From March 09 to March 15

The primary focus across the Fedora Project this week was the Fedora 44 release cycle, culminating in the announcement and release of the Fedora 44 Beta. This involved a wide range of coordinated efforts, including final preparations and testing by the Releng, Infrastructure, and Quality teams, who held blocker review meetings to triage bugs and approve freeze exceptions. Several groups, including the Workstation, KDE, and ARM teams, were specifically involved in testing and announcing new F44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5. Beyond the immediate release, a common thread was discussion on future project direction and policy, with the Council and FESCo debating proposals like a "Technology Innovation Lifecycle" and new membership criteria. Other ongoing work included infrastructure improvements, such as migrations to Fedora Forge, and the introduction of new change proposals for the upcoming Fedora 45 release.

📣 Announcements

The Fedora Project announced the immediate availability of the Fedora Linux 44 Beta, with the final release planned for April. Looking ahead, a change proposal for Fedora 45 was submitted to use systemd for managing per-user environment variables, aiming to make the process shell-agnostic and cleaner for users of alternative shells.

The weekly community update detailed progress across various teams. The QE team's work on approving the Fedora 44 Beta was highlighted, along with ongoing Podman and I18N test weeks. The Infrastructure team reported resolving email issues and setting up a new GPU machine. Other key activities included the Forgejo team accelerating repository migrations, the RISC-V team working on its F44 rebuild, the UX team migrating design assets, and the CentOS and EPEL teams performing regular maintenance and improvements.

Council

This week, the Council's work was split between a substantive meeting and two ongoing forum discussions. In the meeting, the Council planned the rollout of the new Fedora Forge usage policy, deciding on a two-step communication plan involving separate articles on the Fedora Magazine and Community Blog. They also discussed the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), concluding that the current proposal was too vague and that a direct Q&A session with the proposers was needed to clarify the project's role versus Red Hat's legal obligations.

In the forums, discussion continued on the "Fedora Verified" Membership proposal, with community members expressing concern that the proposed baseline criteria (e.g., number of badges and groups) were too high and could be elitist. There was also active debate on the "Technology Innovation Lifecycle" proposal, focusing on practicalities like infrastructure requirements, administrative overhead for FESCo, and the process for retiring unsuccessful projects.

Decisions Taken

  • The weekly Council meeting time was officially moved to 15:00 UTC to resolve scheduling conflicts related to Daylight Saving Time.
  • Regarding the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, the Council decided on a two-article communication strategy:
    1. A Fedora Magazine article will be published first to announce the sunsetting of Pagure.io.
    2. A Fedora Community Blog article will be published later to formally begin the two-week community feedback period on the new policy.
  • The team behind the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) proposal will be invited to a future Council video meeting to provide a more concrete explanation of their request and answer questions.

FESCO

During the week, FESCO held one meeting where they reviewed the status of several F44 changes, marking some as ON_QA. The most significant discussions revolved around two proposals. The first, to restrict ptrace by default, was approved despite debate over its practical effectiveness. The second, a contentious proposal to filter Fedora Flatpaks on Atomic Desktops, ended without a decision after a long and circular debate. Concerns included the proposal's vagueness and fundamental disagreements on packaging philosophy. FESCO members were asked to provide specific feedback on a Discourse summary thread created to continue the discussion.

On the forums, several new change proposals for F45 were introduced. A proposal to use systemd for managing per-user environment variables received significant and immediate pushback regarding its impact on non-systemd environments like containers and SSH sessions. Another notable new topic was a proposal for a "Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process" to create a structured path for experimental features, which generated substantial discussion. Meanwhile, the ongoing LLVM-22 update for F44 was reported to be causing build failures, sparking a conversation about the timing of such invasive changes.

Decisions Taken

Packaging Committee

This week, the committee's discussions focused on new hardware support and specific packaging challenges. Peter Robinson announced the availability of new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5 (Minimal, Workstation, and KDE), seeking community feedback ahead of the release freeze. On the mailing list, a discussion about an "Empty %files file" error concluded that the issue was caused by a package containing no compiled binaries and could be resolved by declaring it as BuildArch: noarch. Another conversation about handling large package builds in COPR resulted in a successful workaround: hosting the large SRPM on an external web server and providing the URL to COPR for the build process. No formal decisions were made this week.

