From March 16 to March 22

The primary focus across most groups this week was the upcoming Fedora 44 release, with a major emphasis on its Final Freeze. Teams including Quality, Server, ARM, and Workstation issued widespread calls for community testing of final validation builds to identify and resolve blocker bugs, with specific feedback being gathered for new Raspberry Pi 5 images. Alongside this immediate release work, a significant common theme was platform migration. The move from Pagure.io to the new Forgejo instance was a key topic for the Council and Packaging Committee, who are navigating technical blockers and planning the transition process, while the CoreOS and Atomic teams discussed their migration to the Konflux build system. Strategic planning was also prominent, with both the Council and FESCo refining a new "Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process" proposal, and FESCo making key decisions to filter Flatpaks on Atomic Desktops and restrict ptrace by default.

📣 Announcements

This week's Community Update detailed progress across various teams, including infrastructure migrations, setup for CentOS Stream 11, and the upcoming Fedora 44 Final Freeze on March 31st. The update also covered continued work on RISC-V, AI tool experiments, Quality Engineering test improvements, Forgejo migration progress, EPEL's activities at the SCALE conference, and initial design sketches for Flock. A security warning was also issued about realistic phishing emails sent from @lists.fedoraproject.org that prompt users to update their credentials; recipients are advised not to click the links.

Additionally, two planned outages were announced. A five-hour maintenance window for server updates and reboots, including some RHEL-9 to RHEL-10 upgrades, is scheduled for March 25 at 22:00 UTC. A shorter, 30-minute maintenance for the Fedora Matrix server (fedora.im) is planned for March 26 at 11:50 UTC.

Council

This week, discussions centered on the practical implications of migrating off pagure.io and a new proposal for managing innovation. In the topic on the decommissioning of Pagure.io, the Fedora Asahi SIG raised several blockers to their migration to forge.fedoraproject.org. These include a dependency on COPR automatically building packages from commits (which is not yet supported on the new forge), the need for an equivalent to GitLab's OpenID Connect for AWS, and a migration path for Fedora-specific tools not tied to a SIG. A suggestion was made to create a packager-tools organization on the forge to house such tools.

The other major discussion was a follow-up on the proposal for a Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process. The Fedora Project Leader is now seeking concrete project examples to help refine the proposal and better define the "sandbox" and "curation" stages, as well as the criteria for entering and exiting them.

FESCo

The main event for FESCo this week was the meeting on March 17 where the contentious change proposal to filter Fedora Flatpaks on Atomic Desktops was approved after a close vote. Proponents argued it aligns with user expectations and "upstream first" principles, while opponents raised concerns about Flatpak's architecture and user alienation. The deciding factor for one voter was that rejecting the proposal would lead the Workstation Working Group to implement a technically inferior solution. It was explicitly clarified that this approval is strictly for Atomic Desktops. Another proposal to restrict ptrace by default was also formally approved for Fedora 45.

Several other change proposals were submitted to FESCo for future voting, including updates to xmlsec, support for IPv6-mostly networks in NetworkManager, and a new web frontend for DRM Panic reports. A new discussion was initiated around the idea of transport-independent updates to help users bypass censorship. Additionally, the ongoing discussion about a technology innovation lifecycle process received wider attention with an article on LWN.

Decisions Taken

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee's main meeting focused on the upcoming migration from Pagure to Forgejo. The proposed plan is to close old and stale pull requests before the migration, asking contributors to reopen them on the new platform if they are still relevant. A significant portion of the meeting was also dedicated to discussing whether to relax packaging guidelines to allow conditionals for non-Fedora/EPEL distributions, prompted by a request from an Amazon engineer. While some argued this would lower the barrier for cross-distro collaboration, others raised concerns about spec file legibility and testing complexity. The discussion was deferred, with a potential compromise being the creation of a "best practices" document for multi-distro spec files.

