From March 23 to March 29

A primary focus across many groups was the upcoming Fedora 44 release, with teams like Quality, KDE, and Server conducting blocker bug reviews, testing new features, and gathering user feedback, especially for the new Raspberry Pi 5 images. In parallel, planning for Fedora 45 is well underway, with FESCo and the broader community discussing and approving Change Proposals, most notably a breaking update to python-setuptools and enabling PAM support in chpasswd. A major, project-wide effort is the infrastructure migration from Pagure to Fedora Forge (Forgejo), a topic central to the Council, Infrastructure, and Releng teams who are managing the timeline, URL structures, and new CI workflows. Improving the user experience also emerged as a key theme, highlighted by a widespread discussion across the Quality, KDE, and Design teams in response to a new user's detailed feedback on the "broken and hostile" bug reporting workflow.

📣 Announcements

This week's announcements include a security alert, a significant infrastructure migration, and two change proposals for an upcoming Fedora release. A spam warning was issued about realistic phishing emails, seemingly from @lists.fedoraproject.org, that ask users to update their credentials. Community members are advised not to follow the links in these messages. Additionally, the project announced that "The forge is our new home.", detailing the migration from pagure.io to a new platform called Fedora Forge, powered by Forgejo. Project owners are urged to migrate their projects before the final cutover planned for Flock 2026.

Two change proposals for Fedora 45 were also introduced. The first, "UsePAMInChpasswdNewusers", aims to enable PAM support for the chpasswd and newusers utilities, ensuring they respect system-wide password policies. The second proposal, "Setuptools_82+", details a plan to update python-setuptools to a new major version. This is a breaking change, primarily due to the removal of the pkg_resources module, and is expected to impact numerous packages, for which a temporary compatibility package will be made available.

Council

This week's main focus was the ongoing discussion around defining a new "Fedora Verified" membership status. This status would determine eligibility for voting in project elections and participating in governance. After initial feedback indicated that the proposed requirements were too high, the community is actively debating more accessible and flexible criteria. The conversation covers establishing a fair baseline of quantifiable contributions (like badges or FAS group memberships), the appropriate number of peer vouches needed, and how to accurately measure ongoing activity to handle dormant accounts without penalizing "invisible work" that isn't easily tracked. The consensus is moving towards creating multiple pathways for recognition rather than a single, rigid metric.

Discussions also continued on the transition from Pagure to Forgejo. Concerns were raised about the migration timeline for core packager tools that still depend on the soon-to-be-decommissioned Pagure.io, and the work to update them is being tracked. Additionally, a past discussion on the URL structure for the new Forgejo instances was revived, with clarification provided on the rationale for having separate forge.fedoraproject.org and src.fedoraproject.org instances for project and dist-git hosting, respectively.

FESCo

During its weekly meeting, FESCo approved a new election policy that introduces a two-consecutive-term limit to encourage new candidates. The committee also formally approved the update of mesa to v26.0.x for Fedora 44. A request to reintroduce the original zlib library was denied for general system use but was permitted for special-purpose bundling within the Android toolchain. Discussions on the third-party repository policy were postponed until a formal proposal is submitted. On the forums, several Fedora 45 Change Proposals were announced as approved by FESCo, including the update to xmlsec, support for IPv6-mostly networks in NetworkManager, the creation of a DRM Panic Frontend, and the deprecation of python-dateutil.

New proposals were also introduced for Fedora 45, notably to enable PAM support in chpasswd and newusers, and to update setuptools to version 82+, which will require significant package updates due to breaking changes. A separate discussion explored the possibility of making Fedora updates transport-independent, with suggestions like IPFS or Syncthing. The committee also forgot to submit a session proposal for Flock 2026 and discussed potential solutions.

Decisions

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, discussion centered on the planning for the Fedora Mentor Summit @ Flock 2026. Following the first organizational meeting, notes and a recording were shared with the community. The main activities being planned are the Contributor Recognition Program, Mentor/Mentee Lunch Matching, and a Sticker Match Social Networking event. Volunteers were asked to review the planning documents, indicate which activities they would like to help organize, and vote in a poll to find a new weekly meeting time that accommodates more people. The final time will be chosen on Sunday 29th.