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, the Diversity & Inclusion SIG's main activity was in the forum discussion regarding the "Call for Volunteers — Fedora Mentor Summit @ Flock 2026". Based on the results of a poll, the first planning meeting for the summit was scheduled. It was noted that the time might not be convenient for everyone, but meeting notes or a recording would be shared afterward.

Decisions Taken

  • The first synchronization meeting for the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 will be held on May 17 at 10:00 CET.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation SIG held their regular meeting to discuss ongoing issues. Key topics included the status of the "Background Logo" GNOME Shell extension, blocker bugs for Fedora 42 and 43, and the transfer of Rust package maintenance. The conversation around enabling LUKS encryption by default was postponed again, awaiting progress on upstream Btrfs filesystem encryption. Separately, a new forum discussion was initiated to announce the availability of Fedora 44 test images for the Raspberry Pi 5, with a call for feedback on the Minimal, Workstation, and KDE variants before the upcoming release freeze.

Decisions Taken

  • The group agreed not to remove the "Gnome Shell Extension Background Logo" from the default installation. An action was assigned to follow up with the maintainer regarding its status and a reported flickering bug.
  • The discussion on enabling LUKS by default was postponed until team members working on Btrfs filesystem encryption are available to provide an update.

KDE

This week, discussions focused on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. Peter Robinson announced new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5, including a KDE version, and is seeking community feedback to refine them before the release freeze. Another user noted a significant improvement in the Kamoso webcam application in Fedora 44 compared to Fedora 43, inquiring about the underlying change that resolved previous performance issues.

Other topics included a technical support thread troubleshooting a systemd vconsole error related to loading keyboard layouts during boot. Finally, an announcement was made for the weekly Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting.

Server

This week, the Server SIG's activity centered around their meeting on March 11, with mailing list discussions providing the agenda and a summary. Key topics included the successful acceptance of the group's talk and workshop proposals for Flock 2026 and ongoing F44 release testing, where most installation and service tests were reported as successful. A new package and demos for the LocalKDC project were also presented and are now ready for group testing.

Decisions Taken

The "Streamlined backup & restore" project was formally agreed upon and split into three sub-projects with assigned leads: - "Strengthening Server updates": eseyman & pboy - "Streamlining regular Server backups": eseyman & korora - "Homeserver spin-off": pboy & mowest

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team's focus was on the Fedora 44 Beta release, which concluded the associated infrastructure freeze. With the freeze lifted, work resumed on merging pull requests and running playbooks. The team investigated and addressed a kojipkgs outage caused by server timeouts when indexing large directories, and also noted performance lags with Matrix federation.

A significant topic of discussion was the proposal to discontinue the on-call role due to its infrequent use, with a final decision planned for the following week. There was also a continued focus on improving monitoring, with ideas for new Zabbix dashboards and a long-term goal to migrate fully from Nagios to Zabbix. Other ongoing work included preparations for the OpenID service shutdown on May 1st, 2026, and planning for the RHEL 10 migration.

Decisions Taken

  • Following a kojipkgs outage, a commit will be submitted to disable directory indexing on the problematic ostree directories to prevent a recurrence.
  • Ticket #13190 was closed as the reporter indicated they could handle the issue.
  • Ticket #12769, a stale DNF sync issue, was closed.

Releng

This week, the Releng team focused on preparations for the Fedora 44 Beta release, which was scheduled for March 10th. Key tasks included creating torrents and performing the bitflip test. The team also discussed internal processes, deciding to ignore a new, confusing "Sprint status To Do" label in Forgejo and seeking clarification on conflicting information regarding a package deletion request in ticket #13242. In the wider context of the F44 release, a Blocker Review Meeting was held, resulting in the acceptance of one Beta blocker concerning the Anaconda crash reporter and several freeze exceptions to address issues with Bluetooth, filesystem pollution, and application startup delays.

