From Feb 16 to Feb 22

The primary focus this week was the Fedora 44 release cycle, which reached a significant milestone with the Beta freeze and code complete deadline. This prompted many groups, including FESCo, Quality, and various SIGs, to review change proposals, process blocker bugs, and prepare for the upcoming Beta release. A common thread across several teams, such as Mindshare, EPEL, and Design, was the ongoing migration of repositories and issue trackers to the new Forgejo instance. Additionally, package maintenance and cleanup were prominent activities, highlighted by the final push to retire the deprecated python-mock package, the retirement of several long-term failing packages, and a notable FESCo-initiated discussion about the responsibilities of package maintainers, particularly concerning the use of Bugzilla auto-responders.

Table of contents:

📣 Announcements

This week saw significant progress in the Fedora 44 release cycle, with the Beta freeze and code complete deadline taking place on February 17. This milestone also marked the Bodhi updates-testing activation point and the Software String freeze. In other development news, the switch to Packit as the default CI for Fedora dist-git has been completed. Package cleanup efforts are also moving forward, with the removal of the deprecated python-mock package in its final stretch and a list of long-term FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) packages scheduled for retirement in March.

The Community Update for Week 8 detailed progress from various teams, including Infrastructure, Release Engineering, QE, and Forgejo, highlighting the ongoing migration from pagure.io and the start of blocker bug reviews for F44. The community is also invited to participate in the Podman 5.8 Test Week, running from February 27 to March 6, to help test new features like faster parallel pulls and automatic database creation.

FESCO

This week, FESCO held its weekly meeting to review several change proposals and assess the status of incomplete changes for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to reviewing these incomplete changes, resulting in several being rejected or postponed to a future release due to being late or incomplete. A key topic of discussion was the issue of Fedora GNOME package maintainers using auto-responders in Bugzilla, which led to a decision to open a broader asynchronous discussion on maintainer responsibilities versus current FESCo policy. This discussion explores the conflict between the expectation for maintainers to monitor bugs and the practice of automatically directing reporters to upstream trackers.

In forum discussions, an update was posted that the change to enforce signature checking by default is now live in Rawhide. Additionally, the proposal to restrict ptrace by default has been formally submitted to FESCo for a vote.

Decisions Taken

  • The contingency mechanism for the NodeJS / NPM swappable alternatives Change Proposal for Fedora 44 was REJECTED.
  • It was agreed that the topic of package maintainer responsibilities, specifically regarding monitoring Fedora bug reports, will be discussed asynchronously.
  • The "Unification of boot loader updates, phase 1" Change Proposal was REJECTED for Fedora 44.
  • The Erlang 27 Change was REJECTED for Fedora 44.
  • The KTLS implementation for GnuTLS Change was REJECTED for Fedora 44.
  • The mkosi-initrd Change was moved to Fedora 45.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare committee held its bi-weekly meeting and published a summary on the forum. A key topic was the migration of the committee's tickets and docs repositories to Fedora's new Forgejo instance, with a target completion date of February 27. The committee also reviewed two event funding requests for Q2: one for snacks at 20 Sesja Linuksowa in Poland and another for accommodation at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage in Germany. Other discussions included a readout from the Fedora Council Strategy Summit, the recent availability of Fedora in Syria, and a reminder for FOSDEM and DevConf India attendees to submit their event reports.

In a related forum discussion concerning FOSSASIA 2026, it was clarified that due to recent event spending in the APAC region, the project would not be funding contributor travel to the conference this year, with the hope of establishing a larger presence in the future.

Decisions Taken

  • The Mindshare committee's "home" and "docs" repositories will be migrated from GitLab to Forgejo by February 27, 2026.
  • A ticket will be created with the Design Team to produce a printable template for acknowledging Fedora's sponsorship of refreshments at small events.
  • The committee will not fund contributor travel to FOSSASIA 2026 due to budget allocation for other recent events in the APAC region.

Ambassadors

This week's discussion for the Ambassadors focused on the potential for a Fedora Project presence at the FOSSASIA 2026 Summit. Contributor Yashwanth Rathakrishnan expressed interest in representing Fedora at the conference. However, a final decision was made not to sponsor travel for this event. The reasoning provided was the recent large-scale presence at DevConf.IN 2026 and the desire to ensure a more regular representation of the community at various events throughout the year, rather than concentrating resources on a few. The group will explore what FOSSASIA has to offer this year with the possibility of a larger presence in the future.

Decisions Taken

  • The Fedora Project will not be able to fund contributors to travel to the FOSSASIA 2026 conference.

