fidzu : Fedora

01 Oct 2026 8:00pm GMT

01 Oct 2026 6:00am GMT

30 Sep 2026 10:00pm GMT

If your project has a domain, you may accept inbound email. And if you accept inbound email, you may offer email addresses to contributors. And this can get complicated.

In 2026, you are almost certainly not running a full-fledged mail service for your project. By which I mean you don't provide accounts that can send, receive, and store email from a server that you run. Because we cannot behave ourselves, the email industry has attempted to adopt stronger security practices. The end result of which is that if you're running your own email server, a lot of the mail you send gets send to the recipient's spam folder (or worse: dropped by the server). This is 100% not a valuable use of time for an open source project. But just because you're not running a full email system, that doesn't mean you can't give your contributors aliases that point to their real inboxes.

Why would you do this? Well, it can be a (basically) free way to reward regular contributors. Giving them a project email address is a form of recognition. It's a status symbol that they can take pride in. Plus, it has some practical advantages. They can use it as a filtering tool: mail sent to bcotton@coolfossproject.example.org may end up in the same account as all of my other email, but I can filter anything sent to that address to my "Cool FOSS Project" folder. It's also a signal to others that I am doing work on behalf of the project.

Unfortunately, the asymmetry of email services makes this (particularly the last time) less effective than it once was. A lot of people, myself included, would use the project email alias in a "send as" setup so that we could not only receive email using the alias, but (appear to) send it, as well. A big chunk of the world uses GMail for email, and GMail will no longer support sending from third-party addresses beginning in January 2027.

So should you still provide project emails? I wouldn't go out of the way to at this point. But if you have the pieces in place for other reasons, it's a nice thing to offer your contributors.

This post's featured photo by Thanhy Nguyen on Unsplash.

The post Providing project emails appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

30 Sep 2026 12:00pm GMT

It has been a while since my last post. I am still recovering from a serious illness and major operation. I will be posting more now I am better and truly on the mend.

Coming up will be some new projects using Single Board Computers (SBCs) and also some robotics work.

30 Sep 2026 10:03am GMT

Version 8.6.0 Release Candidate 2 has been released. It's now entering the stabilisation phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users.

RPMs are available in the php:remi-8.6 stream for Fedora ≥ 43 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, CentOS, Alma, Rocky...) and as Software Collection in the remi-safe repository (or remi for Fedora)

⚠️ The repository provides development versions which are not suitable for production usage.

Also read: PHP 8.6 as Software Collection

ℹ️ Installation : follow the Wizard instructions.

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.6 installation, module way (simplest way):

Using dnf 4 on Enterprise Linux

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.6/common

Using dnf 5 on Fedora

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.6
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.6 as Software Collection (recommended for tests):

dnf install php86

⚠️ To be noticed :

• EL-10 RPMs are built using RHEL-10.2
• EL9 rpm are build using RHEL-9.8
• EL8 rpm are build using RHEL-8.10
• lot of extensions are also available, see the PHP extension RPM status page and PHP version 8.6 tracker
• follow the comments on this page for update until final version
• will be proposed as a Fedora 46 change

ℹ️ Information, read:

• UPGRADING
• UPGRADING.INTERNALS

Base packages (php)

Software Collections (php84)

30 Sep 2026 6:08am GMT

The Fedora QA team invites you to participate in the Anaconda F45 features Test Week, which is running now through October 2, 2026. There is still time to jump in this week and help us shape the Fedora 45 installer before it ships.

What's New in the Anaconda F45 Installer

Fedora 45 brings three significant changes to how you install the system. Each one is ready for real-world testing - and better testing means a better installer.

• WebUI for Atomic Desktops - The modern web-based installer now covers the Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, and the Cosmic/Sway/Budgie Atomic variants). See the Change page.
• Remote WebUI - You can now drive an installation from another device entirely, straight from a browser. See the Change page.
• Stratis support - The WebUI can now configure Stratis storage. See the Change page and the introduction on Fedora Magazine.

How to Participate

Requirements

• A virtual machine or a spare bare-metal box - not a production machine and not one with data you care about.
• The latest Fedora 45 nightly image (nightly images or the development mirror).
• A little time between now and October 2.

Start here

The Anaconda Test Week is running now through October 2, 2026. We have prepared easy-to-follow steps for you here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2026-09-28_Anaconda_F45_features

If you need any help, community contacts are listed on that page too.

Learn more:

• Anaconda F45 features Test Day wiki
• Test cases and results
• WebUI for Atomic Desktops Change
• Remote WebUI Change
• Stratis support Change

The post Anaconda F45 features Test Week appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

29 Sep 2026 2:08pm GMT

On September 19, 2026, the Fedora Project supported the conduct of Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026. The event took place at the Northern Bukidnon State College, Manolo Fortich, Philippines.

Now in its second run, Software Freedom Day Bukidnon gathered students, professionals, educators, and community members to explore how Free and Open Source Software can empower innovation, digital inclusion, and impact their daily lives, primarily in the province of Bukidnon, Philippines. Despite the challenges like power outage, the event was a massive success, demonstrating the local community's resilience and passion for open technology.

Event Highlights

The event features an impressive speaker lineup, with presentations spanning foundational Open Source principles and cutting-edge technology trends.

Linux and Open Systems

Hello Fedora by Paul Harriet Asiñero - This session introduced attendees to Fedora Linux, highlighting its pivotal role in driving Open Source innovation. Participants explored the power, robust security, and exceptional flexibility that make it one of the world's premier Open Source operating systems.

Introduction to Automotive Grade Linux by Walt Miner - Attendees received an exciting look at how Open Source technology has moved beyond PCs and servers, driving the software systems that power modern smart vehicles.

Art and the Developer Workflow

Harnessing Krita For Fun and Profit by Romar Mayer Micabalo - Proving that Open Source is just as crucial for creatives as it is for developers, this talk walked attendees through building a career or hobby using Krita, a premier Open Source digital painting tool.