Decisions

  • Sprint Management: The team decided to ignore the new "Sprint status To Do" label in Forgejo, as the project board columns already serve this purpose.
  • Ticket #13253: Action on this ticket was postponed until a clear task is defined.
  • Fedora 44 Beta Blocker: Bug #2442593 (Anaconda crash reporter passes incomplete information) was accepted as a Beta blocker.
  • Fedora 44 Freeze Exceptions: The following bugs were accepted as Beta Freeze Exceptions:
    • #2440346 (bluetoothctl broken in 5.86)
    • #2443827 (libsoup3 package provides mingw directories)
    • #2440238 (xdg-desktop-portal sometimes times out, delaying app starts)
  • Rejected/Deferred Bugs: Bugs #2439813 (KDE network installs hang) and #2441941 (Graphics break when trying to type LUKS password) were rejected as Beta blockers but will be reconsidered for the Final release. A freeze exception for the Vulkan SDK (#2442986) was also rejected.

Quality

The Quality SIG held one F44 Blocker Review meeting this week to assess several proposed Final blockers and one freeze exception for Fedora 44. Key decisions included accepting a blocker for an initial setup error on NVIDIA hardware and a freeze exception to improve enterprise login on KDE Plasma. Several proposed blockers were rejected, primarily because they were hardware-specific issues affecting single laptop models or were deemed unlikely to occur in common scenarios. Decisions on two other bugs, related to GNOME Remote Desktop and a kernel boot failure, were postponed to allow for further investigation and feedback.

In forum and mailing list discussions, there was continued conversation regarding performance issues with wine-dxvk on recent Fedora releases. Users also reported errors starting virtual machines in virt-manager after upgrading to Fedora 44, and a discussion continued about issues related to a full /boot/efi partition when manually compiling kernels. Announcements were also made for the upcoming Quality and Blocker Review meetings.

Decisions

  • Accepted as Final Blocker:
    • #2359799: An initial-setup error on systems with NVIDIA hardware was accepted as it violates first boot criteria.
  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exception:
    • #2445393: A change to SSSD to add the Plasma Login Manager to the PAM services whitelist was accepted to improve enterprise login on KDE.
  • Rejected as Final Blocker:
    • #2443774: A dnf segmentation fault was rejected as it only occurs in uncommon configurations where the system locale is set to C or POSIX.
    • #2442689: A gnome-session crash was rejected because it was not reproducible and had no clear, regularly encountered impact.
    • #2438442 and #2441941: Two graphics issues were rejected as they were hardware-specific, each affecting only a single known laptop model.
  • Decision Postponed:
    • #2444824: A decision on a GNOME Remote Desktop issue was delayed for more investigation.
    • #2443049: A decision on an unbootable kernel was delayed to gather more feedback after the Beta release.

Docs

This week, the Docs team discussed several key topics in their weekly meeting. They noted that the Call for Papers for a Flock 2026 talk was accepted. With the release of the Fedora 44 Beta, the critical phase for working on the release notes has now begun. The planned migration of the release notes repository is currently blocked by a bug in the migration tool and might be postponed.

In the forums, a discussion continued on retiring the old "Ask Fedora SOPs", with confirmation on the correct repository to use for the new guidelines following the recent forge migration. A technical problem was also raised regarding Antora cross-repository references, which are causing CI build failures in the infrastructure documentation. Additionally, a user provided feedback on an existing power management guide, noting it improved power draw but caused issues with system suspend.

Internationalization

The main activity for the Internationalization SIG this week was the I18N Test Week, which ran from March 9 to March 15. The event focused on testing internationalization support in desktop environments and their applications to ensure quality and stability for the upcoming release.

Discussions also continued on the proposal to enable the "Contributor in comment" add-on in Fedora Weblate. The importance of crediting translators equally with other project contributors was a key point, with feedback supporting the change as long as projects retain the ability to opt-out. A separate call for translation for an external project also sparked community engagement and resulted in a new member joining the Polish translation team.

