fidzu : Fedora

Hello travelers!

Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.18 is OUT NOW with the addition of support for recently released characters like Sandrone and for recently released weapons like A Teaspoon of Transcendence from Genshin Impact Luna VIII or v6.7 Phase 2. Take this FREE and OPEN SOURCE application for a spin using the links below to manage the custom equipment of artifacts and weapons for the playable characters.

Resources

• Loadouts for Genshin Impact - GitHub
• Loadouts for Genshin Impact - PyPI
• Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.18
  • Executable for GNU/Linux distributions
  • Executable for Microsoft Windows

Installation

Besides its availability as a repository package on PyPI and as an archived binary on PyInstaller, Loadouts for Genshin Impact is now available as an installable package on Fedora Linux. Travelers using Fedora Linux 42 and above can install the package on their operating system by executing the following command.

$ sudo dnf install gi-loadouts --assumeyes --setopt=install_weak_deps=False

Changelog

• Complete the 4-piece bonus for Disenchantment in Deep Shadow by @qorexdevs in #575
• Revisit the title case class names for weapons by @gridhead in #570
• Added Sandrone to Loadout by @Ank-22 in #578
• Added A Teaspoon of Transcendence by @Ank-22 in #579
• Review A Teaspoon Of Transcendence inclusion by @gridhead in #582
• Create separate GitHub Action for generating point releases by @gridhead in #571
• Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #566
• Disable caching while building executable binaries by @gridhead in #584
• Update actions/download-artifact action to v8 by @renovate[bot] in #583
• Stage the release v0.1.18 for Genshin Impact Luna VIII (v6.7 Phase 2) by @gridhead in #585

Characters

One character has debuted in this version release.

Sandrone

Sandrone is a claymore-wielding Cryo character of five-star quality.

Weapons

One weapon has debuted in this version release.

A Teaspoon of Transcendence

White Fairy's Queening - Scales on Crit DMG.

Appeal

While allowing you to experiment with various builds and share them for later, Loadouts for Genshin Impact lets you take calculated risks by showing you the potential of your characters with certain artifacts and weapons equipped that you might not even own. Loadouts for Genshin Impact has been and always will be a free and open source software project, and we are committed to delivering a quality experience with every release we make.

Disclaimer

With an extensive suite of over 1584 diverse functionality tests and impeccable 100% source code coverage, we proudly invite auditors and analysts from MiHoYo and other organizations to review our free and open source codebase. This thorough transparency underscores our unwavering commitment to maintaining the fairness and integrity of the game.

The users of this ecosystem application can have complete confidence that their accounts are safe from warnings, suspensions or terminations when using this project. The ecosystem application ensures complete compliance with the terms of services and the regulations regarding third-party software established by MiHoYo for Genshin Impact.

All rights to Genshin Impact assets used in this project are reserved by miHoYo Ltd. and Cognosphere Pte., Ltd. Other properties belong to their respective owners.

15 Jul 2026 6:30pm GMT

We talk a lot in open source about reputation. Individuals have a reputation. Projects have a reputation. This reputation is how we build trust with strangers from around the world. People and projects have an incentive to behave well so as to not ruin their reputation. Or do they?

Glyph

glyph@mastodon.social

@miss_rodent yeah, that's kinda what I mean. The whole industry behaves as if you have a strong incentive to behave in a particular way because we have some strongly-tracked pervasive notion of reputation. but we barely have any notion of reputation *at all* let alone a structured and carefully enforced one. if this breaks the floodgates on activism-via-RCE, that broken trust is going to take a long time to repair

2026-05-30, 3:18 am 0 boosts 8 favorites

Glyph is right. We put too much on the concept of reputation without stopping to think about what it actually means.

One way that I've seen this come up a lot is in conversations about blocking AI agents - or humans who are just a translation layer between an AI model and a project. Folks have come up with a variety of different ways to determine who is a real, trustworthy person that should be allowed to make a contribution to the project. Some, like Mitchell Hashimoto's vouch, use an explicit maintainer vouching model. Others use heuristics that look at account activity to make a guess. Both of these models can make it harder for newcomers to make those early contributions that build their reputation.

Discourse's trust levels are a pretty good model for a trust ladder in a community. The problem is that once you go to a different Discourse site, you're brand new again. Similarly, someone who has been banned from a community for repeated misbehavior can join a new community with no trouble.

In chapter three of Program Management for Open Source Projects, I talk about trust being a combination of person and role. You might trust me when I write about leading open source communities but not when I write critical software. By the same token, I'm relatively well-known in places like Fedora and the OpenSSF. But at an Erlang conference, nobody has heard of me.

If you've gone to a conference, you've probably had an experience along these lines: you chat with a friend-of-a-friend in the hallway for a few minutes, think "they seem nice", and then later you learn they invented your favorite compression algorithm. Even the biggest of the Big Names are a nobody to a lot of people.

So reputations? Not that useful. If you can build a good one, that's nice, but you can't count on it.

The problem with reputation is that it doesn't answer the question you want to answer (unless that question is "who is well-known?"). Start by figuring out what question you want answered. Then you can find the best way to answer it. And don't rely on "but you'll ruin your reputation" to prevent bad behavior.

This post's featured photo by David Clode on Unsplash.