In forum discussions, community members provided feedback on new test images for Fedora 44 on the Raspberry Pi 5, reporting various boot issues. Another topic highlighted that Steam has released a beta 64-bit client, which could influence future discussions on dropping 32-bit support in Fedora. Finally, a discussion about KDE update scheduling noted that Fedora's release cycle was historically designed around GNOME's schedule, providing context for current challenges.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare group held one productive meeting. Key announcements included the success of the Fedora Badges Revamp project at FOSSAsia 2026 and its acceptance into Outreachy, a successful Fedora presence at the same event, and a new intern joining the project. An important topic of discussion was the Fedora Council's proposal for a new "Fedora Verified" membership tier. The team also reviewed and finalized several event tickets, closing those for DevConf.IN 2026 and FOSDEM 2026 after reviewing final costs and event reports.

Decisions Taken

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, the Diversity & Inclusion group's activity was centered on a celebratory forum discussion. Cornelius Emase started a topic, "It’s been a year since I joined Fedora Project", marking their one-year anniversary since joining through an Outreachy internship. They expressed gratitude towards their mentor and the community, noting their continued contributions to the DEI team and Fedora Join. The post was met with positive and encouraging responses from other community members.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the group focused heavily on the upcoming Fedora 44 release and user experience with core technologies. A call for testing Fedora 44 validation tests was issued to help find blocker bugs early. A major point of discussion was the new Anaconda installer, with users providing critical feedback on its lack of intuitive storage configuration options compared to the previous version; the Anaconda team engaged directly, asking for specific use cases that are now functionally impossible. Another significant conversation revolved around user feedback on Wayland, where community members clarified that many perceived issues stem from the compositor and the necessary architectural shift away from X11's less secure model.

Other topics included a proposal to create a hardware quirks database to improve out-of-the-box support, and ongoing testing of new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5, which revealed several boot-related issues. An update was also shared that packages for a voice assistant are ready for review.

Decisions Taken

KDE

A significant discussion took place regarding whether KDE Plasma should adopt a 6-month release cadence to better align with Fedora and Qt, which could improve stability by avoiding rolling updates. The conversation highlighted several complexities, including Qt's short public maintenance window, developer preference for more frequent releases, and the necessity of rolling Qt for Wayland fixes. It was also noted that Fedora's schedule was historically designed around GNOME's releases.

Other activities included a widespread call for testing Fedora 44 Final validation builds to find blocker bugs early. Feedback was also gathered on new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5, where testers of the KDE image reported boot hangs and SD card issues. Finally, a user discovered that poor performance in the Kamoso webcam app on Fedora 43 was due to it defaulting to a 10fps video format.

Server

This week, the Server group's main focus was the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A call for testing was issued to encourage running final validation tests on nightly builds to identify blocker bugs early. In the weekly meeting, the group confirmed that all planned release testing for Fedora Server 44 is complete. Discussions also covered the ongoing progress of the "Integrating LocalKDC" project, which is targeted for basic support in Fedora 45 and has a COPR repository available for testing. Additionally, a new documentation project, a "Beginner's Guide to Server," was proposed to assist new users after installation.

Decisions Taken

  • The Fedora Server 44 installation media are considered ready for release.
  • A ticket will be created to begin work on a new "Beginner's Guide to Server" documentation project.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team made a significant operational change by deciding to discontinue the formal on-call rotation, moving to a ticket-based system for issue reporting. The team welcomed a new contributor, Ruilai Ma, who will begin by fixing obsolete documentation links. Much of the week's work involved planning and announcing upcoming maintenance, including a major server update and reboot cycle for March 25 and a Matrix service outage for March 26.

Throughout their daily standups, the team triaged several new tickets, discussed ongoing issues with the asknot application and Forgejo webhooks, and planned for the creation of a new test instance. They also discussed improving monitoring for services like PostgreSQL and FreeIPA. On the community forum, a user expressed continued interest in having a torrent file for the Everything network installer.

Decisions Taken

  • On-call Rotation Discontinued: During the weekly meeting, the team reached a consensus to stop the formal on-call rotation. The new procedure requires users to file a ticket for any issues.
  • Ipsilon Login Ticket Closed: Ticket #13202 regarding an Ipsilon login error was closed, as the issue is complex and will be made obsolete by the planned migration to Keycloak.