Workstation / GNOME

This week's discussions focused on hardware enablement and user experience. Feedback continued on the new Fedora 44 images for the Raspberry Pi 5. A user requested that Fedora Workstation provide a notification when SELinux blocks an action, as the current silent denials create a poor user experience. The discussion noted that the old setroubleshoot tool was removed for being too technical, and a modern replacement should focus on simple bug reporting. In a thread giving feedback about Wayland, a user detailed persistent copy-paste and window management issues under GNOME, leading to suggestions that the problem might be specific to GNOME's compositor rather than Wayland itself. Lastly, an announcement was posted for the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting to be held on March 30.

KDE

This week, the KDE SIG's discussions centered on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 release and user feedback on existing features. An announcement was made for the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for March 30. A significant topic of conversation was a new user's detailed feedback describing the bug reporting workflow as broken and hostile. The feedback highlighted issues with confusing tools, privacy concerns, and a lack of automation. It was confirmed in the discussion that the primary reporting tool (ABRT) is largely unmaintained and has been removed in other editions.

Server

The Server group's main activity was the weekly meeting on March 25, where they discussed progress on F44 release testing, confirming that media installation tests were successful and key database services are working. The group also made a key decision regarding the "Strengthening Server updates" project. Additionally, they discussed a potential "home server spin-off", considering the use of Btrfs instead of LVM for easier management, and planned a new "Beginners Guide to Fedora Server" to help new users. The group was also notified via the mailing list and forums about the upcoming F44 Blocker Review Meeting.

Decisions Taken

  • The timeshift tool was abandoned for the "Strengthening Server updates" project due to its tight coupling with GNOME and lack of maintainers. The focus will shift to finding an LVM snapshot-based disaster-recovery solution.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team's primary operational focus was a planned mass update and reboot outage. Daily standups revolved around triaging tickets and addressing ongoing issues, including intermittent FAS 2FA problems, DNS issues affecting test instances, and the reinstallation of a problematic proxy11 server. The main Infrastructure meeting welcomed a new contributor, Ahmed Almeleh, and covered progress on migrating monitoring services from Nagios to Zabbix, noting new PostgreSQL alerts that require tuning.

On the community side, a discussion was revived on the forums regarding the URL structure for new Forgejo instances, with team members clarifying the reasoning for separating forge.fedoraproject.org and src.fedoraproject.org. The team also received a request from LIDSOL (UNAM) in Mexico to become a new public mirror.

Releng

The Releng team held one meeting this week, focusing on infrastructure updates and the upcoming Final Freeze. The new mass branching SOP is now live, and the team discussed a scheduled mass update outage. Key service migrations for compose-tracker and failed-composed were completed. The team also addressed a security concern by restricting CI tests on pull requests to organization members to prevent the execution of malicious code. A discussion was held regarding Cisco's OpenH264 binary distribution moving to AWS, which will necessitate an update to Fedora's retrieval process.

Quality

This week, the Quality team focused on the upcoming Fedora 44 release. The main event was the F44 Blocker Review meeting, where three proposed bugs were accepted as final blockers and one was accepted as a final freeze exception. In community activities, a Test Day for CoreOS was announced and ran throughout the week. On the mailing lists, users reported and discussed issues encountered on Fedora 44, including a failure when creating VMs with virt-manager and an error during a grub2 update.

A significant forum discussion was initiated by a new user providing detailed feedback on the bug reporting workflow, describing it as confusing and hostile. The response clarified that the primary reporting application is now largely unmaintained. Announcements for the next Blocker Review meeting and Quality meeting were also posted.

Decisions Taken

  • Bug 2448283 (Selecting a non-ASCII capable keyboard layout should automatically also select US English as a second layout) was accepted as a final blocker.
  • Bug 2446745 (gnome-initial-setup does not enable third party repos) was accepted as a final blocker.
  • Bug 2448365 (rpi4 fails to boot from usb drive after upgrade to RC3) was accepted as a final blocker.
  • Bug 2373699 (Obsolete packages that used to require Python 3.13 but are gone in Fedora 43 and 44) was accepted as a final freeze exception.