5 Cool Open Source Tools to Pimp Out Your Windows CLI by Jay Ginete - A practical guide for developers stuck on proprietary systems, showing how to upgrade a boring terminal into an Open Source-powered developer powerhouse.

The AI and Data Pipeline

Local LLMs: My 8GB VRAM vs the World by Arjay Sitoy - In a highly relevant, budget-conscious session, this talk demonstrated how developers can break free from corporate API reliance by running powerful Large Language Models locally on standard consumer hardware.

Practical Agentic Coding with OpenCode by Roger Madjos - Shifting from consumption to creation, this session showed developers how to leverage Open Source AI agents to actively write and debug code. Attendees walked away with a practical blueprint for turning agentic coding into a reliable, secure, and repeatable development workflow that delivers value faster without compromising quality.

Building a Second Brain: Turning Information into Leverage by Rafael Tibudan - Explored how to use knowledge management, AI, and automation to build a digital "second brain." The session shared simple, scalable strategies to transform past code bugs, research notes, and AI conversations into a personal knowledge base.

Orchestration Still Matters: Apache Airflow in the Age of AI by Wei Lee - Attendees got a deep dive into the backend infrastructure powering modern technology. The talk drove home a crucial point: even as artificial intelligence dominates the headlines, leveraging Apache Airflow to control and orchestrate the data pipelines and workflows powering AI applications remains absolutely vital to AI success.

Page Follow Bingo Game and Raffle Draw

In addition to the engaging sessions, the event featured a Page Follow Bingo Game and an exciting raffle for all attendees. The Bingo game was designed to boost engagement for our event sponsors and partners by encouraging participants to follow their official pages, with the first five to complete the task being crowned winners. The event wrapped up with a raffle draw featuring an array of prizes generously contributed by our sponsors. The raffle was conducted using pyraffle, an Open Source raffle draw software executed within a notebook environment.

Final Thoughts

Despite the challenges, Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026 was a resounding success! An impactful movement like this cannot happen in isolation. As we look back on the success of this year's event, our deepest gratitude goes out to the incredible individuals and organizations who helped bring this vision to life.

Event Sponsors and Partners

This event was made possible through the generous support of our partners and sponsors. In addition to the Fedora Project, we would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the following organizations:

Aside from the participating organizations, we would like to express our gratitude to an anonymous donor for providing financial support for the event.

Speakers

Thank you for sharing your time, passion, and unparalleled expertise. You gave our community tangible frameworks to work with, sparking ideas that will undoubtedly fuel local tech innovation for months to come.

Event Volunteers

Volunteers are the backbone of Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026, driving everything from pre-event preparations to post-event operations. We are proud to recognize the dedicated individuals who made this success possible:

Participants

Thank you for taking the time out of your weekend to show up, engage, and learn. Your energy, thoughtful questions, and collaborative spirit are what give life to the FOSS movement in Bukidnon. You are the future of our digital landscape, a thriving ecosystem where the veterans lift up the rookies, passing the torch to ensure the next generation keeps pushing boundaries.

The event has wrapped up, but our mission continues. The Free and Open Source Software movement in Bukidnon thrives because of community advocates and supporters like you. As we look ahead to the return of Software Freedom Day next September, we invite you to join us as a participant, volunteer, sponsor, or partner. Together, we can empower local tech ecosystems and drive collaborative innovation.

The post Fedora Shines Blue at Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026 appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

29 Sep 2026 12:00pm GMT

28 Sep 2026 1:28pm GMT

28 Sep 2026 1:06pm GMT

28 Sep 2026 11:24am GMT

Across the Fedora community this week, the primary focus is squarely on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 45 Final release, with groups including Workstation, KDE, Release Engineering, and Quality heavily engaged in blocker bug reviews, freeze exception evaluations, and rigorous test days ahead of the imminent October 6 infrastructure freeze. Concurrently, teams are bracing for a massive planned infrastructure outage scheduled for October 1, 2026, which coincides with foundational planning to move dist-git from Pagure to Fedora Forge. Another prominent, community-wide theme is the spirited debate over opting into a new LLM-powered weekly reporting tool; groups like EPEL, Websites and Apps, and RISC-V approved data collection with varying privacy boundaries, while the Kernel and CoreOS members negotiated compromises for their channels. Finally, foundational housekeeping remains a shared priority, highlighted by the Packaging Committee's drive to simplify snapshot versioning rules and FESCo's ongoing efforts to standardize packager workflows and evaluate long-term Bugzilla replacements.

Announcements

Fedora 45 is bringing modern local storage management to the forefront, as the Anaconda installer will now feature built-in support for Stratis storage (detailed further in a companion Fedora Magazine article), allowing users to easily configure pools and filesystems via the Cockpit Web UI or Kickstart. On the hardware side, Fedora Podcast Episode 061 explores the successful collaboration to ship the Framework Laptop 12 with Fedora KDE pre-installed, highlighting upstream kernel bug fixes that benefit the broader Linux ecosystem. The community also shared excellent technical resources this week, including a highly portable guide for installing the Navidrome music server using Podman and a comprehensive deep dive into BTRFS maintenance, Snapper configurations, and drive balancing.

To ensure contributors are prepared for upcoming maintenance and avoid disruptive surprises, please note a planned infrastructure outage scheduled for October 1, 2026, at 20:00 UTC. The downtime will last approximately six hours to apply necessary system updates and reboot servers. While most services will only experience brief interruptions, some may be unavailable for a longer period due to firmware upgrades.

Council

The primary focus of the Council this week was advancing the new Fedora Forge Usage Policy to a formal vote. After incorporating community feedback over several weeks, the policy is designed to govern the scope, access, and resource limits of the Fedora Forge infrastructure. Council members have until September 30, 2026, to cast their votes, requiring full consensus to pass.

