From March 30 to April 05

The primary focus across the Fedora Project was the upcoming Fedora 44 release, which has now entered its "Final Freeze." This prompted numerous teams, including Quality, Workstation, Server, Releng, and ARM, to concentrate on release quality by holding "Blocker Review Meetings" to triage critical bugs. Alongside release preparations, a major project-wide infrastructure change was a common theme: the successful migration to the new Fedora Forge platform, powered by Forgejo, which is now the primary workflow tool for groups like Mindshare and the Security SIG. Looking forward, significant discussions took place around new initiatives, such as a proposal for an "AI Developer Desktop" and a debate over a "Fedora Verified" membership system. Collaborative, cross-team efforts were also evident in the community-driven work to improve Raspberry Pi 5 support, while discussions on improving user experience, particularly the unmaintained ABRT bug reporting tool, highlighted a focus on quality of life for users and developers.

📣 Announcements

This week, the Fedora Project is focused on the upcoming Fedora 44 release, which has now entered its Final Freeze. This means only packages fixing accepted blocker or freeze exception bugs will be included in the final release, currently scheduled for April 14, 2026. The weekly Community Update provided details on this and other activities, including progress on the Forgejo migration, a discussion on a proposed "AI Developer Desktop" objective, and a major update to the Bodhi service. Additionally, a brief, 30-minute planned outage for Fedora's Matrix services was announced for April 6, 2026, for scheduled maintenance.

The Fedora Code of Conduct Committee published its annual reports for both 2023 and 2024, catching up on its transparency reporting. The reports indicate a positive trend in community health, with a steady decrease in the number of incidents reported over the last few years (17 in 2023 and 11 in 2024). While the 2023 report noted more decisive actions were taken on high-impact issues, the overall data suggests a stabilizing community environment. The 2024 report also announced the addition of three new members to the committee.

Council

A new Fedora AI Developer Desktop Objective was proposed to improve the experience for AI developers on Fedora. The initiative suggests creating a dedicated Atomic spin, potentially including an LTS kernel, and pre-configured support for hardware acceleration, which involves building and signing NVIDIA's open-source kernel module. The proposal sparked a detailed discussion covering the technical feasibility and policy implications of shipping an LTS kernel and out-of-tree modules, concerns about promoting proprietary software like CUDA, and the potential for collaboration with existing community efforts like Universal Blue. Ethical and legal questions regarding the training data of Large Language Models (LLMs) were also raised.

The conversation continued on the proposal for a “Fedora Verified” Membership. This week, contributors voiced concerns that the proposed system could discourage participation and act as a form of gatekeeping, running counter to the goal of increasing contributors. It was argued that the problem of inactive voters influencing elections is not a current issue and that the idea of expiring a contributor's status should be scrapped. An alternative was suggested: to decentralize recognition and allow different Fedora teams (like Docs or QA) to define their own criteria for active contribution to grant voting rights, making it easier for non-packaging contributors to participate in governance.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held one meeting where they rejected the Change proposal to use systemd for managing per-user environment variables, citing a lack of consideration for environments without systemd. The change owner was encouraged to revise and resubmit the proposal.

In the forums, discussions continued on several topics. For the F45 Change to update python-setuptools to version 82+, a plan was outlined to create a compatibility package (python-setuptools80) and a separate python3-pkg-resources subpackage. This will help maintainers of the ~130 affected packages transition away from the deprecated pkg_resources module. Other discussions included the technical feasibility of transport-independent updates using technologies like IPFS, and the next steps for implementing the already-approved DRM Panic Frontend, which now requires infrastructure support for hosting.

Decisions

Packaging Committee

During its weekly meeting, the Packaging Committee approved an update to the Python packaging guidelines related to PEP 704. The committee also discussed the potential impact of a project-wide forge migration on packaging guidelines, but is awaiting further direction before taking any action. Elsewhere, a technical discussion on the packaging mailing list explored challenges with linking static Rust libraries against specific glibc versions, providing insight for packagers working with Rust.