Design

This week, the Design team focused on asset creation and process improvements while also engaging in community discussions about user experience. A significant forum topic was raised by a new user providing detailed feedback on the "broken and hostile" bug reporting workflow, which was acknowledged as being based on a largely unmaintained tool. Another discussion highlighted the lack of user-friendly notifications for SELinux blocks on Fedora Workstation, noting the old tool was removed for poor UX. In their weekly meeting, the team reviewed designs for "Powered by Fedora" assets, vintage-inspired Flock event postcards, and finalized low-ink "Sponsored by Fedora" printables.

Decisions Taken

  • The "Sponsored by Fedora" printable templates were finalized, with an agreement to change the sponsor text color to the official lighter Fedora blue for brand consistency.
  • For the upcoming Flock event postcard, approval was given to use a custom gothic font for the word "Flock," as its logo does not have the same registration protection as the main Fedora logo.
  • A plan was approved to formally revisit the entire wallpaper submission process by creating a new epic to facilitate community discussion.
  • Standardized templates will be created for release party branding and badges to ensure consistency and simplify preparations for future events, starting with the Fedora 44 release party.

Docs

During the weekly Docs team meeting, a key technical issue was resolved regarding Antora's handling of SHA256-based git repositories; a workaround was found by pre-downloading the repos, which the build script already does. The team also discussed the future ownership of "QuickDocsNG," proposing a "content head" role to ensure the content remains up-to-date. Updates were shared on improvements to the docs-fp-o repository and the status of Forgejo Action runners, which are not yet available. In the forums, a long-standing topic on improving power profiles with powertop and tuned saw a new development, with an issue being opened in Quick Docs to potentially incorporate this community guide into official documentation.

Internationalization

This week, the Internationalization SIG's activity consisted of an announcement by Jean-Baptiste for a "Localization workshop @ Prague in June" to be held during the Flock to Fedora conference from June 14th–16th, 2026. The workshop will focus on the "State of Open Source Localization" and will present a 20-year statistical analysis that reveals serious health challenges for language communities within the Linux ecosystem. The goal is to collaborate with allies from other projects like Mozilla, Weblate, and LibreOffice to analyze the data and brainstorm improvements. Community members were asked to help spread the invitation to their respective language communities.

This week, the Legal team continued its discussion on the relicensing controversy of the python-chardet package. The library was rewritten using an LLM, and the maintainer relicensed it from LGPL-2.1-or-later, first to MIT and subsequently to 0BSD. The conversation explored whether the LLM-generated code could be considered a derivative work of the original LGPL code and the general copyrightability of AI-generated code. A second discussion was initiated to correctly identify the license of the XSD package. The license was determined not to be GPL-2.0-only WITH Universal-FOSS-exception-1.0, but rather a variant of an older MySQL F(L)OSS exception that is not yet available in Fedora's license data.

Decisions Taken

  • Regarding the XSD package, the packager was instructed to open an issue to have the specific license reviewed for inclusion in Fedora.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL team met to discuss several ongoing packaging efforts. Preparations are underway for the EPEL 10.1 End of Life in May, with updates to the Standard Operating Procedure documents in progress. A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to the challenges of managing LLVM versions. While llvm19 has been submitted for EPEL 9 and llvm20 is being worked on for EPEL 10, the team noted that CentOS Stream's early move to llvm21 could cause build issues and will require a llvm20 compatibility package. In a separate mailing list discussion, plans were announced to update the uv package to version 0.11.x in the EPEL 10 leading branch. This is a formally breaking update due to changes in its networking stack, but it is permitted under an existing policy exception and will follow the standard procedure for incompatible upgrades.

Decisions Taken

  • The combined update for ffmpeg and qt6 for EPEL 9 will be split due to its size and build failures with qt6-qtwebengine. The ffmpeg update will be handled first.

