From March 02 to March 08

Across the project, many groups are working on the ongoing migration of repositories and documentation from Pagure to the new Forgejo instance. Several teams are also beginning to plan for the next release, with new change proposals for Fedora 45 being introduced for features like a DRM Panic Frontend and IPv6-mostly support. The focus of this week, however, was squarely on the Fedora Linux 44 Beta release. The Quality, Release Engineering, Infrastructure, and Server teams all coordinated their efforts around testing and validating the Beta release candidates, which culminated in a successful Go/No-Go meeting and the announcement of a public release scheduled for Tuesday, March 10th, 2026.

📣 Announcements

This week's announcements confirmed that the Fedora Linux 44 Beta has been approved for release on Tuesday, March 10th, 2026. The Week 10 Community Update detailed progress from various teams, including Infrastructure, Release Engineering, QE, and Forgejo, with a focus on the Beta release candidates and ongoing migrations from Pagure. As part of this migration, Fedora Documentation translations will be unavailable starting March 4th. Additionally, a final reminder was issued for the Flock 2026 financial assistance application deadline on Sunday, March 8th, and a notice was sent regarding the upcoming retirement of packages that have failed to build for a long time.

Several change proposals for the future Fedora 45 release were also announced. One proposal is to deploy a web-based frontend for the DRM Panic feature, which would provide a user-friendly interface for understanding kernel panics and reporting bugs via QR codes. Another proposal aims to update the xmlsec library to version 1.3, a new, non-backward-compatible version with modern features. Finally, a change was proposed to enable support for IPv6-mostly networks in NetworkManager by default, allowing for better compliance with modern internet standards.

Council

This week, the Council's discussions centered on two significant proposals for Fedora's future. The first, "Evolving Trust: "Fedora Verified" Membership", introduces a new human-centric recognition tier to secure project governance, such as voting in elections. Initial feedback gathered at SCaLE 23x indicated that the proposed quantitative requirements (e.g., number of badges and groups) were too high and that a decentralized, peer-vouching system is strongly preferred over an elected committee. The conversation now seeks broader community input on refining these criteria and defining contributor "activity" for maintaining the status.

The second major topic was "A Modest Proposal: A Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process for Fedora", which outlines a structured path for experimental technologies from a "Sandbox" stage through "Curation" to full "Integration". This process aims to foster innovation while managing risk and ensuring the long-term sustainability of new features and services. The community is currently discussing the high-level structure, potential bureaucracy, infrastructure requirements, and the process for retiring projects that do not advance. Both topics are in the feedback-gathering stage.

FESCO

This week, FESCO held a significant and contentious meeting primarily focused on the proposal to filter Fedora Flatpaks on Atomic Desktops in favor of a subset of Flathub. Proponents argued for an improved user experience, while opponents raised concerns about deprioritizing Fedora's own content and the reliability of Flathub packages. Unable to reach a consensus, the committee deferred the topic for a future vote. The committee also reviewed the status of F44 changes, postponing three to Fedora 45. Other topics included the need for better Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) data for security tracking and a discussion about outdated documentation for primary vs. secondary architectures, which led to a new forum thread to address the issue.

On the forums, several new F45 Change Proposals were introduced, including updates for xmlsec, support for IPv6-Mostly networks, and a user-friendly Drm Panic Frontend. A significant new discussion was started by the Fedora Project Leader proposing a Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process to provide a structured path for experimental features from a "Sandbox" stage to full integration. Follow-up questions were also posted regarding the ongoing proposal to restrict ptrace by default.

Decisions Taken

• The change proposal Using Konflux for bootc-Based Artifacts was approved for Fedora 44.
• The F44 Change Proposal "ModernizeLiveMedia" was postponed to Fedora 45.
• The F44 Change Proposal "Package builds are expected to be reproducible" was postponed to Fedora 45.
• The F44 Change Proposal "Protobuf 5.x/6.x" was postponed to Fedora 45.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee's main focus was on the future home for packaging-related tools and the review of several proposals. In their meeting, which aligned with an ongoing mailing list discussion, the group discussed moving repositories like the Packaging Guidelines and FedoraReview to a new "packaging" organization on forge.fedoraproject.org. A new proposal was also introduced to add PURL/SBOM metadata to packages to help security teams reduce CVE false positives; the committee decided to first gather feedback from other groups before creating a policy.