Workstation / GNOME

This week's discussions focused on package maintainer responsibilities and user experience. A major topic, brought forward by FESCo, was the conflict between package maintainer responsibilities and the use of auto-responders on unmonitored Bugzilla components for GNOME packages. The debate focused on whether maintainers should be required to triage all bugs or if redirecting users upstream is a valid strategy for high-volume components. Another significant user-experience issue was highlighted regarding the lack of GUI feedback during background akmod builds on reboot, which can make the system appear to hang. Additionally, an older thread about the risks of nodatacow on Btrfs RAID1 was revived, with users expressing concern about applications enabling it by default. Announcements were also made for the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting and the next Workstation Working Group Meeting.

KDE

This week's main event was the release of KDE Plasma 6.6.0 and Frameworks 6.23 to Fedora 43, which prompted discussions on testing the new Plasma Login Manager. However, the update was not smooth for everyone. One user started a discussion to request that major Plasma updates be tied to new Fedora releases after experiencing broken plugins and instability. This led to a clarification of Fedora's specific update policy for KDE, which allows for such in-release upgrades. The update also introduced a bug causing maliit-keyboard to crash; this was acknowledged as an accidental omission during the transition to Plasma Keyboard, and a fix was promptly pushed.

Separately, a user reported an issue where native KDE applications like Elisa and Dragon Player bypass the default Bluetooth audio sink on Fedora 43, a problem confirmed by another user. On the planning side, an announcement was made for the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting to be held on February 23rd.

Server

This week, the Server group held its weekly meeting where they discussed a draft proposal to update their governance rules and the status of Fedora 44 release testing, noting that the Beta Freeze has passed. On the forums, a discussion was revived regarding the risks of using nodatacow on Btrfs RAID1 configurations, with participants expressing concerns about potential data corruption due to the lack of a synchronization mechanism after unclean shutdowns. Mailing list activity was primarily logistical, including the meeting agenda and an announcement for the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting.

Decisions

  • The group agreed to adopt a more structured meeting routine, including assigning a moderator for each topic and ensuring discussions conclude with a clear wrap-up, agreement, or action item. It was also clarified that any member can use meetbot commands.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team entered the Fedora 44 Beta infrastructure freeze, a major event limiting changes to production environments. A notable exception was an approved freeze break request to fix incorrect update requirements in Bodhi. The ongoing migration to Forge was a key topic, particularly issues with pull requests in the Ansible repository that needed to be reopened. The team also discussed monitoring, investigating Zabbix alerts for bastion mail queues, and held a learning session on the Anubis proxy.

Daily standups covered ticket reviews, such as classifying #13156 as low priority and investigating #13155. In the forums, discussions included a user query about the best way to mirror codecs and another user successfully getting their Matrix account reactivated. The team also noted that many members would be away for a Red Hat recharge day on Friday, February 20.

Decisions Taken

  • A freeze break request to clean up the FedoraBranchedBodhi implementation and fix its current state was approved.

Releng

This week, the Releng team held its regular weekly meeting to review upcoming scheduled tasks for the Fedora 44 release and discuss open tickets. In forum discussions, an announcement was posted for the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting. A new topic was also initiated suggesting a smarter bandwidth prioritization for multiple downloads in DNF, which prompted a technical discussion on whether application-level scheduling could improve the user experience without interfering with TCP's built-in congestion control.

Quality

This week, the Quality team held its regular meeting to discuss the status of Fedora 44. Key updates included the landing of GNOME 50 and KDE/Plasma 6.6, and the recent conclusion of successful test days for both desktop environments. The team also reviewed the results of the GRUB Out-of-Memory fix verification test day. An important milestone was reached with the activation of the Fedora 44 Beta Freeze, meaning only packages fixing accepted blocker or freeze exception bugs will be included in Beta composes. A blocker review meeting was held to process these bugs.

Looking ahead, announcements were made for an upcoming Kernel 6.19 Test Week and the next blocker review meeting. A significant discussion also took place on the mailing list regarding the F44 installer hanging on slow machines, with debugging efforts underway.

Decisions

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

  • Bug 2438907 - A gnome-shell crash was accepted as a Beta Blocker.
  • Bug 2437985 - An issue requiring sudo permissions for VPN connections was accepted as a Beta Freeze Exception.
  • Bug 2440208 - A Plasma login issue on Kinoite was accepted as a Beta Freeze Exception.