Decisions

  • The committee approved an update to the Python Packaging Guidelines to support require-extra from PEP 704.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare group focused on the major infrastructure transition to Fedora Forge, powered by Forgejo. The Mindshare meeting confirmed the migration from GitLab was a success, and the committee is now exclusively using Forgejo for its workflow. This shift coincides with the start of Q2, which makes new funding available for community initiatives. Other significant news included the publication of the 2023 Fedora Code of Conduct annual report and the welcoming of four new members to the CommOps team.

In the CommOps meeting, an urgent need for help was identified for the upcoming Fedora Linux 44 Release Party. Due to a capacity crisis, volunteers are needed for communications and speaker outreach. The Mindshare committee is also beginning work on action items from the recent Fedora Council Strategy Summit, with tasks to be completed before Flock 2026. A summary of the Mindshare meeting was also posted on the discussion forum.

Decisions

Diversity & Inclusion

The Diversity & Inclusion team continued discussions on organizing the Fedora Mentor Summit at Flock 2026. A vote related to the summit is underway and expected to be finalized shortly. The call for volunteers to help with planning and on-site activities remains open, and new contributors have offered their assistance.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation Working Group held a meeting where they decided against reinstating the ABRT crash reporting UI for Fedora 44 due to backend issues and a lack of developer support. The group will now explore alternatives, including potentially using Canonical's Apport. They also discussed a proposal for a consistent default wallpaper style across all Fedora editions, with plans to consult other desktop teams like KDE and Cosmic. Preparations for the Fedora 44 release continued with a blocker review meeting where several bugs were triaged. Other key discussions included a report on IPv6 connectivity issues in networks with non-persistent prefixes, which has been reported upstream to NetworkManager.

Contributors are invited to join the upcoming Workstation Working Group meeting on April 7 to discuss replacing the Fedora Flatpak repository, and the next Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting on April 6. Those interested in the IPv6 issue can follow the upstream ticket.

Decisions

KDE

This week's discussions centered on preparations for the Fedora 44 release and improving the user experience. During the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, a critical bug causing text corruption in KDE editors like Kwrite and Kate was accepted as a release blocker. A significant point of feedback came from a new user on Fedora KDE who detailed a frustrating experience with the bug reporting workflow, citing confusing tools, privacy concerns, and high friction. The response clarified that the primary reporting tool (ABRT) is largely unmaintained, highlighting a major area for potential contributor involvement. On the hardware front, progress continues on Raspberry Pi 5 support, with new test images for Fedora 44, including a KDE version, now available for community testing and feedback.

Decisions

Server

This week's activity focused on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 release and a technical discussion on IPv6 address handling. A Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting was held to triage bugs, leading to several decisions on release-blocking issues. A significant community discussion arose concerning IPv6 address selection behavior in networks with non-persistent prefixes, where Fedora may not default to the newest, functional address. This issue has been reported upstream to the NetworkManager project.

Contributors interested in networking can follow the upstream NetworkManager ticket regarding the IPv6 issue. Community members are also invited to participate in the release process by joining the next Blocker Review Meeting to help ensure the quality of the upcoming Fedora 44 release.

Decisions

The following decisions were made during the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting:

  • Accepted as Final Blocker:
    • #2449945: KDE editor (kwrite, kate...) corrupts text on selection.
  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exceptions:
    • #2444726: Workstation live Installer sometimes apparently freezes near the end, logs indicate install actually completed.
    • #2450672: Black screen after installing a number of updates including dpkg + grub.

Infrastructure

The team announced that the Fedora 44 Final Infrastructure freeze is now in effect to ensure stability for the upcoming release. A planned outage for fedora.im and Matrix services was announced for Monday, April 6th. Key operational discussions this week included investigating poor rsync transfer rates reported by Tier 1 mirror providers and a detailed review of the monthly AWS usage report, which highlighted unusually high costs for the 'ci' group that are now under investigation. The routine report on untagged AWS resources was also published.

To address confusion caused by Daylight Saving Time, a proposal was made to change the weekly meeting time. The team continues to welcome new contributors, with introductions from Rahul Kumar Singh and Ravindra Lakal. Regular work continued in the daily standups and the main weekly meeting with ticket reviews and backlog refinement.