Decisions Taken

  • Sebastian Bieniek was added to the l10n Fedora Account System group to contribute to Polish translations.

This week, the Legal SIG continued to discuss the implications of age verification laws in some U.S. states. A positive development was shared from System76, who reported a Colorado senator is considering an exemption for open source software. However, the complexity of the situation was underscored by a comparison of conflicting requirements in proposed laws from California, Colorado, and New York, making a single compliant solution difficult. Another significant discussion revolved around a bug in the licensecheck tool, which was incorrectly identifying a BSD-3-Clause license. This prompted a conversation about the tool's limitations and recommendations to use more accurate alternatives like the ScanCode toolkit.

Additionally, a parent seeking advice on how their 13-year-old daughter could contribute to Fedora concluded that, in the absence of a formal process for underage contributors, they would create an account on her behalf and supervise its use. No formal project-wide decisions were taken this week.

EPEL

The EPEL SIG held one meeting this week with low attendance, potentially due to the recent US daylight savings time change and the SCaLE conference. Discussions focused on two main topics: EPEL Steering Issue #361 and the development of !epel macros. For the steering issue, the group affirmed the plan to first request that RHEL update the package in question. Progress was also reported on the !epel macros, with a pull request expected to be ready soon.

Decisions and Actions

  • Regarding EPEL Steering Issue #361, it was decided to proceed with requesting that RHEL update the package version first. An action was assigned to create the RHEL issue.
  • Work has commenced on the !epel macros, and an action was taken to prepare a Pull Request for review.

CentOS Hyperscale

During their weekly meeting, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG established a formal policy for managing inactive members and introduced new tooling to streamline package management. The new membership policy involves an annual "spring cleaning" to identify and contact members who have been inactive for over a year. Two new tools were also presented: hs-relmon, which automates issue creation for outdated packages, and hs-intake, which analyzes the impact of adding new packages. The group also noted that libbpf is now available in Hyperscale 9 and that work on the kernel rebase would resume.

Decisions

  • A policy for managing inactive members was established. The process involves an annual review of contribution activity. Inactive members will be contacted and moved to a "former members" list if they do not respond, with a special "emeritus" status for significant past contributors.
  • The group will investigate automating Merge Request creation from issues filed by the new hs-relmon tool, with plans to consult the Packit team.

ELN

During the single ELN meeting this week, the primary discussion revolved around the ELN Hyperscale Kernel, which is blocked by the need for a separate kernel configuration to enable btrfs.ko. The group explored strategies to get a community Merge Request accepted by the RHEL kernel team. A new proposal was introduced to auto-generate PURL metadata in RPMs to aid in CVE tracking, though the discussion was deferred for a more detailed write-up. The group also received a status update on the failing CI for the bootc images MR and was invited to provide feedback on the new Anaconda WebUI prototype in eln issue #328.

Decisions Taken

  • The discussion on generating PURL metadata in RPMs was deferred. An action was created for Michel Lind (salimma) to file a ticket with a detailed proposal for future consideration.

Atomic

During the week, the Atomic SIG held one meeting focused on planning for their "Birds of a Feather" (BoF) session at the upcoming Flock 2026 conference. The main goal of the session will be to collaborate with other Fedora teams on integrating images produced by Konflux. Key topics proposed for the BoF agenda include defining how artifacts will be consumed by other teams, making Fedora Atomic/Bootc the primary method for creating a Fedora Remix, and unifying with Atomic Desktop by consolidating CI flows. A proposal to add documentation for the bcvk tool was also briefly discussed but was deferred to other channels for further conversation.