Additionally, during the Council meeting, members celebrated the release of the Fedora 45 beta and noted that the Fedora 45 Final freeze will begin on October 6. In open floor discussions, the Council also deliberated on a proposed Conflict of Interest policy and discussed how to improve escalation and mediation pathways from project groups like FESCo and Mindshare to the Council.

Decisions

• The Council formally agreed that they are satisfied with the latest version of the Fedora Forge Usage Policy and have moved it to a formal vote in Ticket #581. Voting is due by September 30, 2026, and requires full consensus (+3 votes, and no -1 votes) to pass.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

FESCo's week focused heavily on finalizing system changes for the upcoming Fedora 45 release, managing the ongoing Bugzilla migration investigation, and addressing packager workflows. The committee evaluated the status of several incomplete F45 changes and approved a critical, late-stage security update for libxml2. They also discussed concerns regarding meeting quorum and attendance, deciding to reach out directly to inactive members before pursuing formal policy adjustments.

Extensive discussions took place asynchronously regarding the eventual replacement of Fedora's Bugzilla instance, with members heavily debating whether to migrate to a modernized upstream Bugzilla or transition to Forgejo. Key considerations included the preservation of historical data, necessary API integrations, and cross-component query capabilities. Additionally, FESCo addressed community concerns regarding AI-generated upstream code in the proposed oo7 secrets service provider and debated new performance baseline requirements for alternative architectures hosted in the main Koji instance.

Decisions

• Approved a policy exemption to upgrade libxml2 to 2.15.4 in F45 to address critical security vulnerabilities, deciding to treat it as an Updates Policy exception rather than retargeting the official Change proposal.
• Agreed to publish a reminder to provenpackagers clarifying that converting packages to %autorelease or %autochangelog does not constitute a "general cleanup" and strictly requires prior maintainer consent.
• Declared the Filter Fedora Flatpaks for Atomic Desktop v2 Change as complete, with Aoife Moloney tasked to update the Bugzilla and wiki entries to reflect the correct release target.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee focused heavily on cleaning up and simplifying the packaging guidelines, with RPM versioning rules as a major theme. A recent incident involving the bluez package-where non-standard snapshot versioning broke upgrade paths and led to incorrectly waived test failures-highlighted the excessive complexity of the current snapshot guidelines. As a result, the committee is actively discussing standardizing on a single, highly simplified snapshot format to prevent packagers from making similar errors in the future.

Alongside the versioning simplification efforts, the committee handled several routine housekeeping tasks. These included proposing a new appendix page to declutter the main versioning guidelines, fixing typos in the OCaml guidelines, and completely updating outdated references to decommissioned Pagure instances across the documentation.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group evaluated new third-party software repository proposals this week, including LiveFaceSwap Desktop and 1Password. In community discussions, users highlighted issues with power management during offline upgrades on Ryzen laptops, and it was noted that the RPM package for Bottles is orphaned and slated for removal in Fedora 45+ unless a maintainer steps up.

Furthermore, the group is preparing for the Fedora 45 Blocker Review and is addressing concerns about stale appstream-data, which severely impacts GUI software stores like GNOME Software and KDE Discover if left unmaintained.

Decisions

• The working group voted to include 1Password as an approved third-party repository, pending the repository being correctly set up with AppStream repodata.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is urgently needed to automate the weekly updates for appstream-data, which currently depends on manual interventions. This is critical for the stability of graphical software centers in Fedora.
• Contributors are invited to review and vote on bugs for the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review to help expedite the upcoming Matrix meeting.
• The Bottles package is currently orphaned and requires a new maintainer to prevent its removal from Fedora 45+.
• The LiveFaceSwap Desktop application has been proposed as a third-party software repository and is open for community evaluation.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE SIG focused on modernizing the default package selection for Fedora KDE installations. Proposals currently under review include making k3b optional in favor of a lightweight USB ISO image writer like Fedora Media Writer, and dropping the akonadi-server-mysql backend from the default install. Because KDE Gear 26.04 now defaults to SQLite, removing the MySQL backend would reduce the installed footprint by approximately 184 MiB.

In the community forums, users are investigating a potential bug where startup and shutdown sounds continue to play despite being disabled in the system settings. Additionally, Fedora QA announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting, reminding community members that they can vote on proposed blockers in advance.

Contribution opportunities

• Vote on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions ahead of the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting using the blockerbugs app.
• Provide feedback on the SIG proposal to make k3b optional and include a modern USB ISO image writer in the default installation.
• Review the SIG proposal to drop akonadi-server-mysql from the default comps.
• Help troubleshoot and investigate a potential bug where startup and shutdown sounds cannot be disabled in Fedora 44 Plasma.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server group focused heavily on Fedora 45 release testing and finalizing their Ansible support strategy. System updates for Python 3.15, Perl 5.44, and MariaDB 12.3 have been successfully integrated and most F45 Branched installation tests (USB/NET, BIOS/UEFI) are passing smoothly. However, persistent partition type errors and initial-setup infinite boot loops remain unresolved for KVM Guest and ARM SBC images.

Concurrently, the group shaped the delivery mechanism for Fedora Server's Ansible automation. To accommodate both advanced administrators and everyday users, the team opted to provide standard Ansible collections alongside an opinionated, turnkey management wrapper designed to hide Ansible's complexity for regular single-node deployments.

Decisions

• The group will publish the core Fedora Server Ansible collection under the name fedoraserver.general to Ansible Galaxy before packaging it into Fedora via RPM (Ticket #265).
• The Server team will develop a separate, turnkey 'management project' package containing a purpose-built CLI, template playbooks, and a default inventory to simplify single-node server setups for users unfamiliar with Ansible (Meeting Log).
• Documentation articles in the 'Postinstallation Customizations' section will use single-word titles based on a working group vote (Meeting Log).