Releng

During their weekly meeting, the Releng team addressed the urgent need to get new OpenH264 builds published for F44 and F45 before the Final Freeze, noting the process of coordinating with Cisco could be slow. The team also considered implementing optional AI-powered code reviews on their pull requests, deferring a final decision to the next meeting. A discussion on a faulty branch deletion script concluded that the script must be fixed before it is used. In the forums, a user added their support to an existing request to provide a torrent file for the Everything network installer ISO.

Decisions Taken

  • The branch deletion script must be fixed to correctly identify if a branch is safe to delete before it is used; a manual override will not be performed.

Quality

The Quality team's week was heavily focused on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. In their main meeting, the team noted that the release was in decent shape but emphasized the need for community help in running all Final validation tests as soon as possible. This call to action was also shared on the mailing list and the discussion forum. The team also noted the conclusion of the i18n and podman test events and an upcoming CoreOS test week.

A significant portion of the week was dedicated to the Fedora 44 Blocker Review meeting, where several bugs were evaluated against the release criteria. On the mailing lists, discussions included a boot failure report for the Surface Pro 11 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor and a notable issue where the openh264 package caused problems for users upgrading from Fedora 43 to 44; this is now being addressed.

Decisions

  • Bug 2391723 (shim-ia32 missing): Accepted as a Final Blocker.
  • Bug 2444824 (GNOME Remote Desktop blank screen): Accepted as a Final Freeze Exception; the decision on blocker status was delayed for further investigation.
  • Bug 2444046 (Incorrect KDE application launcher icon): Rejected as a Final Blocker but accepted as a Final Freeze Exception.
  • Bug 2443774 (dnf cli segmentation fault): Accepted as a Final Freeze Exception.

Internationalization

This week, the Internationalization team held its weekly meeting to review progress on the Fedora 44 release cycle. The implementation of Fedora 44 changes and the recent i18n Test Week were both considered successful. The team also discussed the upcoming Final Freeze and the need to triage a significant number of remaining bugs for Fedora 42. On the mailing lists, a call for testing was made for a new IBus release candidate in Fedora 44. A major announcement was also shared regarding a cross-community localization workshop in Prague this June, which will focus on analyzing 20 years of data to address the health of language communities in the open-source ecosystem.

Decisions Taken

  • Following the successful implementation of Fedora 44 Changes, change owners can now begin working on the release notes.
  • Team members were asked to help triage the remaining bugs for Fedora 42.

This week's discussions focused on legal compliance and licensing complexities. A major topic was the proposed "age verification" API for new US state laws. Instead of focusing on implementation, a significant contribution argued for mounting a legal challenge against these laws on constitutional grounds. Another key issue raised was regarding software origin, specifically the inclusion of software from a developer in Iran, which was escalated to Red Hat's export compliance team for review. There was also a follow-up on the python-chardet relicensing controversy, with the opinion that the relicensing of the LLM-rewritten library was likely not legally improper, despite the complexities surrounding the copyrightability of AI-generated code.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group's main focus was on the proposed incompatible update for mongo-c-driver in EPEL 10.3. The proposal (issue #362), which involves a breaking soname change required by a new PHP extension, was discussed during the weekly meeting and subsequently approved. Following the decision, the update was pushed to the stable repository for the future EPEL 10.3 release, as confirmed in the related mailing list thread.

Other topics included an update that the RHEL request ticket for python-requests (RHEL-155709) has been filed and the group is now awaiting a response from Red Hat. Additionally, a new epel/misc repository was created on forge.fedoraproject.org to handle issues that don't fit elsewhere, and an announcement was made regarding the upcoming rebase of Asahi-related packages in EPEL 10 to support Apple Silicon hardware.

Decisions Taken

  • The proposal to allow an incompatible update for mongo-c-driver for EPEL 10.3 (issue #362) was approved with a 6-0 vote.