Decisions Taken

  • The agenda for the Flock 2026 "Birds of a Feather" session was set to include discussions on artifact consumption (including signing), unifying with Atomic Desktop, and establishing Fedora Atomic/Bootc as the primary method for creating a Fedora Remix.
  • The discussion regarding documentation for the bcvk tool was deferred to the bootc channel and GitLab issue fedora/bootc/docs/-/issues/22.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team's main focus was the successful release of the Fedora CoreOS 44 Beta to the next stream. This preview of the upcoming Fedora 44 release includes several notable changes for users, such as an automatic Podman database migration from BoltDB to SQLite, the removal of some previously set SELinux booleans, and another update to the location of SSH authorized keys configuration files.

During their weekly meeting, the team discussed preparations for the Fedora 44 Test Week, scheduled to begin on March 23. They also made the decision to postpone the move to build Fedora CoreOS on Fedora Konflux until the Fedora 45 cycle, as the required infrastructure is not yet in place.

Decisions Taken

  • The numad and numactl packages will be added to the Fedora CoreOS base image, confirming a decision from a previous meeting.
  • The planned change to "Build FCOS on Fedora Konflux" will be deferred to the Fedora 45 release cycle.

ARM

This week's activity centered on progress for the Raspberry Pi 5. Peter Robinson announced the availability of new experimental Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5, including Minimal, Workstation, and KDE variants. He is seeking community feedback to help refine these images ahead of the F-44 freeze. This was also announced as an update to the original RPi5 image thread. In other news, the group was notified of the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for March 16 to review proposed blockers and freeze exceptions.

Alternative Images

During their weekly meeting on March 12, 2026, the Alternative Images SIG discussed progress on the RISC-V image, which is delayed by at least a month due to ~20 packages that still need to be built. They also covered an issue with updating the kiwi package in Fedora, which is currently blocked by failing tests.

The main focus was the upcoming quarterly image release. For this release, the CentOS Stream 10 KDE images will be updated to use plasma-login-manager and will handle user creation on first boot via plasma-setup, rather than through the installer. A potential migration of projects from Pagure to GitLab was also considered, with plans to investigate this possibility after the next release cycle.

Decisions

  • The CentOS Stream 10 KDE image will be updated to use plasma-login-manager for the next quarterly release.
  • User creation for the CentOS Stream 10 KDE image will be handled by plasma-setup on first boot instead of by the Anaconda installer.
  • The migration of SIG projects from Pagure to GitLab will be investigated after the next image release.

Cloud

The Cloud SIG's single meeting this week focused on preparing for the upcoming F44 release. The main discussion points were the need to improve the Cloud Edition documentation and the process for updating the Vagrant images to include F43 and F44. Other topics included reviving a Kiwi PR for better Vagrant support, a report that the Rocky Linux team is exploring the use of cloud image uploader libraries, and a bug report concerning nm-wait-online failing on F44 cloud images in AWS. The group also discussed recent and future conference presentations.

Decisions Taken

  • davdunc and nhanlon volunteered to work on improving the Cloud Edition documentation before the F44 release.
  • davdunc took the action to update the Vagrant images and to grant access to the Vagrant repositories to Fedora Infra and jcline to facilitate future automation.

Containers

This week, activity for the Containers SIG was focused on a forum discussion regarding how to manage a host's Podman from within a container. A new solution was posted to the old topic, "How do I setup Podman inside a container to talk to Podman on the host?". The new post explains that this can now be easily achieved by installing the host-spawn tool inside the container and linking it as the podman command, which allows it to forward commands to the host system. This method was highlighted as being particularly useful for development workflows inside toolbox containers on atomic operating systems.

AI & ML

The AI & ML SIG held one meeting this week, focusing on reviewing completed action items and discussing package updates. Progress was noted on creating a new group identity, with tickets opened for a new logo and an asynchronous discussion on brand identity. A key discussion point was the upcoming ROCm 8.x Change, which aims to enable ROCm support for most AMD GPUs, with a note that more testing will be required. The group also covered the update of ollama to version 0.16.3 and discussed the final versions of python-accelerate and python-datasets for the F44 release.