CentOS Hyperscale

During the CentOS Hyperscale SIG meeting on March 25th, the group discussed its recent cleanup of inactive members and repositories. The main technical focus was on the upcoming kernel rebase to version 6.19, which will include a proposal for a new Hyperscale config profile for ARK/CKI. The SIG also welcomed a new member, Licia (eseiker), who is interested in hardware enablement. A key discussion point was the potential for officially supporting AlmaLinux's "Kitten" project to foster greater collaboration and attract new contributors.

Decisions Taken

  • To keep packages in sync, the SIG will track the rawhide versions of dracut and selinux-policy.
  • A Hyperscale kernel config profile will be created in ARK as a proposal for CKI.
  • An RFC (Request for Comments) will be drafted to formalize support for AlmaLinux Kitten.

ELN

During the week, the ELN SIG met to discuss several key initiatives. The planned hardware baseline increase for EL 11 to POWER10 is currently blocked by CentOS Stream infrastructure, which still relies on POWER9; an updated schedule for this transition is expected in a few weeks. Progress on Hyperscale work is also stalled due to difficulties getting kernel configuration changes accepted, and a meeting with CKI team leadership is planned for mid-April to resolve this. Other topics included updates on bootc image work, the creation of an ELN organization on the new Forgejo instance, and a discussion on implementing email notifications for failed builds.

Decisions Taken

  • Regarding the new ELNBuildSync email notification feature for failed builds, the initial implementation will only send alerts to an internal automation list. This will allow the team to gauge the volume of notifications before considering sending them directly to Fedora package maintainers.

Atomic

This week, discussion continued in the long-running forum topic "Using updates-testing with rpm-ostree". The main subject is the difficulty users face when trying to test specific updates from the updates-testing repository on rpm-ostree based systems like Fedora Silverblue. This week's posts revived the conversation, with one user clarifying that the rpm-ostree override replace command can accept URLs to RPMs, not just local file paths. While this information could help streamline the testing process, it was acknowledged that the broader concerns about making the overall workflow more user-friendly still remain.

CoreOS

During the weekly Fedora CoreOS meeting, the team reviewed the progress of the Fedora 44 release, noting that the FCOS Test Week was underway before the final freeze. A significant discussion took place regarding a proposal to allow Afterburn to generate NetworkManager keyfiles. This would help on platforms like Hetzner that require an initial network connection to fetch metadata for the final network configuration, a complex topic that was tabled for further discussion. The team also addressed the need to increase the /boot partition size due to the growing initramfs. As a short-term solution, the team will prioritize investigating a reduction in the Ignition binary size, specifically by targeting its large Azure SDK dependency (Ignition #2045).

ARM

This week, the main focus was on testing and feedback for the new Raspberry Pi 5 images for Fedora 44. User testing confirmed the images are functional but highlighted that the CPU fan is not yet active due to missing kernel drivers for thermal control. It was also clarified that while USB disks are detected and work, booting from them is not yet supported. A significant discussion arose around disk partitioning defaults and user choice, leading to a proposal for a graphical "deployment helper" tool to streamline the process of moving the official Fedora image to NVMe storage.

An announcement was also circulated on the forum and the mailing list for the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, scheduled for March 30th.

AI & ML

This week, the SIG's main activity was a meeting focused on its future structure. The key discussion revolved around evolving the Special Interest Group (SIG) into a broader Working Group (WG) to encompass more AI-related activities. After a debate on naming (weighing "AI" for branding against "AI/ML" for inclusivity) a decision was made on the group's new name: AI/ML Working Group. It was also announced that ROCm 7.2.1 has been released and updates will soon be available in Rawhide. Separately, a forum discussion on NPU support saw renewed interest, with a user asking for an update on a potential setup guide, though no new progress was shared.

Security

This week's activity for the Security SIG centered on a mailing list discussion about troubleshooting SELinux issues. A user who upgraded a server to Fedora 43 encountered AVC denials that prevented dovecot and postfix from accessing SSL certificates. Community members provided extensive advice, suggesting the user check for correct file labels, review relevant SELinux booleans, and use tools like audit2allow and audit2why to generate policy instead of writing it manually. The importance of providing the actual AVC error messages from the audit log for effective support was emphasized.