Contribution opportunities

• The Fedora QA team invites contributors to vote on proposed F45 blockers and freeze exceptions prior to the review meetings to help expedite the review process (Mailing list post).
• Assistance is needed in diagnosing an initial-setup infinite boot loop and incorrect LVM partition typings affecting the F45 KVM Guest and ARM SBC images.
• Community members are invited to review two newly submitted documentation articles regarding virtualization and creating a VM from a disk image (Meeting Log).

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team is preparing for a major planned outage on October 1st, which will involve mass updates, reboots, firmware upgrades, and database migrations (including RHEL 10 upgrades). In preparation, the team has been focused on deploying new databases in production and testing the new siguldry signing code in the staging environment. Additionally, the Forge team completed the foundational planning for migrating Fedora's dist-git from Pagure to Forgejo, implementing automated backups, SSH key sync from FAS, and developing private issues.

Other notable activities included mitigating a Koji Out-Of-Memory incident caused by a scraper aggressively hitting rpminfo and tweaking Zabbix monitoring thresholds for disk space. Routine maintenance involved archiving old mailing lists, creating new FAS groups, and addressing various service access issues.

Decisions

• A major infrastructure outage for mass updates, reboots, and database migrations is scheduled for 2026-10-01 at 20:00 UTC.
• The Fedora 45 infrastructure freeze will begin on 2026-10-06.
• The qa-devel and autoqa-devel mailing lists have been archived and made read-only.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed to rewrite Standupbot in the Maubot framework and to clean up technical debt on Status.fpo.
• The team is looking for testers and karma for several kiwi plugin updates across different Fedora and EPEL releases.
• A community member is looking for someone to run the Oraculum playbook for them.
• New contributors interested in non-sysadmin tasks, such as documentation or application development, are encouraged to check the Infrastructure Join Guide.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering group focused heavily on preparations for the Fedora 45 Final release this week. Blocker review meetings were held to evaluate critical bugs, accepting key issues involving oo7-portal and GRUB boot failures on FW RAID, while rejecting other proposed freeze exceptions. In the background, the team refined their beta release announcement templates, updated standard operating procedures to prevent missed commits during future release branchings, and scheduled the second round of retiring Fail-To-Install (FTI) packages currently in the NEW state.

Other infrastructure and pipeline efforts progressed smoothly. The team investigated ostree failures during system composes, which were successfully traced back to background git maintenance runs. The group also coordinated the upcoming generation of a new GPG key for ELN 12, discussed the routing of unsigned RISC-V builds directly to eln, and processed package orphanings for non-responsive maintainers.

Decisions

• Accepted bug 2537341 (oo7-portal not installed by default after upgrading) as a Final Blocker, and bug 2530897 (GRUB boot failure on FW RAID) as a Final Freeze Exception during the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting.
• Confirmed that package maintainers requesting unretirement no longer need to open RelEng tickets and should use the automated fedpkg request-unretirement command, as noted in Ticket #13535.
• Confirmed that RISC-V builds in the Koji instance are currently unsigned and decided that ELNBuildSync will tag them directly to eln rather than routing them through Bodhi, as discussed in the Matrix chat.
• Decided to drop the "Retire all packages with broken deps" step from the release freeze schedule, as historical review showed it has not been actively utilized since 2017 (Meeting Log).
• Cancelled the scheduled September 28th RELENG meeting due to overlapping PTO and conferences (Meeting Log).

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team has been actively preparing for the Fedora 45 release through rigorous blocker bug reviews, test days, and validation testing. The F45 CoreOS Test Week took place this week, and preparations are finalized for the upcoming Anaconda F45 features test days (focused on the new WebUI and Stratis support) as well as the Conmon-v3/Podman test days in October. Additionally, the release-blocking storage interfaces list has been trimmed to remove obsolete or hard-to-test interfaces.

In addition to F45 preparations, the team addressed CI/CD pipeline improvements, such as downgrading rpmlint spell-check errors to warnings to reduce dist-git PR failures, and cleaning up the fedora-ci-admins group membership. Discussions are also underway regarding power management regressions with tuned-ppd on modern laptops and a proposal to make the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop AArch64 live ISO release-blocking for Fedora 46.

Decisions

• [CI/CD Improvement] rpmlint spellchecking errors in Fedora CI have been downgraded to warnings to prevent unnecessary dist-git PR blockages on valid technical terms (URL).
• [Community Process] The qa-devel mailing list has been made read-only due to long-term inactivity; communication will consolidate to modern channels (URL).
• [F45 Final Blocker] Bug 2537341 was accepted as a Final Blocker because the oo7-portal replacement for gnome-keyring is not installed by default on upgraded systems, breaking keyring functionality (URL).
• [F45 Freeze Exception] Bug 2530897 was accepted as a Final Freeze Exception for an Anaconda installer bug where Grub boot fails with an "invalid magic number" on FW RAID (URL).
• [F45 Final Blocker] Bug 2448283 regarding non-ASCII capable keyboard layouts was rejected as a Final Blocker, as UI pre-selection now mitigates the issue on KDE live installs (URL).
• [F45 Freeze Exceptions] Bugs 2533661 and 2535835 were rejected as Final Freeze Exceptions due to the risks of introducing minor or substantial upstream changes during a freeze (URL).