Design

During the Fedora Design meeting on February 16, the team discussed their ongoing migration to Forgejo, noting that new tickets will be moved manually and a demo of the new structure is planned for the following week. They also reviewed brainstorming for the Fedora 45 wallpaper, which will be inspired by Alan Turing. A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to deciding on a new meeting platform.

Decisions Taken

  • The team agreed to move their weekly meetings from Jitsi to Google Meet, starting the following week, to utilize Gemini for automated note-taking.

The Legal team discussed a request from the Fedora Documentation team regarding a new beginner's guide. The discussion centered on whether it is permissible to include links or instructions for installing patent-encumbered software, such as multimedia codecs and NVIDIA drivers, from the third-party RPM Fusion repository. Concerns were raised about the appropriateness and legality of directing users to software that Fedora cannot distribute, with some members suggesting it could be seen as advising users to violate laws. No final decision was reached on this matter.

A separate, ongoing discussion about a non-allowed license in the antlr3 package concluded this week. It was confirmed that the LicenseRef-Unicode-legacy-source-code license is non-FOSS due to a restrictive use clause. Based on this advice, the package maintainer took action to resolve the issue.

Decisions Taken

  • In the antlr3 package, the C/C++ backend containing files with a non-allowed license will be disabled in future builds. The problematic source files will not be scrubbed from the source tarball but will no longer be built into the binary RPMs.

EPEL

The major event for EPEL this week was the completed migration of the steering committee's issue tracker from Pagure to the new forge.fedoraproject.org. This was formally announced and discussed during the weekly meeting, where a known issue with assigning tickets on the new platform was noted (issue #408). Looking ahead, an announcement was made for the upcoming EPEL 10.2 mass branching, and informal discussions about EPEL 11 took place at recent community events. Additionally, updated versions of ruff and uv were pushed to the EPEL 10 leading branch, and the openssl3 package for EPEL 8 was orphaned after no new maintainer came forward.

Decisions Taken

  • The EPEL steering committee issue tracker was officially migrated to forge.fedoraproject.org.
  • The openssl3 package in EPEL 8 was orphaned.
  • Updated versions of ruff and uv were pushed to stable for the EPEL 10 leading branch ahead of the scheduled branching.

ELN

The ELN group held one meeting this week, where the main topic of discussion was the potential for an "ELN Hyperscale" variant. This involved reviewing related work in CentOS Hyperscale and a kernel-ark merge request. The group also touched upon a dnf5 pull request and followed up on a previously discussed issue.

Decisions

  • Conan Kudo will outline the requirements needed to create an ELN Hyperscale variant.
  • SIG members were invited to file tickets with their "big ideas" for ELN to facilitate future discussions.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group held one meeting which focused on the use of bvck with Atomic Desktops, updates to the base-images repository, and an issue with integration tests for F44 base images that requires access to firestoreDB for logs. In forum activity, a seven-year-old topic regarding "Docker volume permission denied" received a new potential solution involving SELinux relabeling before being closed by a moderator due to its age.

Decisions

  • Hristo was tasked to open an upstream issue to ask about using bvck with Atomic Desktops and to create a related documentation tracker issue.

CoreOS

During the single Fedora CoreOS meeting this week, the primary discussion centered on the upcoming Podman v5.8.0 release and its risky automatic database migration from BoltDB to SQLite. The team strategized on how to safely introduce this change, agreeing to release it to the next stream first for a period of testing before it reaches the testing and stable streams. They also discussed the status of the Fedora 44 rebase following the Beta Freeze and planned a live video meeting for the following week to discuss a specific Ignition pull request.

Decisions Taken

  • The Podman 5.8.0 update will be released to the next stream first to allow for testing of the database migration.
  • The team will consult with Podman maintainers before deciding whether to ship the Podman 5.8.0 RPM in the next stream while it is still in Bodhi testing.
  • The request to add the kmscon package for Fedora 44 and newer was approved.

IoT

The IoT group held one meeting this week, focusing on the status of different Fedora releases. For Fedora 43 (Stable), OpenQA testing is performing well, with the exception of a known, long-standing aarch64 console issue tracked in issue #22. Fedora 44 has entered its Beta freeze, and its tests are also looking good despite an expected false failure. For Fedora 45 (Rawhide), discussions centered on an unusual OpenQA failure related to a version date check and potential key signature issues following a recent change, which is currently under investigation. Additionally, a plan was mentioned to review and close old issues in the tracker.

ARM

This week's activity on the ARM mailing list was light. An announcement was made for the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, scheduled for February 23rd, inviting community members to review and vote on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the Beta release.