ELN

During the Fedora ELN SIG meeting, the group checked the status of the request for an eln organization for the Forgejo migration, which is still pending. The main topic of discussion was the bootc image, which is failing in CI tests despite building correctly locally. A team member is investigating the failures, with a potential cause identified as trailing whitespace in a configuration file. An action was assigned to investigate this specific issue.

Decisions Taken

  • Once the bootc image builds successfully, it will be pushed to the fedora/eln namespace on Quay.io. Credentials for this namespace will need to be arranged.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group held one meeting focusing on the CoreOS convergence with Konflux. While upstream work is stalled, it was noted that RHCOS is now built similarly to FCOS, with a "sealed uki composefs fcos" identified as a future goal. The team also discussed a blocked merge request to add ELN support to bootc base images and recapped several successful talks related to FCOS and Fedora Atomic Desktops at the recent SCaLE conference. Additionally, a five-year-old forum topic about Bluetooth file reception issues saw new activity before being closed due to its age, with users being advised to open a new topic if the problem persists.

Decisions Taken

  • @nimbinatus:matrix.org is to get clarity on the Konflux cluster migration plan and post an update.
  • @jcapitao:matrix.org will work on and share an architecture document explaining how CoreOS will be built on Konflux.
  • @nimbinatus:matrix.org will share the slides from the Fedora Hatch session at SCaLE.
  • @jcapitao:matrix.org is to review the merge request to add ELN support to bootc/base-images to help get it unblocked.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team focused on preparations for the upcoming Fedora CoreOS 44 Test Week, which is set to begin on March 23rd. An announcement was sent out inviting the community to participate and join a live help session on March 24th. In the weekly meeting, the team also discussed the Fedora 44 release schedule, which is nearing its final freeze.

Technical discussions centered on changes for Fedora 44, including necessary updates for the GoLang 1.26 bump and investigating the impact of the libdnf5 change on rpm-ostree. The team also discussed how to handle fast-tracked package updates in Bodhi and made a decision regarding the timeline for migrating the build system to Konflux.

Decisions Taken

  • The migration to build Fedora CoreOS on Konflux will be decoupled from the Fedora 44 release schedule and will happen when the new cluster is ready.
  • For fast-tracked package updates, the team agreed that passing CI and being successfully shipped in the previous release (F43) is sufficient justification to add positive karma in Bodhi.

ARM

The main focus for the ARM SIG this week was the upcoming Fedora 44 release. A call for testing was issued on both the forum and the mailing list, encouraging contributors to run Final validation tests on nightly builds to identify blocker bugs early. A Blocker Review Meeting was also announced to address critical release issues.

In hardware-specific discussions, testing of new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5 generated significant feedback. Testers reported boot stability problems, including hangs and hardware interrupt timeouts, particularly with the KDE image. The discussion also included suggestions to simplify the default Btrfs filesystem structure to be more user-friendly for the Pi community. Additionally, a new boot issue was reported on the mailing list concerning a GRUB freeze and boot loop on the Surface Pro 11 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor.

Cloud

This week, the Cloud SIG's activity consisted of a single mailing list thread, a call to action from Adam Williamson to begin running the Fedora 44 Final validation tests. The main subject was the importance of testing on the nightly composes or the Beta release now, rather than waiting for the final release candidates. This proactive approach aims to find and fix any potential blocker bugs as early as possible to ensure a smoother release process.

RISC-V

This week, the RISC-V SIG focused on the transition from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44. In a forum post, the group announced that a critical debuginfo bug affecting Fedora 43 has been resolved, and provided a link to the non-official F43 images. During their weekly meeting, they confirmed that the rebuild for Fedora 44 is set to begin soon. The group also discussed their strategy for the upcoming Flock conference, where their talk proposal was accepted. It was agreed that it is too early to formally propose RISC-V as a primary architecture, and this topic will be discussed informally at the event while they await more RVA23-based hardware.

Decisions Taken

  • The "unified" kernel package was officially renamed to the "omni" kernel to avoid confusion with the Unified Kernel Image (UKI) specification. A new Copr repository has been created for it.
  • The group will not submit a formal "community initiative" for RISC-V to become a primary architecture at this time. The topic will be discussed informally at Flock 2026 instead.