Decisions

  • A public discussion was initiated to move the weekly Infrastructure meeting time to 15:00 UTC to better accommodate attendees and handle Daylight Saving Time changes. The discussion is taking place on the mailing list and the discussion forum.

Releng

This week, the Releng team focused on internal processes and preparations for the Fedora 44 release. The main Releng meeting on March 30th covered the init process, referencing several tickets including #13273, and discussed choosing the next team chair. In the wider community, the focus was on release quality with the announcement of Fedora 44 Blocker Review meetings. These meetings offer a key opportunity for contributors to get involved by reviewing and voting on bugs that could delay the release. The meeting on March 30th resulted in several decisions on proposed blockers, with another meeting scheduled for April 6th to review the remaining issues.

Decisions

During the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting on March 30, the following decisions were made regarding release-critical bugs:

  • Accepted as Final Blocker:
    • #2449945: KDE editor (kwrite, kate...) corrupts text on selection.
  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exceptions:
    • #2444726: Workstation live Installer sometimes apparently freezes near the end.
    • #2450672: Black screen after installing a number of updates including dpkg + grub.

Quality

This week, the Quality team's focus was heavily on the upcoming Fedora 44 release, as the Final Freeze went into effect on March 31. In the weekly blocker review meeting, several bugs were discussed, resulting in one new accepted blocker and two new freeze exceptions. The regular team meeting noted that the Test Day cycle for F44 is largely complete, with low attendance at the recent CoreOS Test Days.

A significant forum discussion was initiated by a new user who provided detailed feedback on the bug reporting workflow, describing it as "broken and hostile to non-experts." The detailed response explained the history and current unmaintained status of the ABRT "Problem Reporting" tool, shedding light on the challenges of maintaining such complex systems. Contributor opportunities this week include testing nightly composes and participating in the upcoming Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting on April 6.

Decisions

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

  • Accepted as Final Blocker:
    • #2449945 - KDE editor (kwrite, kate...) corrupts text on selection.
  • Accepted as Final Freeze Exception:
    • #2444726 - Workstation live Installer sometimes apparently freezes near the end.
    • #2450672 - Black screen after installing a number of updates including dpkg + grub.
  • Decision Delayed (Punted):
    • #2451701 - ngtcp2-crypto-gnutls dependency issue.
    • #2448283 - Selecting a non-ASCII capable keyboard layout should automatically also select US English as a second layout.
    • #2453005 - systemd-oomd.service is not enabled on some systems.

Design

A forum discussion this week centered on feedback from a new user who found the bug reporting process in Fedora KDE to be confusing, fragmented, and difficult. The user detailed issues with having two separate crash reporting applications, the high resource usage and broken automation of the "Problem Reporting" tool (ABRT), privacy concerns, and the high-friction experience of using Bugzilla. In response, it was clarified that the ABRT tool is now effectively unmaintained and has already been removed from the main Workstation edition, which explains many of the user's issues. The discussion also provided context on the technical and security challenges that shaped the current workflow, such as the difficulty of automatically sanitizing private data and security policies affecting Bugzilla logins.

Internationalization

The Internationalization team held its weekly meeting to review ongoing issues, including tracking bugs for Fonts, preparing for Fedora 44 changes, and triaging bugs for Fedora 42. A key topic of discussion was the potential migration from Pagure to Fedora Forge. On the mailing lists, a new component, rhc, a CLI tool for RHEL and Fedora, was announced and is now available on Weblate, providing a new translation opportunity for contributors. Additionally, a query about Pulseaudio translations not syncing was addressed, confirming that the sync was working as expected and the latest contributions were pending an upstream merge.

EPEL

The EPEL Steering Committee met this week to discuss ongoing issues and old business. The committee noted there has been no progress on the python-qrcode rebase in EPEL 9 due to an incompatibility request with python-django-allauth. During the open floor discussion, a releng issue was also brought to the group's attention.