Additionally, a discussion continued regarding CPU temperature monitoring on Raspberry Pi devices. The conversation included a follow-up question about whether a solution for the RPi 5 would also work on an RPi 4, which prompted a request for clarification.

RISC-V

During the week, the RISC-V group held one meeting focused on the status and future of the architecture within the Fedora project. The primary topics of discussion included reviewing the current state of RISC-V for the Fedora 43 release and engaging in forward-looking planning for the upcoming Fedora 44 and 45 releases. The meeting concluded with an open floor for any other business.

Go

This week, the Go group discussed a broken dependency chain affecting the mkcert package, as reported in the thread "golang-x-text > golang-x-tools > golang-x-telemetry > golang-cloud-google-cloudtasks > golang-google-grpc dependency". The issue was caused by the golang-google-grpc package being orphaned. The discussion concluded that instead of restoring the orphaned package, the mkcert package should be switched to use vendored dependencies, in line with the current Fedora policy for Go packages. A pull request to implement this fix was provided.

Decisions

Perl

This week's activity on the perl-devel mailing list consisted of package maintenance via pull requests. A pull request for perl-Syntax-Highlight-Engine-Kate was opened and quickly merged to update the package to version 0.15 and add tests. Another discussion revolved around a change to perl-DBD-MySQL to stop providing unversioned MySQL packages in RHEL. Following a brief exchange to clarify the wording in the commit message and changelog, this pull request was also merged.

Decisions

Python

The main discussion this week focused on the final steps to retire the deprecated python-mock package in favor of the standard library's unittest.mock. In the ongoing mailing list thread, "python-mock removal in the final stretch", it was highlighted that only a few pull requests remain open to complete the transition. Packages that are already failing to build for unrelated reasons will be skipped for now.

Decisions Taken

  • The remaining pull requests to remove python-mock usage will be merged within a week, using provenpackager privileges if the maintainers do not respond.
  • Once the pull requests are merged and a final check is done, the python-mock package will be retired.

Ruby

The main discussion this week revolved around the rubygems package, which was scheduled for retirement in March due to a long-standing "Fails to Build From Source" (FTBFS) issue. Mamoru TASAKA initiated the conversation by forwarding the retirement notice and proposing an update to fix the problem. After Vít Ondruch approved the plan, it was decided to update the package to version 4.0.6. This action will resolve the build failure and prevent the package from being retired, with the update planned before the Fedora 44 beta freeze.

Decisions Taken

  • The rubygems package will be updated to version 4.0.6 to fix the FTBFS issue and will not be retired.
  • Mamoru TASAKA will proceed with merging the pull request for the update.

Other Discussions

Package updates

  • Orion Poplawski announced an upcoming update of octave to version 11.1.0 in Rawhide. This is an API/soname bump, and all dependencies will be rebuilt in a side-tag.
  • Remi Collet gave a heads-up about a planned major update of mongo-c-driver to version 2 in Rawhide. This update involves significant API/ABI changes and will require a mass rebuild in a side tag.
  • Gwyn Ciesla announced an update to LibRaw 0.22.0, which includes a soname bump. After successfully building all consumer packages in a side tag, the plan was to merge it ahead of schedule.
  • The previously announced update of PDAL to version 2.10.0 in Rawhide, along with the rebuild of its dependencies, has been completed.
  • The update to Lua 5.5 in Rawhide was pushed directly without a full side-tag rebuild, causing breakages in packages like lmod and libreoffice. The libreoffice issue was traced to fonts-rpm-macros, and a fix is in progress.
  • In the discussion for the Pandas 3.x update proposal, it was clarified that dependent packages that fail to build will be handled by working with upstreams or Fedora maintainers. A Copr repository for testing is available.
  • A detailed discussion took place about updating the out-of-date mingw-boost package and the possibility of merging it into the main boost package to reduce long-term maintenance. While the maintainer created a proof-of-concept, a scratch build failed, indicating more work is needed to resolve build system issues.

Orphaning packages

New contributor introductions

  • Licia Seiker, a Software/DevOps engineer from South Korea with a long history of using Fedora, introduced herself and expressed interest in contributing to areas like atomic desktops and the Asahi kernel.
  • Emil (gmanka) introduced himself to the community. He is working on the pocketblue project for Fedora Mobility, has submitted his first package qbootctl for review, and is seeking sponsorship.

This summary has been AI-generated and then manually edited. If you see errors, please email aurelien@bompard.org or reach out to @abompard:fedora.im on Matrix, and they will be corrected. The original meeting logs are available here (make sure you select the right week). The original discussion topics are available here. The original mailing-list messages are available here.

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