Security

During the single security-sig meeting this week, the main subject was a proposal to integrate Package URLs (PURL) into Fedora packages. This initiative, tracked in ticket FRCL-23, aims to improve vulnerability management and tracking. The group expressed support for the idea, seeing it as a positive emerging trend that could streamline security processes, even though other distributions have not yet widely adopted it. It was also noted that many language ecosystems could potentially integrate PURL generation directly into their RPM generators.

Perl

This week, the Perl SIG's activity focused on package maintenance. A pull request to update perl-Time-ParseDate to version 2026.0219 was merged. Progress was also made on an update for perl-Net-Server, where a new scratch build was initiated to test the changes.

Python

This week's activity consisted of a single Request for Comments (RFC) on the python-devel mailing list. Charalampos Stratakis proposed a new RPM macro, %pyproject_patch_dependency, for pyproject-rpm-macros. The goal of this new macro is to provide a standardized and less fragile way for packagers to override upstream dependency constraints that are incompatible with the package versions available in Fedora. This would replace the current practice of using sed or patches to modify files like pyproject.toml. The proposal outlines the syntax and available actions, such as dropping or setting version bounds and ignoring dependencies entirely, and seeks feedback from the community on the overall approach and API.

Other Discussions

Package Updates

  • In the thread ghostscript 10.07.0 coming into rawhide, removing .tempfile operator and 2 deprecated functionality, Zdenek Dohnal announced an upcoming Ghostscript update with breaking changes, including the removal of the .tempfile operator to reduce the attack surface.
  • Jonathan Wakely announced a License change: boost (some subpackages) to correct the RPM License tags for several boost packages, ensuring they accurately reflect the various licenses found in the source code headers.
  • Following up on a previous announcement, Orion Poplawski confirmed that the update for VTK 9.6 coming to Fedora rawhide this weekend has been submitted to Bodhi, along with rebuilds of its dependencies to accommodate the ABI break.
  • Jaroslav Škarvada announced that tuned-2.27.0 released, marking a new stable release for the system tuning tool.
  • In the libvpx 1.16.0 ABI break thread, Nicolas Chauvet took the initiative to rebuild the remaining dependencies in the long-pending side-tag to help push the update through. Most dependencies were rebuilt, with only Firefox remaining, which requires fixes to build in Rawhide.
  • José Expósito outlined the Plan for mesa 26.0, proposing to update Fedora 44 to the new version before its final release. The community strongly supported this, leading to a FESCo ticket for the late change and the submission of the update to Bodhi for testing.
  • In the n2n licence change thread, Miroslav Suchý suggested using tools like the license-diff browser plugin or scancode to help identify and verify software licenses.

Orphaning Packages

  • A discussion regarding the Status of OpenStack Clients in Fedora (looking for maintainers) was initiated because the current maintainers in the openstack-sig are no longer able to dedicate time to the packages. Steve Traylen stepped up, volunteering to join the SIG and help maintain the OpenStack client packages.

New Contributor Introductions

  • Ananya Nalavathu Self Introduction: Ananya Nalavathu introduced herself as the new Community Architect at Red Hat, bringing experience from both technical (AWS/DevOps) and community-focused roles.
  • In a thread about his new package, btrfs-dump, new contributor Mark Harmstone from Meta's kernel team introduced himself and his tool for dumping btrfs metadata. He was welcomed and encouraged to join the Fedora Btrfs SIG.
  • Self Introduction & Request for Guidance: Sarika Sharma introduced herself, expressing interest in becoming a package maintainer. She received a warm welcome and advice to start by reviewing existing packages or by fixing issues she encounters in her daily use of Fedora.
  • Several new contributors introduced themselves on the fedora-join mailing list. They were welcomed by Cornelius Emase and others. Newcomers include Joshua/Josie Weidanz, Jamie Null, Ruilai Ma, Tunde-Ajayi Olamiposi, Chinni Sree Addagalla, Akriti Sengar, and Anne Ndungu. Many are Outreachy applicants interested in contributing to areas like web development and AI/ML.

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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