Decisions Taken

• A ticket will be filed to request the creation of a "packaging" organization on forge.fedoraproject.org.
• PR #1525, a proposal for NodeJS license validation, was rejected in its current form as the implementation was considered not robust enough.
• PR #1521, related to NodeJS BuildRequires, was identified as obsolete and will be closed.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare group's activity centered around a CommOps meeting and two forum discussions. Key topics in the meeting included the announcement that the community health tool, Hatlas, is now functional, with a roadmap discussion planned for March 17th. The team also discussed migrating the Community Blog to Fedora Discussion to reduce editor burnout and brainstormed a unified, stack-like theme for new logos for Fedora Messaging, Datanommer, and Datagrepper. On the forums, planning for a Fedora presence at FOSSASIA 2026 continued with a contributor confirming their attendance, and new photos were shared from the Fedora 43 Release Party in Poland.

Decisions Taken

During the CommOps meeting, the following action items were assigned:

• @neil will follow up on the Fedora Discussion topic regarding the Community Blog migration to clarify next steps and see where help is needed.
• @jflory7 will summarize the meeting's creative ideas for the Fedora Messaging, Datanommer, and Datagrepper logos in the Design Team ticket #116.
• @mwinters will share the Design Team ticket #116 with the Data WG for their input.
• @mwinters will create a CommOps ticket to prepare for the Hatlas post-launch and roadmap discussion scheduled for the March 17th meeting.

Ambassadors

This week, discussion continued around organizing the Fedora Project's presence at FOSSASIA 2026. Samyak Jain announced their intention to represent Fedora at the event, focusing on community and release engineering topics. They are already in communication with Akashdeep Dhar to coordinate their efforts for the conference.

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, the Diversity & Inclusion team's main activity was their meeting on March 5th, with a summary also posted to the forum. Key discussions included celebrating Fedora's official availability in Syria as a significant inclusion win, updates on the Fedora Hatch at SCaLE 23x, and the temporary unavailability of documentation translations during a migration to Fedora Forge. A major topic of discussion was the potential impact of new age verification laws on the project, with concerns raised about privacy and harm to marginalized youth. Separately, a reminder was sent to volunteers for the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 to vote on a date for their first planning meeting.

Decisions Taken

• A new topic will be posted on the Fedora Discussion forum to recruit volunteers for the Week of Diversity 2026.
• A new ticket will be opened to formally discuss the DEI team's stance on implementing age verification in Fedora.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation Working Group held its meeting on March 3rd, where the main topic was the future of the ABRT command-line service. The service is largely ineffective due to an unmaintained retrace server and is known to cause shutdown stalls, but some members still see value in its functionality. The group also discussed the successful implementation of Packit for stable branches and noted a lack of enthusiasm from the Design team regarding changes to the wallpaper flow. In the forums, a discussion about switching the default Chinese input method to Rime continued with a post explaining customization options. Finally, an announcement was made for the next meeting on March 10, with topics set to include removing the background-logo extension and the future of Rust package maintenance.

Decisions Taken

• A decision on removing the remnants of the ABRT service was deferred for a couple of months to allow time to put out a call for new maintainers.

Server

This week, the Server SIG held its weekly meeting to discuss several ongoing topics. A primary focus was the testing required for the upcoming F44 release, with a corresponding mailing list post detailing the specific package changes needing validation, such as updates to MariaDB, LLVM, Ruby, and PHP. The team also reviewed progress on key projects, including "Integrating LocalKDC," "Streamlined backup & restore," and the development of Forge templates.

Decisions

• A ticket was created to gather input and define requirements for new Forge templates.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team's activities revolved around daily operations, process refinement, and planning. Daily standups focused on triaging new tickets and tracking ongoing work, including the installation of a new gpu01 machine and planning for RHEL 10. A significant topic of discussion, both in the main Infrastructure meeting and a forum thread, was the utility of the on-call role, with a consensus forming to potentially discontinue it. The team also discussed improving monitoring with Zabbix, soliciting ideas for new dashboards, and continued its agile process adoption by refining the backlog. The Fedora 44 Beta has been staged, and the monthly AWS usage report was shared on the mailing list.

Decisions Taken

• Several new tickets were triaged and classified with priority and points, including #13169, #13170, and #13182.
• An action was taken to clean up old, confusing labels in the issue tracker to improve the agile process.
• Ticket #12873 (fix meetings_by_team.sh script) will be added to the next sprint backlog.