Contribution opportunities

• Testing Opportunity: Test the Fedora 45 RISC-V (non-official) Beta images on various boards and provide feedback on the Fedora RISC-V Matrix channel.
• Test Days: Participate in the upcoming Anaconda F45 features test days (Sept 28 - Oct 2) to test Stratis, Atomic Desktop default installs, and the new remote WebUI.
• Test Days: Participate in the upcoming Conmon-v3 test days (Oct 5 - Oct 11) to test the new Podman container monitor lifecycle and logging capabilities.
• Translations: Language teams and translators are encouraged to help add missing strings to the anaconda-webui translation before the Final Freeze.
• Test Organization: Help organize or suggest test cases for remaining F45 planned test days.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

The Websites and Apps team focused heavily on optimizing page load times for several Fedora download pages, including /misc, Spins, Labs, and Atomic Desktops. By removing heavy client-side JavaScript related to the "beta" release toggles and replacing it with a lightweight redirect script, contributors reduced initial page load times from around 5 seconds to just over 1 second. Following this success, the team is discussing further optimizations to the Nuxt codebase, including standardizing URL construction and moving static metadata from navigation.js into the project's CMS to allow more pages to be built entirely server-side.

Additionally, a bug that caused CoreOS bare metal raw images to disappear from the download page was identified as a Nuxt YAML parsing issue and was promptly fixed. The group also updated the Swedish translation files and approved the inclusion of their communication channels in automated weekly community reports.

Decisions

• CoreOS bare metal raw images have been restored to the download page after a Nuxt content YAML parsing issue was patched.
• The team approved the collection of their Matrix logs and GitLab trackers for LLM-generated community reporting, and requested that the CMS repository be monitored as well.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors familiar with Nuxt and Vue are welcome to help optimize the codebase by migrating remaining client-side rendered elements to Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and moving static description data out of navigation.js and into the Fedora CMS. Long-term refactoring efforts should be tracked by opening tickets on the Fedora Websites GitLab.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Design team published a final wrap-up of the Fedora 45 wallpaper in a recent blog post and is currently preparing for the Fedora 46 wallpaper, which honors mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck. The team is also evaluating a request to provide a higher-resolution Fedora logo to resolve blurry rendering on the GDM login screen when using fractional scaling, a default setting since Fedora 41.

In addition, the Design team successfully finalized the new EPEL Steering Committee badge, and a new pull request was opened to add a "Fedora loves KDE" sticker to the Event Kit. Ongoing foundational work continues on the Community Personas project, aimed at creating character concepts for different Fedora contributor roles.

Decisions

• The EPEL Steering Committee officially accepted the new badge design created by the Design team. The badge has been published and is now available for current and past committee members.

Contribution opportunities

• Contribute sketches or visual explorations for the Fedora 46 Karen Uhlenbeck wallpaper ahead of the September 28th checkpoint.
• Sketch character concepts and ideas for the Community Personas project to visually represent various Fedora contributor roles, such as coders, translators, designers, and event organizers.
• Help resolve the higher-resolution Fedora logo request by verifying or providing a crisp, SVG-derived render of the Fedora logo (at least 600px wide) to fix pixelation issues on the GDM login screen.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Docs team launched a new Matrix channel (#alerts-docs:fedoraproject.org) dedicated strictly to automated notifications for issues, pull requests, and build failures. To reduce noise in this channel, they agreed to disable org-level Action Run events in favor of per-repository configuration. In tooling news, a Cryptpad instance was successfully deployed on CommuniShift ahead of the Fedora Linux 45 release, providing the team with a dedicated, AsciiDoc-friendly collaborative writing tool.

On the content side, the Beginner's Guide was updated for F45 compatibility, which notably includes migrating the backup section from kbackup to Vorta. Discussions are also underway regarding a proposal to generate an llms.txt index to optimize interactions with AI agents, and the team remains divided on whether to allow the TWIF bot to summarize their Matrix channel. Finally, efforts to improve monitoring and incident reporting for site builds are continuing with plans to test Zabbix integrations and replicated CI workflows.

Decisions

• The team decided to disable global Action Run webhooks in Forgejo and manage them manually on a per-repository basis to prevent spamming the new alerts channel.

Contribution opportunities

• Experienced Git users are invited to help provide input on a new Git cheat sheet being drafted for team documentation.
• Contributors interested in AI integrations can participate in the discussion about adding llms.txt discovery indexes to the Docs site.

Learn more about the Docs team.

COPR

Between 2026-09-21 and 2026-09-27, the COPR team announced and completed a scheduled infrastructure outage to update their systems to the September 2026 release version. The maintenance took place on September 23, lasting approximately two hours. While build queue processing and the frontend web interface were temporarily disabled, existing DNF packages and repositories remained fully accessible to users throughout the downtime.

Following the successful deployment, the team published the September 2026 release highlights detailing the new changes and improvements for the community.

Decisions

• The COPR team scheduled and executed a two-hour infrastructure update on September 23, 2026, temporarily pausing build queues and web UI access while ensuring existing DNF repositories remained online. (Source)

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group officially approved Issue #373 to include specific EPEL communication channels in a new LLM-powered weekly report. The committee deliberately excluded the general Matrix chat channel to preserve conversational privacy while authorizing data collection from mailing lists, Discourse, specific trackers, and meeting logs. Additionally, progress was shared on finalizing and merging the ESC member badges.

The team also engaged in package policy work regarding snapshot version guidelines alongside routine maintenance for djvulibre and ansible-collection-ktdreyer-koji_ansible (Issue #19). Quality work was similarly performed on FTI packages including pipewire-epel.

Decisions

• Approved Issue #373, permitting an LLM-powered weekly report generator to parse specific group channels: the epel-devel and epel-announce mailing lists, Discourse posts with the #epel-sig tag, the epel/misc, epel/releng, and epel/steering trackers, and the official weekly meeting logs.

Contribution opportunities

• The python-sphinxcontrib-apidoc package has been orphaned in EPEL because it fails to install in epel9. The community is seeking a volunteer to take over the package's maintenance. (Mailing List Thread)

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

During the ELN meeting on September 22, 2026, the group focused on aligning the fedora-eln-release package with fedora-release. Contributors noted that the DNF configurations require manual synchronization, mirroring recent updates made to the generic release. Completing this alignment is an important maintenance step that will streamline the process of forking the package to create future CentOS and Red Hat release packages.