ELN

The ELN group held one meeting this week, with the main topic being the ELNBuildSync (EBS) tool. Progress on EBS was discussed, with several enhancements and bugfixes having been implemented. Ongoing work includes the development of a database resume feature to improve the tool's robustness. An opportunity for contribution was identified in creating an Ansible deployment for EBS, which will facilitate its setup and management.

Decisions

  • jcline will collaborate with sgallagh to create the Ansible deployment for ELNBuildSync.

Atomic

The Atomic group held one meeting this week, focusing on improving cross-team collaboration and formalizing its structure. The main discussion centered on creating a formal working group proposal and establishing a monthly video sync call to engage with other Fedora teams, WGs, and SIGs. This initiative aims to enhance coordination on topics like image sealing and DNF builds.

Decisions

  • The team agreed to move away from managing users and groups with nss-altfiles. The new implementation will use the plan outlined in bootc work item #87 as a starting point.

CoreOS

During the weekly Fedora CoreOS meeting, the team reviewed the upcoming Fedora 44 release schedule and its associated blocker bugs. A key decision was made to increase the release frequency for the next stream to a weekly cadence. This change aims to accelerate development and testing cycles. The team also discussed a proposal to use Afterburn for generating NetworkManager connection profiles, which is being tracked in issue #2126 on the tracker.

Decisions

  • The release rotation document will be updated to reflect a move to weekly releases for the next stream.

IoT

The IoT SIG's weekly meeting focused on the release status across the Stable (Fedora 43), Freeze (Fedora 44), and Rawhide (Fedora 45) branches. The team reviewed the latest OpenQA test results for all active versions and discussed the list of blocker bugs for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. Contributors are encouraged to help with testing and bug fixing to ensure a smooth release. The team also reviewed the list of open issues on GitHub for ongoing development and bug tracking.

ARM

This week's activity centered on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 44 release. The main event was the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting, where several bugs were reviewed to determine if they should block the final release. An important ARM-specific issue, a Raspberry Pi 4 failure to boot from USB, remains an accepted blocker awaiting a fix. In parallel, there was significant progress in the ongoing discussion about Raspberry Pi 5 images for Fedora 44. A community member shared a working implementation of kernel-level fan and thermal control for the RPi5. The response clarified that the official strategy is to integrate patches only after they are reviewed and accepted upstream, highlighting the long-term goal of mainline support.

Contributors interested in Fedora QA are encouraged to participate in the next Blocker Review meeting on 2026-04-06. Testing and feedback on the experimental Raspberry Pi 5 images also remain a key opportunity for engagement.

AI & ML

The AI & ML SIG's activity this week centered on the ongoing discussion about Figuring out NPU support in Fedora. A new post clarified the timeline for full NPU enablement, noting that the complete stack is expected to be functional in Fedora 44 and newer. This timeline breaks down as follows: kernel driver support was added in Fedora 40-42, the system-provided OpenVINO in Fedora 43, and the final piece, the userspace NPU driver, is targeted for Fedora 44. For those with the necessary hardware, the post also provided a way for contributors and users to test for NPU detection by using the python3-openvino package.

RISC-V

The RISC-V SIG held a brief meeting this week. The primary topic of discussion was the observation that GCC 16 builds are taking longer than GCC 15 builds. This performance regression is currently being investigated.

Security

The Security SIG held its weekly meeting to discuss its initial processes and review open tickets. A key topic was whether the fedora-downstream-hardening project should be moved to the new Fedora Forge instance. Community members interested in this topic are encouraged to provide their feedback on the corresponding ticket. The group also reviewed other issues on their new ticket tracker.