Releng

This week, the Releng team's activity focused on the Fedora 44 release cycle. During the weekly meeting on March 2nd, members discussed upcoming scheduled tasks and reviewed tickets that required attention, including issue #13177. The major development of the week was a mailing list announcement confirming that the Fedora Linux 44 Beta was approved ("GO") and is scheduled for public release on Tuesday, March 10th, 2026.

Decisions Taken

• patrikp was selected to be the chair for the next meeting on March 9th.

Quality

This week, the Quality team's primary focus was the Fedora 44 Beta release. The team held its regular Quality meeting to coordinate testing efforts for the Beta RC 1.2 compose, with a call for validation on KDE, anaconda webui, and ibus systems. A blocker review meeting followed, where several proposed blockers and freeze exceptions were evaluated. The week culminated in the F44 Beta Go/No-Go meeting, where the decision was made to ship the Beta. Other activities included an ongoing testing request for graphical corruption on Intel laptops, the announcement of an upcoming I18N Test Week, and welcoming a new contributor to the team.

Decisions Taken

• The Fedora Linux 44 Beta was declared GO for release on 2026-03-10, using the RC-1.2 compose.
• In the F44 Blocker Review meeting, the following decisions were made:
  • Accepted as Beta Blocker: Bug #2442593 (Anaconda crash reporter passes incomplete information).
  • Rejected as Beta Blocker: Bug #2439813 (KDE network installs hang) and Bug #2441941 (Graphics break when trying to type LUKS password) were rejected for Beta and deferred for Final release consideration.
  • Accepted as Beta Freeze Exception:
    • Bug #2440346 (bluetoothctl broken in 5.86).
    • Bug #2443827 (libsoup3 package provides mingw directories).
    • Bug #2440238 (First start of xdg-desktop-portal sometimes times out).
  • Rejected as Beta Freeze Exception: Bug #2442986 (Freeze exception for Vulkan SDK).

Design

This week, the Design team's activity centered on the F45 Wallpaper Process Update discussion. Following the community's choice of Alan Turing as the inspiration, the team is exploring several creative directions. The main themes under consideration are the mechanical "Enigma" aesthetic, patterns from nature based on Turing's work on Morphogenesis, and a "Light & Legacy" concept reflecting his life and impact. As the initial sketch and rough draft phase was scheduled to end on March 6th, a community member contributed some photos of a motorbike repair shop floor as a source of visual inspiration.

Docs

This week's discussion focused on the retirement of the old "Ask Fedora SOPs" and where to host the new "Fedora Discussion Forum (Self-)Moderation Guidelines and Rules". The old SOPs have already been unpublished from the Docs website. Following a community poll, a decision was made to host the new guidelines within the official Fedora Docs. Preparations are now underway to create a new repository on Forgejo for this purpose, using the standard docs template. The localization team was also notified to prepare for the translation of the new content.

Internationalization

In the weekly i18n meeting, the team confirmed that the two tracked changes for Fedora 44 have been implemented and are now in the ON_QA state. A reminder was issued for the upcoming Fedora 44 i18n test week, scheduled to begin on March 9th. Team members were asked to help triage the remaining bugs for Fedora 42 and to test an ibus update for Fedora 44.

A key discussion occurred on the mailing list regarding the proposal to enable the "Contributor in comment" add-on site-wide in Fedora Weblate, which adds contributor names to PO file headers. While concerns were raised that this is an obsolete practice and git history is a better way to track authorship, the consensus was that it provides important and accessible credit for translators. The discussion concluded with an agreement to proceed with the feature enabled by default, while allowing projects to opt-out.

Legal

This week, the Legal team discussed the need for a cross-distribution "age verification" API to comply with new laws in some U.S. states. The conversation centered on creating a flexible freedesktop.org standard that respects privacy-focused distributions like Whonix while meeting legal requirements. Concerns were raised about differing age brackets in various jurisdictions and a potentially more restrictive "know your customer" style law being discussed in New York.

Other topics included a controversy surrounding python-chardet, where a maintainer used an LLM to rewrite the library and unilaterally relicensed it from LGPL to MIT, prompting a debate on the validity of this action. A licensing question was also raised about the go-tpm-tools dependency, which contains a non-allowed license (TCGL) that may only apply to an excluded submodule. Finally, a parent inquired about the process for their 13-year-old daughter to contribute to Fedora, as the account system requires users to be at least 16.