RISC-V

This week, the RISC-V SIG addressed a technical boot issue and a policy documentation discussion. A user successfully resolved a problem where an Orange Pi RV board failed to boot from an NVMe drive due to the PCIe interface not initializing correctly. The solution was found to be a kernel configuration change rather than a device tree issue. Concurrently, a discussion about clarifying the requirements and definitions for "Primary vs. Alternative" architectures within Fedora wrapped up, with the next step being to draft updated documentation based on feedback from the forum and the mailing list.

Decisions Taken

In the context of booting an Orange Pi RV from an NVMe drive without an initrd, it was determined that two kernel drivers must be built-in (=y) rather than compiled as modules (=m):

  • CONFIG_PCIE_STARFIVE_HOST (PCIe host controller driver)
  • CONFIG_CLK_STARFIVE_JH7110_STG (A clock driver dependency for PCIe)

Security

This week, the Security SIG's activity centered on a new forum discussion initiated by Chris, proposing a new package named "Fedora-harden" for the Security SIG's consideration. The package is intended to provide user-friendly security hardening for average desktop and workstation use cases on Fedora and other RHEL-derivatives like CentOS, AlmaLinux, and RockyLinux. A preliminary version has been developed and packaged as an RPM for testing and review, with further details and a test package available in the Security SIG ticket. The proposal is now open for discussion, review, and testing by the community.

Go

During the weekly meeting, the Go SIG discussed several key topics. The conversation around automating mass rebuilds for security updates (go-sig#51) was tabled, as the group decided to wait for a new build system feature that would simplify the process. In the meantime, critical security updates will be handled on a case-by-case basis. The SIG also reviewed and agreed upon a new membership policy (go-sig#60), which will be put to a formal vote.

Other significant discussions included plans for migrating to the new Fedora Forge (go-sig#64), which involves creating a new organization and migrating the issue tracker from Pagure. The group also touched on the state of Go versions in Fedora, the ongoing effort to make vendoring the default in go2rpm, and encouraged members to orphan old, broken packages to help clean up the repositories.

Perl

This week's activity for the Perl SIG was focused on package maintenance within the Fedora ecosystem. All discussions revolved around pull requests for updating various Perl modules. Specifically, pull requests were opened and subsequently merged for perl-Date-Manip, perl-LWP-Protocol-https, and perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker, bringing them to their latest versions.

Decisions Taken

Python

The only activity for the Python SIG this week was a single announcement on the python-devel mailing list. Michel Lind initiated a thread to announce the retirement of the python-sphinx-hoverxref package in Rawhide. The retirement is justified as its sole dependent, python-hypothesis, has been updated and no longer needs it. Furthermore, the package's upstream is inactive and it is incompatible with the forthcoming Sphinx 9 release.

Other Discussions

Package updates

  • An upcoming API and ABI-breaking update for the rapidyaml package to v0.11.0 in Rawhide was announced. The maintainer will also handle the required rebuild of its sole dependent, jsonnet.
  • An update to the VTK package to version 9.6 in Rawhide was planned, which will require a rebuild of all its dependent packages due to a lack of ABI stability.
  • An update to the live555 package was announced, which will introduce an SONAME change. The only affected package, vlc, will be rebuilt in a side tag.
  • Following the announcement of an ABI break in libvpx 1.16.0, several dependent packages including ffmpeg, vlc, and xine-lib were successfully rebuilt in the designated side tag.
  • After adopting the n2n package, the new maintainer announced an update to its license field to reflect multiple licenses. The initial string was found to be invalid and will be corrected.
  • A list of packages where the Fedora 44 version is older than the Fedora 43 version was posted, with a request for maintainers to submit the necessary updates to the branched release before the final freeze.

Orphaning packages

New contributor introductions

  • New contributor Bekir YAZIR is seeking a sponsor and reviewer for the glaze package. This is part of an effort to re-introduce the Hyprland window manager to the official repositories.
  • Agata Kruszona-Zawadzka, a developer for MooseFS, introduced herself as a new packager and is seeking a sponsor for her MooseFS package review. She also asked for guidance on an rpmlint error, which was identified as a likely bug in the tool itself.

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.

Content sources:

links

social