The weekly security-sig meeting was a brief open floor session.

Go

This week, the Go SIG discussed the new organization on the Fedora Forge, which is now available at https://forge.fedoraproject.org/go. The SIG meeting also covered the timeline for pagure.io's decommissioning and the current limitations of the new forge. On the packaging front, a mailing list discussion addressed a significant build failure (FTBFS) for the Hugo package on Fedora 44. The issue, caused by linker changes affecting the wazero dependency, was resolved by applying a workaround. Other topics included a fix for a tinygo dependency issue and ongoing annocheck failures for some Go packages, which are being investigated.

Decisions Taken

Perl

This week, the Perl group's activity consisted of a single mailing list thread regarding a package update. Jitka Plesnikova submitted and merged a pull request to update the perl-XML-Parser package to version 2.51. The thread also included an informational post from the Packit Bot about its new role as the default CI system for Fedora.

Python

This week's discussion centered on the Request for Comments (RFC) for a new %pyproject_patch_dependency macro. This macro is intended to provide a standardized way for Fedora packagers to override upstream dependency constraints without manual patching. The conversation focused on feedback from Michael J Gruber regarding the specific behavior of the proposed actions. Key points included the naming of the drop_constraints action, the logic behind the operators used in set_upper (<) and set_lower (>=), and, most significantly, how actions like drop_upper and drop_lower should handle exact (==) and compatible (~=) version specifiers.

Following the feedback, several changes to the macro's behavior were agreed upon to make it more logical and less surprising for users.

Decisions

  • Applying drop_upper to an exact version (==V) or a compatible release (~=V) will now result in a lower-bound constraint (>=V).
  • Applying drop_lower to an exact version (==V) will result in an upper-bound constraint (<=V).
  • Applying drop_lower to a compatible release (~=V) will remove the constraint entirely due to the complexity of calculating the remaining effective upper bound.
  • It was clarified that drop_constraints correctly removes all constraints, including exclusions (!=), while drop_upper/drop_lower will preserve exclusions.

Other Discussions

  • Ibrahim Jamiu posted a detailed, step-by-step guide for Outreachy 32 applicants interested in the "Develop a SLM/LLM using Ramalama RAG" project. The guide is split into two phases: mandatory pre-requisite tasks to familiarize applicants with the Fedora community workflow (like setting up a FAS account and a blog), and the project-specific contribution phase. It provides clear instructions on how to complete and submit tasks.
  • Ibrahim Jamiu created a guide on how to set a Fedora profile picture using Libravatar, addressing common issues new contributors face. The guide explains the process of logging in via OpenID, uploading a picture, and provides a crucial fix for avatars not updating, which involves adding and verifying an email address. The community found the guide helpful and shared additional resources, including a video tutorial on the same topic.
  • Adam Williamson announced the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for March 30, 2026. The agenda includes reviewing 2 proposed blockers and 2 proposed freeze exceptions for the Final release. The announcement encourages community members to review and vote on the bugs beforehand to shorten the meeting.
  • Miroslav Suchý provided an update on the SPDX license compliance effort, reporting that only 13 packages remain non-compliant, all of which have pending pull requests. He noted that over a thousand packages still use non-allowed LicenseRef-Callaway-* tags and provided detailed instructions for maintainers on how to use scancode-toolkit to identify the correct SPDX license identifiers and update their spec files.
  • Michael McLean announced the release of Koji 1.36.0. Key new features include support for rpm v6, porting the web UI to Jinja2, and adding web visibility for repository requests.
  • Sarah Julia Kriesch announced a hands-on workshop about s390-tools for mainframes, scheduled for March 31, 2026. The session aims to teach Linux users how to interact with mainframe devices, covering topics like channel architecture, disks (zFCP and DASD), and networking. Participants are encouraged to get a free mainframe VM from the LinuxONE Community Cloud for the hands-on portion.
  • New packager Ruslan Bekenev requested to unretire and maintain the emacs-php-mode package. He created a releng ticket and asked for guidance on which branches to unretire, with Benson Muite suggesting that F43 should also be included as it is still maintained. The purpose of announcing this on the devel list is to check for any objections from previous maintainers or the community.
  • Michael Katzmann is seeking help with a package review for GPIB user libraries, which was blocked by an automated check flagging unversioned .so files. Petr Pisar pointed out that the issue was specifically with /usr/lib64/libgpib-guile.so and suggested it should be installed in a versioned, guile-specific directory. After making changes to resolve the automated check, Michael asked about the next steps to move the review forward.
  • Luya Tshimbalanga reported a build failure for Blender 5.1.0 on Fedora 43, which did not occur on F44 or Rawhide. The issue was traced back to an API change in the eigen3 library; the version in F43 is too old for Blender 5.1.0. Mamoru TASAKA provided a patch to fix the eigen3 issue and noted that nanovdb support would also need to be disabled on F43 due to an old openvdb version, which was deemed an acceptable trade-off.
  • Jerry James reported that a recent texlive-base update removed the tex(dvips) Provides, breaking dependencies for several packages like doxygen and hevea and causing build failures. Tom Callaway acknowledged it was an oversight while cleaning up other provides and committed to adding it back. Richard W.M. Jones had already patched hevea with a workaround, which can be reverted once the fix is in place.
  • Other discussions this week included the process of bringing OpenSSL 4.0 to Rawhide, continued discussion on the Lua 5.5 update and its impact on packages like Lmod, and troubleshooting missing XPM image support in Glycin which is causing issues for applications like claws-mail and xsane.