EPEL

This week's discussions in EPEL centered on package updates and retirements, with a significant focus on the process for incompatible updates. A proposed incompatible update for django-allauth (Issue #361) was delayed; the group decided to first request an update to the conflicting qrcode package in the base OS. Another incompatible update for mongo-c-driver was pushed without following the required procedure and was subsequently blocked, prompting a reminder about the importance of the policy even for the leading EPEL 10 branch. Additionally, several packages were retired or are planned for retirement due to being EOL or unmaintained, including python-django3, rust-pore, and pocl. The group also received notice of upcoming large update requests for forgejo, qt6, and ffmpeg.

Atomic

During the Fedora Atomic Initiative meeting, the team reviewed usage statistics, highlighting strong growth for the fedora-bootc image. The primary discussion centered on the Konflux cluster migration. It was determined that the new cluster deployment would miss the F44 release timeline, leading to a decision to delay the switchover. The team also addressed the stalled migration of project resources to the atomic namespace on Fedora Forge, which is blocked pending Konflux support for Forgejo. As a potential first step, they discussed migrating issue trackers independently of the code repositories.

Decisions Taken

• The migration to the new Konflux cluster is postponed until the F45 release cycle to prevent disruption to the F44 release. The current cluster will be kept online until then.
• The Fedora CoreOS team will also defer its full migration to Konflux until the F45 cycle.
• The team will experiment with migrating the bootc issue tracker to the Fedora Forge staging instance to test the process as a potential first step for the namespace migration.

CoreOS

During the week, the CoreOS group held one Fedora CoreOS meeting where they discussed the upcoming Fedora 44 release schedule and reviewed a request to add new packages for NUMA awareness. The team also briefly touched on the potential move of the ignition-integration repository, but deferred the discussion. A conversation about the utility of the coreos-aleph.json file was started and moved to the Matrix channel for asynchronous follow-up.

Decisions

• The numad and numactl packages will be added to the Fedora CoreOS base image to improve support for performance-sensitive workloads.

RISC-V

This week, the RISC-V SIG meeting focused on preparations for the Fedora 44 mass rebuild. Key tasks discussed included updating builders, moving to the unified kernel, and bootstrapping missing languages. The group noted positive progress on the unified kernel, which now supports most development boards with a decreasing number of out-of-tree patches. In the forums, a user sought help with a PCIe probe issue when booting an Orange Pi RV from an NVMe drive, and was directed to newer kernel versions with official board support. Another significant discussion was initiated to clarify the definitions of "Primary" versus "Alternative" architectures in Fedora, aiming to update outdated documentation to reflect current practices.

Security

The Security SIG held its weekly security-sig meeting on March 5th. A key update was the completion of the ticket to create the new SIG and FAS groups (Forge #387). The group also discussed the start of data collection for specific types of CVEs and security bugs, such as those that are invalid or for un-shipped components.

MinGW

This week's discussions focused on library updates and transitions. Sandro Mani proposed an update of mingw-libsoup from version 2.74.3 directly to 3.x to address numerous unpatched CVEs, rather than creating a new mingw-libsoup3 package. This proposal is currently open for objections. In a separate, ongoing thread about replacing zlib and minizip with their -ng counterparts, it was clarified that the mingw packages should already be based on the respective -ng sources.

Perl

This week's activity for the Perl SIG centered on package maintenance and addressing incompatibilities. A key discussion was initiated about the need to remove Alien::cmake3 from Fedora 44 and newer, as it requires CMake 3 while Fedora has upgraded to CMake 4. This change impacts perl-Alien-Build and perl-Alien-Brotli. Several pull requests were also opened to update packages, including perl-Date-Manip and perl-Time-ParseDate.

Decisions Taken

• The pull request to update the dependency list for perl-Email-Sender was merged.
• The pull request to exclude a private key from the perl-Net-SSLeay RPM documentation was merged.
• A pull request to disable optional tests for perl-Clone in RHEL was closed without merging, pending a review of the package's dependencies.

Rust

This week, the main activity for the Rust group was the finalization of the retirement for the rust-pore package. Following up on an intent to retire announced in February, the package was officially retired from EPEL 8 and 9. The reason for this action is that the package's open-source development has stalled, which was causing issues with updating other Rust crates. Users who were using the pore binary are now advised to switch back to using Google's repo.

Decisions

• The rust-pore package has been retired in EPEL 8 and 9.