Decisions

• Stephen Gallagher will update the fedora-repos-eln package with the necessary DNF configuration changes to ensure it is synced properly with the main Fedora release. (Source)

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week in the Atomic group, a community member inquired about an up-to-date solution for running the 3D VFX software Houdini on Fedora Silverblue. The discussion focuses on finding a modern method to manage the software's background services, specifically adapting to recent changes in how the free version's license server operates.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

The CoreOS group primarily focused on the Fedora 45 CoreOS Test Week which ran from September 21 to 25. Throughout the week, community members and maintainers tested FCOS based on F45 content, identifying bugs such as the live installer not appearing on VT1 due to the system-wide integration of kmscon, and a Cilium defect on 7.2.x kernels that prevents networking on Kubernetes clusters.

Additionally, the team discussed their inclusion in the LLM-powered weekly report, resolved several SELinux policy issues (including a pin to fix podman-remote socket connections), and successfully merged support for the STACKIT cloud platform.

Decisions

• The team decided to defer the decision on allowing the weekly report scraper into the general Matrix #coreos channel, opting instead to start by supplying public, structured data like formal meeting logs, Discourse posts, and issue trackers. (Meeting log)
• Decided to drop DTBs (Device Tree Blobs) on aarch64 architectures for Fedora 45+ to save space in the /boot partition. (Issue #2222)
• Pinned the selinux-policy package to mitigate an issue where SELinux denied podman-remote socket connections via SSH on the next and testing streams. (Issue #2217)
• Accepted and merged native platform support for STACKIT, a European sovereign cloud provider, into Afterburn, Ignition, and CoreOS Assembler. (Issue #2175)

Contribution opportunities

• The Fedora CoreOS team invited the community to participate in the Fedora 45 CoreOS Test Week to test FCOS before it is released to the stable streams. Contributors can find testing instructions on the Fedora Wiki and log their results on the Test Day Results page.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

ARM

This week, the ARM group received an announcement regarding the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker and Freeze Exception Review meeting scheduled for September 28, 2026, at 16:00 UTC on Matrix. The community will evaluate four proposed blockers for the Final release to determine if they violate any release criteria.

Contribution opportunities

• Participate in the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting on Matrix to evaluate bugs against the release criteria.
• Review and vote on proposed blocker and freeze exception bugs ahead of the meeting via the Blockerbugs app. Voting early helps expedite the review process and keeps the meeting short.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Kernel

Aurelien Bompard initiated a discussion regarding LLM data collection for the "This Week in Fedora" newsletter. The proposal involves gathering activity from the group's mailing list, Discourse tags, and public Matrix channel to summarize ongoing work. Following privacy concerns from some members regarding the processing of Matrix chat logs, Justin Forbes volunteered to provide human-written summaries instead. However, other members suggested retaining the LLM automation to avoid adding to the manual workload, provided there is a human review step before publication.

Decisions

• Specific users who object to having their messages processed by an LLM have been added to an exclusion list to prevent their data from being collected. (Source)
• The newsletter tool is being modified to output draft articles to the Community Blog, allowing contributors to review and amend the LLM-generated summaries prior to publication. (Source)

Learn more about the Kernel team.

AI & ML

The AI & ML SIG celebrated the official launch of their new documentation site and discussed potential plans to migrate legacy wiki content to the new platform, though this will wait for further input from key wiki contributors. Upstream changes in ROCm 10.0 have introduced a faster time-based release cycle, and efforts are underway to package it for Rawhide. Looking ahead to Fedora 46, the SIG explored debuting a Fedora Skills Library to facilitate the sharing of agentic tools, though they acknowledge ongoing packaging challenges with complex dependencies like PyTorch and Electron.

In administrative updates, the new skills-reviewers FAS group was successfully established and linked to Forgejo, formalizing the sub-team that will review and curate the skills library. Meanwhile, members are currently discussing whether to allow a summarizer bot to parse their Matrix channel data for weekly community reports, stressing the need for clear disclosure to room members if implemented.

Decisions

• Reverse dependencies for ROCm can switch to the 7.2 compatibility packages if migrating to the newly released ROCm 10.0 is not yet realistic.
• No final decisions will be made on the Wiki to Docs site content migration without input from primary wiki authors; a ticket will be opened to outline the proposed plan instead.
• The creation of a Skills Reviewers sub-team has been finalized via a new FAS group, concluding the administrative setup for the skills-library.

Contribution opportunities

• Package reviewers are needed for podman-desktop and its Electron dependencies.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group has been finalizing unofficial Fedora 45 Beta images (Server, Cloud, and Container), which are now available for testing in the alt architectures test directory. During generation, the team diagnosed an LVM/XFS boot failure tied to a dm-sysfs truncation bug related to the Zbb CPU extension, as well as a kernel panic with ACPI enabled in QEMU. Consequently, they temporarily reverted the image filesystems back to Btrfs while upstream kernel patches are finalized.

Meanwhile, the Fedora 46 mass rebuild is approximately 70% complete, and the ELN bootstrap on RISC-V continues. Packaging fixes are actively being upstreamed for scipy, nodejs26, cmake, and others. The group also discussed maintaining the existing LP64D ABI while targeting the RVA23 baseline hardware, and officially opted back into having their Matrix channel scraped for the weekly Fedora LLM reports.

Decisions

• Reverted the default file system for RISC-V Fedora 45 images back to Btrfs (from XFS/LVM) due to a dm-sysfs truncation bug linked to the Zbb CPU extension (Issue #33).
• Opted the Matrix channel back into the LLM-powered 'This Week in Fedora' summary scraper to improve group discoverability (Issue #30).
• Published unofficial Fedora 45 Beta RISC-V images (Server, Cloud, and Container) to the alt architecture testing mirrors for community evaluation (Issue #34).
• Agreed to target the RVA23 ISA baseline while maintaining the existing LP64D ABI so that new and existing binaries can be safely mixed (Issue #31).

