 13 Plus.
    • 2458899: Broken Realtek Wi-Fi chip, deemed not widespread enough.
    • 2455855: Storage editor issue with btrfs subvolumes (accepted as a Freeze Exception instead).
    • 2456353: A flatpak update was rejected as a blocker because the associated CVEs were not rated 'Important'.
    • 2457639: Background logo transparency was deemed not serious enough to block the release.
    • 2456896: Raspberry Pi 4 KDE boot failure, considered a hardware-specific issue.

  • Accepted Freeze Exceptions:

    • Several updates were accepted as Freeze Exceptions to address various bugs and CVEs, including updates for KDE Frameworks, nix, xdg-desktop-portal, and LibRaw.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

This week, the Design team held its weekly meeting to discuss several ongoing projects. Key topics included clarifying ownership of a Fedora logo transparency bug, providing layout feedback for a poster design, and reviewing initial vector concepts for the Flock conference T-shirt, which were positively received. In forum discussions, a contributor asked if the F45 Wallpaper Process was on track for its community feedback phase, which was scheduled for this week.

Decisions

  • It was determined that the Fedora logo transparency bug is an issue within the Workstation group's extension. The Design team's responsibility is to provide the developers with the correctly styled SVG logo file, including the proper color and opacity.

Learn more about the Design team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization team held its weekly meeting to review ongoing work. Key topics included tracking font-related bugs, preparing for Fedora 44 changes, and discussing the potential migration to Fedora Forge. For contributors, a new translation opportunity was announced on the mailing list: the rhc command-line tool, a new component targeting RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS Stream, is now available for translation on Weblate. The team also continues to triage bugs for Fedora 42.

Decisions

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

COPR

This week, the COPR community's attention was drawn to a user-reported issue on the mailing list. Malte Kiefer is experiencing persistent build failures in his maltekiefer/fedora-extras project. Every build fails with an error indicating the copr_base repository is never ready, preventing builds from starting. Kiefer has already attempted common troubleshooting steps, such as regenerating the repositories and recreating the project, without success. This has led him to suspect a backend infrastructure problem, and he is seeking help from the COPR maintainers to investigate the issue.

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

The EPEL group held its weekly meeting to discuss ongoing business and open issues. For those looking to contribute, the team highlighted the open steering committee issues and pending documentation pull requests as areas needing attention and review. The meeting also included an open floor discussion for general topics.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN team held one meeting this week, focusing on several significant future changes. Discussions continued on the plan for the upcoming OpenSSL 4.0 transition, with a related FESCo ticket opened for follow-up. The group also reviewed the ongoing effort to introduce x86-64-v3 microarchitecture support and discussed changes to the fedora-release package, including pull requests for branding updates and other adjustments. Other topics included bootc integration.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week, an older forum discussion regarding the challenges of using systemctl within a toolbox container was revived. The core issue, originally raised in 2021, is that toolbox containers do not use systemd as their init system (PID 1), preventing systemd services and timers from functioning as they would on a standard system. A user renewed interest in the topic this week, asking for updates with the specific goal of running Docker inside a toolbox. No new solutions or workarounds were provided in the thread.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team held their weekly meeting to review the Fedora 44 release schedule and discuss using afterburn to generate NetworkManager connection profile configurations. The team decided to proceed with a pilot of this approach on the Hetzner platform. In the forums, the author of "Pyromaniac", a tool for modular CoreOS configurations, announced an updated release with improved argument parsing and a new example deployment, offering an opportunity for community testing and contribution.

Decisions

  • A pilot program will be initiated to use afterburn for generating NetworkManager connection profile configurations on the Hetzner platform, as agreed upon in the Fedora CoreOS meeting.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The IoT group held its weekly Fedora IoT Working Group Meeting, which focused on reviewing the development status of the various Fedora IoT editions. The team examined the latest builds and OpenQA test results for the stable Fedora IoT 43, the upcoming Fedora IoT 44, and the development branch, Fedora IoT 45 (Rawhide). A standing item on the agenda was the review of open issues and general bugs, which remains the primary place for contributors to engage with the team and help improve the distribution. No major decisions were taken during this status update meeting.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

This week, the group's focus was on the final stages of the Fedora 44 release cycle. Two release candidates, RC-1.2 and RC-1.3, were announced, with a call for community members to help with validation testing. A specific request was made for users to test encrypted installations, as potential blocker bugs related to display issues at the LUKS passphrase prompt have been identified on some hardware. In preparation for the final release, a Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting was announced for the following week to review proposed blockers and freeze exceptions.

Learn more about the ARM team.

kernel

This week, the Fedora Kernel team announced that the os-build branch in the kernel-ark has been rebased. This is a recurring maintenance task performed with every new upstream kernel release to keep the patch set clean and current. As a result of this rebase, contributors with pending merge requests are required to rebase their work and repush their changes. This process, while causing a minor inconvenience every few months, is crucial for maintaining transparency and ensuring that Fedora's patches are easy to manage and apply to other trees.

Decisions

  • The os-build branch will continue its cadence of being rebased with every upstream kernel release.