Other Discussions

• In a discussion about migrating to Forgejo, FranciscoD from the Join SIG shared a script to mass-comment on Pagure tickets to inform users of the move. The post also includes tips for other teams migrating, such as warning users about potential notification spam and making the old Pagure repositories read-only.
• Adam Kaplan started a conversation about using SPIFFE/SPIRE as a modern, container-friendly alternative to subscription-manager for authenticating to protected RPM repositories. He argued that the current system is ill-suited for environments like Kubernetes and that a workload-based identity approach would offer better security and flexibility.
• Rénich Bon Ćirić announced an initiative to bring the Crystal programming language to Fedora Linux as a first-class citizen, similar to Python and Go. As an existing package maintainer, they are seeking collaborators for the effort and noted that the upstream Crystal project is supportive.
• Marcin Juszkiewicz reported an issue where his KDE session has a low file descriptor limit (4096), despite systemd being configured for a much higher limit. Lennart Poettering identified this as a likely bug in KDE, as it should not be overriding the system-wide limits in a way that could break applications.
• Vít Ondruch raised concerns about the difficulty of adhering to Fedora's JavaScript packaging guidelines while updating Ruby on Rails. The strict rules against bundling JavaScript libraries are hard to follow due to a lack of tooling and complex dependencies, leading to a question of whether to bend the rules or abandon such packages.
• Miroslav Suchý posted the monthly report of new packages added to Fedora, which included forgejo-runner, python-django6, phpunit13, and a large number of Rust crates.
• A new contributor requested sponsorship to maintain the orphaned package "emotion". After discussion about the utility of reviving a long-dead library, they decided to find a different package to maintain.
• On the Chinese mailing list, a user asked for recommendations for laboratory management software suitable for a small university lab, seeking features like personnel and equipment tracking, instrument usage logs, and data management.
• Other topics discussed this week include a request for a package review on the scitech list, resolving a local build failure of the libcap package, a list of packages in Rawhide with old dist-tags, how to add a fileinfo rule to rpminspect, dealing with unsigned packages in CI, a list of package updates missing in F44, a call to help test F43 to F44 upgrades, clarifying the definition of primary vs. alternative architectures, the final list of long-term FTBFS packages to be retired, a contentious proposal for an "age verification" API, and the planned removal of gnome-abrt.

Package updates

• Pavel Raiskup announced the release of Mock v6.7, which includes a new expand_spec plugin, a default umask change, and Skopeo integration for improved hermetic builds.
• An update to libvpx to version 1.16.0 in Rawhide introduced an ABI break. Maintainers of dependent packages were asked to rebuild their packages in the provided side tag.
• Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski gave a heads-up about an upcoming SONAME change for SDL3_sound. Since no packages in Fedora currently depend on it, no rebuilds are necessary.
• Alexey Tikhonov announced an upcoming ding-libs rebase that will introduce backward-incompatible API/ABI changes in libini_config.so. He is coordinating with maintainers of affected packages like SSSD for a rebuild in a side tag.
• Kaleb Keithley announced an update of liborc to version 2.3.0 in Rawhide, clarifying that it is not an SONAME bump and does not require mass rebuilds.
• A recent update to cmocka 2.0.1 caused bpfilter to fail to build. The issue was traced to bpfilter using internal cmocka functions. A patch was created for the Fedora package to resolve the problem.

Orphaning packages

• Mateus R. Costa announced he is taking an indefinite pause from contributing to Fedora for personal reasons. He will be orphaning his packages, which include bbox-firago-fonts and bign-handheld-thumbnailer.
• Michel Lind has orphaned the python-selenium package due to a lack of time. Michael J Gruber expressed potential interest in taking over its maintenance.
• Kaleb Keithley proposed retiring the civetweb package in Rawhide (F45) as it no longer has any dependencies. The package will remain in older stable releases and EPEL where it is still in use.

New contributor introductions

• Maksym Hazevych, a long-time Fedora user and professional JavaScript developer, introduced himself and is seeking a reviewer for his package submission, Flood, a web UI for rtorrent.
• Jamie Null, a law student with a background in computing, introduced themselves and expressed interest in contributing to packaging for aarch64 and RISC-V.
• Joshua/Josie Weidanz, a DevOps engineer from Germany, introduced themselves with the goal of learning how to build and maintain packages for Fedora.
• Jaylon Christy, a software developer with a background in C++/C and Java, introduced himself and is looking to get involved as a package maintainer.