Orphaning packages

  • James Richardson is orphaning kmetronome and sonivox due to a lack of time.
  • Mateus R. Costa announced an indefinite pause from contributing to Fedora for personal reasons. He has now completed orphaning his packages, including bbox-firago-fonts and bign-handheld-thumbnailer.
  • In the weekly orphaned packages report, concerns were raised about the potential retirement of pcre due to its many direct and indirect dependencies, including coccinelle and KDE libraries. Another thread highlighted that a long dependency chain starting with the orphaned jdependency package could potentially lead to the retirement of glibc.
  • Following the discussion about pcre being orphaned, Richard W.M. Jones and Olaf Hering collaborated to update the coccinelle package to use pcre2 instead of pcre. The necessary patches were applied, and a new build of coccinelle was successfully completed, resolving its dependency on the orphaned package.

Package updates

  • Ben Beasley announced plans to update the uv package to version 0.11.x in F43, F42, and the EPEL10 leading branch. This is a formally breaking update due to changes in the networking stack, but it is permitted under an existing policy exception.
  • Antonio Trande announced that superlu_dist 9.2.1 is coming to Fedora 44, Rawhide, and EPEL10. This version includes an API change, requiring rebuilds for dependent packages like freefem++, hypre, and petsc.
  • Joonas Sarajärvi is planning to update rtmidi to version 6.0.0 in Rawhide, which includes a SONAME bump. He has created a side tag and is seeking assistance from maintainers or provenpackagers to rebuild the dependent packages furnace and milkytracker.
  • Fabio Valentini reported that 18 packages in Fedora 44 are older than their versions in Fedora 43, leading to downgrades on system upgrade. He requested help from provenpackagers to build the correct versions for F44, as maintainers have been unresponsive. The discussion also highlighted other version discrepancies between Rawhide and F44.

New contributor introductions

  • Ananya Nalavathu introduced herself as a new Community Architect at Red Hat, with a background in both DevOps and marketing.
  • Tharun SDR, a computer science student with experience in web development, AI/RAG pipelines, and self-hosting, introduced himself and expressed interest in contributing to Fedora.
  • Victor Akoh and Akriti Sengar introduced themselves as Outreachy applicants, detailing their skills and interest in contributing to the Fedora Badges and LLM/RAG projects, respectively.
  • Raunak Rose, a computer science student with experience in web development and DevOps, recently switched to Fedora and is eager to start contributing, preferably to projects using Go or Rust.

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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