Other Discussions

  • Ibrahim Olawoyin posted a detailed, illustrated guide on how to set up a Fedora Linux environment on Windows using WSL. Following community feedback, the guide was updated to include a comparison between WSL1 and WSL2 and their respective features on Windows 10 and 11.
  • A step-by-step guide was created for Outreachy applicants interested in the RamaLama RAG project. The guide details a two-phase contribution process, starting with mandatory prerequisite tasks like setting up a FAS account and a blog, before moving on to project-specific contributions.
  • Mercy Njeri Kimaru shared a beginner-friendly guide on how to contribute and create a pull request. The ensuing discussion highlighted the difference between proprietary tools like VS Code and open-source alternatives, recommending VSCodium as a community-driven, telemetry-free option for development.
  • The introduction thread for the Outreachy 2026 "Revamp Fedora Badges" project saw continued activity. A link to a recorded onboarding session was shared, and several more applicants introduced themselves. A meeting retrospective was also posted, summarizing key decisions, such as allowing self-assignment of issues and prohibiting the use of AI for writing code contributions.
  • Adam Williamson announced the Fedora 44 Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for April 6, 2026. The meeting aimed to review proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the Final release, with a call for community members to vote on bugs beforehand to streamline the process.
  • Miroslav Suchý published the monthly list of new packages added to Fedora Linux during March 2026. The extensive list included a wide range of software, from the 86box PC emulator and gcc15 to a large number of new Rust crates.
  • A discussion was initiated to update the Nonresponsive Maintainer Policy to better handle cases where a maintainer's email or Bugzilla account is invalid. Proposed changes include removing the requirement for a bug report in such instances and streamlining the FESCo ticket submission process. A draft pull request with the updated policy was created for review.
  • The Koji 1.36.0 release was announced, featuring significant updates like rpm v6 support and a port of the web UI to jinja2. A subsequent warning was issued regarding a critical bug in draft build promotion for users with storage volumes, with a workaround provided until a fix is released in 1.36.1.
  • The ongoing discussion about the future of OpenStack client packages in Fedora continued, with a link to the OpenStack SIG's Matrix room being shared to facilitate communication with new and interested maintainers.
  • Other discussions this week included an April Fool's joke about a DNF5 plugin for mandatory age verification.

New Contributor Introductions

  • Bhanu Bhattarai, a four-year Fedora user with interests in game development and mountain biking, introduced themself and expressed a desire to contribute to the community.
  • Peter Blackman, a long-time Linux user and hobbyist developer, introduced themself with an interest in packaging Lazarus applications and noted they have three package review requests awaiting sponsorship.
  • A new welcome message was posted in the self-introduction thread for Ananya Nalavathu, who recently joined Red Hat as a Community Architect.

Package Updates

  • Ben Beasley gave a heads-up about the upcoming update of python-starlette to version 1.0.0 in F45/Rawhide. This stable release includes API changes, and an impact check was performed to identify and address incompatibilities in dependent packages.
  • The petsc package is being updated to release 3.25.0 in Rawhide, which will involve a soversion bump and require several dependent packages like bout++ and sundials to be rebuilt.
  • An update for the fmt library to version 12.1.0 was announced for Rawhide, which includes a soversion bump from .11 to .12. This change necessitates a rebuild of all 75 dependent packages, and pull requests have been submitted for those requiring patches.
  • The discussion on bringing OpenSSL 4.0 to Rawhide continued. To prepare for the transition, Dmitry Belyavskiy requested admin access to the existing openssl3 package to use it as a compatibility package. He later encountered a permissions issue with the disabled rawhide branch and opened a releng ticket to resolve it.
  • The pasdoc package was updated to version 1.0.2, and as part of the update, its License tag was corrected from a simple GPL-2.0-or-later to a more accurate and complex combination of licenses.
  • Following the rtmidi 6.0.0 update and SONAME bump, it was discovered that the newly added 86box package, which depends on it, was missed during the rebuild process and is now broken in Rawhide. A request was made to the package maintainer for a rebuild.
  • In the thread about missing package updates on Fedora 44, several provenpackagers stepped in to fix downgrades for packages like snapd, tmux-top, and inspektor-gadget by creating the necessary builds and Bodhi updates.
  • An older discussion about Fedora 43+ containers breaking on ChromeOS due to the removal of cgroup-v1 support in systemd received an update. It was noted that ChromeOS is transitioning to a new "Baguette" containerless VM, which will replace the Crostini/LXD subsystem and remove the ability to run non-Debian guests.

Orphaning Packages

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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