Learn more about the kernel team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V SIG held its weekly meeting, focusing primarily on the progress of the Fedora 44 release for the architecture. Key discussion points included the status of the F44 package rebuilds, the strategy around creating "Omni kernels" to support a wider range of hardware, and the process for generating official release composes with pungi. The conversation centered on tracking ongoing work and coordinating efforts to prepare for the upcoming release.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security SIG held its weekly meeting with an open floor for discussion. During the meeting, it was noted that there are several open tickets available for contributors in the main Security Forge and the Security Docs Forge. Separately, a discussion was started on the SELinux mailing list regarding missing policy rules in the drbd-selinux package that are causing denials.

Learn more about the Security team.

Perl

This week's activity in the Perl group consisted entirely of routine package maintenance handled via pull requests on the perl-devel mailing list. Several key modules were updated to their latest upstream versions, including perl-Crypt-SMIME (to 0.33), perl-IO-Stty (to 0.08), perl-libwww-perl (to 6.82), perl-Module-Manifest-Skip (to 0.24), and perl-XML-Parser (to 2.57). These updates incorporated bug fixes and new package tests. A notable discussion point was the addition of a build dependency on openssl >= 3.0.0 for perl-Crypt-SMIME starting with version 0.32. Additionally, perl-CGI-Struct was updated to use the modern SPDX license format, aligning with broader Fedora project goals. All proposed pull requests were reviewed and merged.

Decisions

  • perl-CGI-Struct: The package's license identifier was migrated to SPDX format.
  • perl-Crypt-SMIME: The package was updated first to version 0.32 and then to 0.33. The 0.32 update required adding a build dependency on openssl >= 3.0.0.
  • perl-IO-Stty: Updated to version 0.08 to fix a bug (rhbz#2449112) and add package tests.
  • perl-libwww-perl: Updated to version 6.82.
  • perl-Module-Manifest-Skip: Updated to version 0.24, along with a fix for patching and a correction to the RPM release number.
  • perl-XML-Parser: Updated to version 2.57 to address a bug (rhbz#2451091).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Ruby

This week's activity in the Ruby SIG centered on a discussion about packaging rubygem-cucumber-messages. Following a decision by the Fedora Packaging Committee to allow an exception for this package, a broader proposal has been made to loosen the source requirements for all RubyGems. This represents a potential shift in packaging policy, and contributors are invited to review and comment on the proposed guideline changes.

Decisions

  • The Fedora Packaging Committee approved an exception to the packaging guidelines, allowing rubygem-cucumber-messages to be built as a subpackage of cucumber-messages.

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Other Discussions

Orphaning packages

  • The Quality team orphaned several Python packages, including python-aniso8601, python-flask-caching, and testcloud. In response, Brandon Nielsen, the upstream developer of python-aniso8601, offered to take over its maintenance and Kevin Fenzi stepped up to be their sponsor.
  • Marcin Juszkiewicz filed a series of non-responsive maintainer tickets for packages with pull requests that were several months old. This led to a broader discussion on maintainer responsiveness and the appropriate use of the policy.
    • For the gtk2 package, tickets were filed against mclasen, tdawson, rhughes, mkasik, alexl, and rstrode. The PR was eventually merged by a proven packager. The subsequent discussion highlighted frustration over the long delay and the difficulty for packagers to remove themselves from ACLs of packages they no longer maintain.
    • A ticket was filed for spot regarding the julius package. Adam Williamson noted that flagging a very active contributor for not responding to a Pagure PR was unreasonable, as many prefer other workflows. Marcin apologized for overreacting.
    • Tickets were filed for mystro256 for four packages. The maintainer, Jeremy Newton, responded, apologized for missing the notifications, and agreed to review the PRs.
    • A ticket was filed for aekoroglu for the arm-compute-library package, which was subsequently merged by another packager.
    • A ticket was filed for julian8628 for the ursa-major package, which had a 4-month-old PR with no comments.
    • An inquiry was made about maintainer marcdeop, as emails to their FAS address have been bouncing, making them unreachable.

Package updates

  • The OpenSSL 4.0 update landed in Rawhide along with a compatibility openssl3 package. However, it caused widespread build failures and disruption, particularly due to the removal of the ENGINE API. After significant feedback from maintainers about the lack of impact assessment and communication, FESCo decided to revert the update from Rawhide to allow for better preparation. A subsequent request was made to run a mass rebuild in a side tag or COPR to properly assess the impact. Dmitry Belyavskiy also sent a warning to developers to remove engine support from their packages as soon as possible.
  • Orion Poplawski announced the process of updating hdf5 to version 2.1.1 and netcdf to 4.10.0 in Rawhide. The updates were built in a side tag due to the large number of dependencies and have since been submitted to Bodhi.
  • Julian Sikorski updated the header-only library asio to version 1.36.0 in Rawhide. He noted that 6 of its 12 dependencies fail to build with the new version and that the update was pushed early to give maintainers plenty of time to fix their packages before the Fedora 45 release.

New contributor introductions

  • Evelyn Park introduced herself to the community. A long-time FOSS user with a background in social sciences and nonprofit administration, she is looking to contribute in a non-technical capacity and is interested in community engagement work.

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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