Contribution opportunities

• Test the newly generated unofficial Fedora 45 RISC-V Beta images (Server, Cloud, Container) and report feedback (Issue #34).
• Help track down the root cause of the QEMU/EDK2/Kernel ACPI boot freeze occurring on the F45 server images (Issue #35).
• Investigate and fix architecture-specific test failures for ELN packages such as cmake, java-25-openjdk, llvm, and toolbox.
• Assist with builder capacity and Fedora Message Bus integration for the ongoing ELN bootstrap on RISC-V (Issue #32).

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Other Discussions

• Gordon Messmer initiated a discussion on adding upstream-release branches in dist-git to easily build applications like Flatpaks using specific dependencies, which spurred debates regarding maintainer workload, Fedora's curation philosophy, and dependency management.
• A user reported that ~2,300 Fedora/EPEL security tracking bugs unexpectedly became private, to which Alasdair Kergon responded that the changes were quickly reversed using a new administrative function to prevent future occurrences.
• Varshitha Kolupuri pointed out that Bodhi's require_bugs and require_testcases flags have never been enforced despite defaulting to enabled, prompting Adam Williamson to suggest flipping the default to false and mass-editing existing updates before enforcing them.
• Priscila Gutierres published a Bioinformatics SIG Proposal aimed at identifying, prioritizing, and packaging core bioinformatics and computational biology tools in Fedora, asking for feedback and potential contributors.
• Miroslav Suchý requested volunteers to test F44 to F45 upgrades to uncover dependency issues, which helped identify several required obsolete paths and conflicting package situations (e.g., openssl-devel-engine, python3-protobuf, and python3-magic).
• Adam Williamson's earlier proposal to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck was resurrected by Nikita Popov, who expressed strong support for extending the gating process to Rawhide updates as well to prevent accidental breakages.
• Gordon Messmer provided an update on his proposal to use got-audit as a generic Fedora test, noting that he successfully scanned all F44 packages featuring service units and confirmed the tool effectively detects ELF namespace tampering.
• Maxwell G announced the completion of the two-factor authentication requirement for provenpackager members, removing a few non-compliant members while prompting a wider discussion on eventually enforcing 2FA for all standard packagers.
• Norbert Manthey proposed extending default compiler settings to harden applications by adding flags like -fno-strict-overflow, but Jakub Jelinek opposed this change, explaining it primarily serves as a workaround for kernel bugs and could severely impact performance and break C/C++ userland code.
• Paul Bolle raised concerns about thousands of sources files still using the plain md5sum format (and its subsequent discussion), leading to suggestions of using a provenpackager mass-update to transition them to the secure sha512sum format.
• Other discussions across the mailing lists included a question about stalled package reviews, multiple patches submitted on the libteam mailing list for adding a per-runner decoupled LACP option (2, 3, 4), a contentious proposal on the buildsys mailing list to unconditionally pass --noclean to rpmbuild in Mock, a notice about a Fedora Copr outage, the scheduling of the F45 Blocker Review Meeting, the availability of F45 RISC-V Beta images, and a report of a dead link for the sshd role on the systemroles mailing list.

Orphaning packages

• Paul Bolle inquired about who monitors pull-requests to unmaintained packages, to which Miroslav Suchý merged a trivial cleanup and recommended opening a releng ticket for packages with broken retirement states.
• Joe filed a non-responsive maintainer check for ddcutil, resulting in the current maintainer stepping down and Jan Drögehoff offering to adopt the package.
• An automated report detailed orphaned packages looking for new maintainers that will be permanently retired in six weeks if no one steps up to adopt them.
• Chih-Tao Lee reached out regarding the unresponsive maintainer for python-authlib, and Kai Hiller responded offering to transfer ownership to anyone with the resources to maintain it.
• František Šumšal announced the intent to retire linux-atm in F45/Rawhide because upstream kernel 7.2 dropped the required ATM-related UAPI headers, urging maintainers of dependent packages like ppp and iproute to review pull requests dropping their dependencies.

Package updates

• Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek coordinated an update of libxml2 and a mini mass rebuild for F45, managing a few minor synchronization snags with branch maintainers.
• Luya Tshimbalanga managed the OpenVDB 13.1.0 SONAME change and coordinated rebuilds via a side-tag, receiving help from Jerry James to push through some failing rebuilds for F45 and Rawhide.
• Kaleb Keithley announced a libarrow (Apache Arrow) SONAME bump in rawhide for Arrow 25.0.1, with Orion Poplawski assisting in rebuilding hard dependencies like gdal, groonga, and root.
• Artur Frenszek-Iwicki updated libunibreak to v8.0 in Rawhide, bringing a SONAME bump and API changes that required test rebuilds of dependent packages like fbreader, libass, and krita.

New contributor introductions

• Damian Daniel introduced himself on the sway mailing list, hoping to join the Sway SIG to help package scenefx, SwayFX, and related projects.
• Vivek Denny introduced himself as a backend engineer interested in systems programming, looking to start contributing via package maintenance.
• Bradan Fleming introduced himself as a current RPM Fusion maintainer who aims to bring more audio plugins and the ICANN-RDAP tool to Fedora, asking for a package review sponsor.

All contribution opportunities

A crucial way for any community member to support the project is through quality assurance, testing, and troubleshooting. Volunteers are invited to review and vote on Fedora 45 blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the blockerbugs app across Workstation, KDE, Server, and ARM environments to expedite upcoming review meetings. Testers are highly requested for the upcoming Anaconda F45 features and Conmon-v3 test days, the Fedora 45 CoreOS Test Week (log results here), testing kiwi plugin updates for Infrastructure, and validating F44 to F45 system upgrades. For users with specific hardware or virtualization environments, testing the unofficial F45 RISC-V Beta images (Issue #34) or diagnosing infinite boot loops on F45 KVM Guest, ARM SBC, and RISC-V server images provides immense value. Additionally, volunteers can help organize future test cases or help investigate a startup sound bug in Fedora 44 Plasma.

If your strengths lie in communication, localization, or visual arts, several teams are seeking immediate assistance that does not require coding. Writers and editors are needed to review new Server documentation, refine a Git cheat sheet, and document instructions for running Houdini on Silverblue. Translators are encouraged to provide missing strings for the anaconda-webui before the Final Freeze. Visual designers are invited to conceptualize the Community Personas project, submit visual explorations for the F46 Karen Uhlenbeck wallpaper, or provide a crisp, SVG-derived Fedora logo render to fix pixelation on the GDM login screen. All community members are also welcome to evaluate non-technical proposals, such as the LiveFaceSwap desktop repository or the KDE SIG's proposals regarding k3b defaults and akonadi-server-mysql.

Developers and infrastructure engineers have numerous opportunities to resolve technical debt and build new tooling. Web developers familiar with Nuxt and Vue can significantly optimize the Fedora Websites GitLab repository by migrating remaining client-side rendered elements to SSR. Programmers are needed to automate appstream-data updates, rewrite Standupbot using the Maubot framework, and address technical debt on Status.fpo. System administrators and DevOps contributors can assist by running an Oraculum playbook for a community member, and integrating the Message Bus for the ELN RISC-V bootstrap. Discussions are also open regarding adding llms.txt discovery indexes to the Docs site, and newcomers wanting to learn more can consult the Infrastructure Join Guide.

Finally, contributors with packaging experience can ensure the software ecosystem remains secure and up-to-date by adopting orphaned packages or conducting reviews. Volunteers are actively sought to take over maintaining Bottles in Workstation, python-sphinxcontrib-apidoc in EPEL9, and python-authlib. There is a pressing need for package reviewers for pending requests like airwindows-lv2, VDR packages, and podman-desktop along with its Electron dependencies. Advanced packagers can also investigate architecture-specific test failures for ELN packages such as cmake, llvm, and toolbox on RISC-V, or explore specialized computing by joining the newly proposed Bioinformatics SIG.

28 Sep 2026 9:00am GMT

A branching release process frees developers to work independently and asynchronously

Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month is best known for the observation that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. This is now known as Brooks' Law. He offered several explanations that contribute to this outcome, including the effects of coordination and communication.

I missed the 50th anniversary of The Mythical Man Month by a bit, but I wanted to talk about one of the biggest changes in software development as it relates to the book. When I started developing software, 30 years ago, version control systems with workflows centered around locking a file for one developer's exclusive access were still common. If you never worked with those systems, you may not appreciate that along with better testing practices, some of the most significant productivity improvements of the last 50 years has been been driven by branching (in various forms), which significantly reduces the friction that Brooks observed.

Branching is used not just in source code, but in releases as well. I spend a lot of time talking about the stable release model. The modern stable release model is a branching model. It provides overlapping release streams in which the extent of change within a stream is less significant than the extent of change from stream to stream. The overlapping streams allow consumers to test and migrate from stream to stream asynchronously. These developers are more efficient because the availability of multiple supported releases allows them to schedule work based on their own priorities.

Interrupt-driven work is a well known killer of productivity. Imagine that you develop a service that uses shared components for TLS, RPC, PubSub messaging, and KeyVal data storage. In this hypothetical production environment, the TLS library published updates every 4 weeks, and RPC publishes updates every 6 weeks, and PubSub publishes updates once a month, and KeyVal publishes updates once a month but not at the same time as PubSub. If the client library releases for these services are linear and not branching, then you may need to adapt your software to track changes in these libraries in order to continue building and testing your own releases, when those releases occur. Those interrupts can make it difficult to find uninterrupted periods in which to develop features of your own. You will probably find your team padding their schedule in order to provide time for testing and porting efforts that can be unpredictable in magnitude, even if they have a predictable frequency.

If release streams overlap, then developers who use those client libraries can schedule updates when it is convenient. They can do that work any time between the initial availability of a new client library and the end of support for the one they were previously using. This improves productivity for users of the client library by removing uncertainty in the development process, which leads to less schedule padding. It tends to improve productivity for the teams providing those client libraries as well, because the urgency of most support requests drops significantly.

This model requires slightly more work, but in exchange, teams avoid most of the coordination that Brooks observed constraining development velocity. The extra work doesn't slow development down, it speeds it up. Many people try to make systems more efficient by reducing the amount of work required, but in this case the efficiency gains are significantly greater than the work required to continue maintaining older release series.

The distribution release process may require developers to coordinate and synchronize

Stable release distributions like Fedora aim to deliver the benefits of the stable release model for the collection of software they provide, so that users of the distribution don't have to manage thousands of components individually. They do this by coordinating updates that affect applications across the distribution. In some cases, that means doing the work required to port components to new interfaces provided by the update. The result is a software collection with minimal duplication of code. But, ironically, because they are working to eliminate multiple release streams for shared components, distribution package maintainers don't get the benefit of the stable release process for their own work. Just like the hypothetical production network, maintainers may be notified that updates have broken their software, at which point they have to adapt to the change to ensure that users can continue to use their software. In this way, they reintroduce the inefficiency that Brooks observed and reimpose the problem that the stable release process solves.

That work is necessary to produce an integrated OS that implements the concepts described in the Linux FHS. but from the point of view of any given application developer, the shared libraries present in the OS are mostly a coincidence, and one which varies from distribution to distribution. Application developers will tend to be most productive using registries like PyPI, crates.io, or npm which allow them to schedule maintenance work asynchronously from any target operating system.

27 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Time for another saturday recap of the week in longer form.

26 Sep 2026 5:15pm GMT

26 Sep 2026 1:12pm GMT

25 Sep 2026 9:00am GMT