The post The importance - or not - of reputation appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

15 Jul 2026 12:00pm GMT

I got behind a little in my reading and a lot in my posting because of the onrush of the end of school, the beginning of summer and holiday season, and needing to give two talks. This catch-up post is a bit longer than most, but that's partly because it represents some binge reading I did while on the beach on vacation. I accidentally gave myself a digital detox because I took my Kindle loaded with 300 unread items from Instapaper and a bunch of books and wound up using it way more than I used my phone. The winnowed down results are here and I hope you enjoy them.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on upstream Linux in Azure. These are my personal notes and opinions.

AI & the future of software work

• The bottleneck has moved: redesigning the SDLC for AI

  I've always been bothered by the admonishment that you must "read every line of code" generated by an LLM. This article argues that LLMs are useful only if they boost the throughput of the whole system. That boost comes from the same place it always has: features of acceptable quality that move the codebase further toward its goals.

  Since humans aren't going to read every line of code, and never have, what do you do instead? You formalize the gating humans have traditionally used.

  Risk-based change classification is one example. Not all work requires the same level of scrutiny. Some changes are routine, well-understood, and low risk. Others carry architectural, security, or product risk that demands deeper review. Classifying work by risk profile allows scarce human judgment to be applied where it matters most, instead of spread thinly across everything.

  I found this opening comment about Agile insightful because it made me think about what its rituals should do, rather than what we built an industry to do.

  Agile wasn't primarily about being nimble or responding to change. That's the story we told about it. Agile was the industry's answer, mostly unconscious, to a single problem: how to manage a scarce, expensive development bottleneck.

• Let's talk about LLMs

  Writing code not being the hardest or most critical part of building software isn't controversial, except among those for whom writing code is pleasurable. I believe most people want to focus on the harder parts, not grinding out code. One goal of LLM coding tools is to allow anyone, experienced or not, to produce code that achieves their goal.

  It seems to be widely agreed among advocates of LLM coding that it's a skill which requires significant understanding, practice, and experience before one is able to produce consistent useful results … strong prior knowledge of how to design and build good software is also generally recommended or assumed.

  I believe I can do this, but I've been a developer. The real question is whether someone can learn to do this without ever having been a developer. More and more, I believe the answer is yes, we just haven't looked at the problem long enough in isolation. Accounting, piloting, and other professions have seen core elements of their work automated away and retooled their education systems to account for this. I believe software development can too.

• "maybe later" was a feature - arnorhs.dev

  This article provides the corollary risk. Our backlogs are filled with work that would require enough effort that we should seriously question the value of doing it. Unchecked LLM use as a way to grind through it is as bad as anything else done unchecked.

  The rule of product management is to keep builders so busy they don't have time to invent things to deliver. If LLMs accelerate development, product has to accelerate too. A company has to organize to use its people wisely, otherwise garbage from the backlog gets built.

Forking

• Open source was not ready for AI-speed contributions

• Reviving an Abandoned Open-Source Project: 6 Years of Atomic Calendar Revive

• Respectful Open Source

  Together, these three articles poked at a thought that has been in my mind for a while. We need more forks. Not the "soft fork" or "friendly fork" variety, but also not "hard forks," which, to me at least, carry a connotation of anger or social breakdown. We need forks where someone carries the patch they wrote or generated. We need forks where others can review the patches "on offer" and discuss or debate them. We need well-maintained forks that keep up with their upstream. That is inherently required if you care about your patch and the project, and it lets long-term maintenance and use signal to other forks and the upstream that your patches may be worth carrying. All of this will require an infrastructure that can surface forks usefully, something GitHub and their clones haven't figured out yet.

  A common complaint is that we are drowning in PRs with no more review capacity. Carrying your own patch in your own fork moves us toward that.

  A fork isn't "I fixed it for me." It's "I'm now responsible for fixing it for everyone." That's a much bigger sentence than it looks. - "Reviving an Abandoned Open-Source Project: 6 Years of Atomic Calendar Revive"

  The last article really drives this home: a patch not submitted may be the best solution for some things.

Open Source Sustainability

• The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden - ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes

  Apparently "always free" is back at Bitwarden. But this author isn't happy about that. They've already "moved on" to a free clone. This attitude is what really bothers me.

  The "all for me, none for thee" mentality: "I am shocked that the company that creates the thing I refuse to pay for hasn't found a market to sustain itself from other people who, because they aren't me, should pay. Now it is forced to figure out a profit strategy that includes cutting costs for users like me. Instead of becoming a supporter of the thing I need, want, and claim to care about, I'll begin using an open source project that spends most of its time either repackaging the company's code or blindly reimplementing its features with little to no innovation. That'll show them!"

  It's like the argument about LLM resource usage. In aggregate, it is huge, and because that is bad, we should save some of our torches and pitchforks for use on the users, even though at a personal level it is very little. Here we see the opposite: people think code development and web hosting should be free because one free-rider user costs little, even though those costs are real in aggregate.

• Why Gentoo?

  In discussing Gentoo, the use of tools like GitHub and Codeberg is touched on:

  Sure, abandoning them would be inconvenient for us, but we can do that if need arises.

  Many make these kinds of statements and then get angry when Big Corp (tm) uses a project and doesn't contribute back. Hint: this is the exact same thought that your favorite noncontributor is having. Changing projects will be an inconvenience, but it is a calculable risk. It is the difference between "Mr./Mrs. Right" and "Mr./Mrs. Right Now."

  As a bonus, I love that they mention OpenPGP being used for the one thing it is actually good at. Shout out to The PGP problem.

Growing older and longevity

As someone rapidly becoming a man of a "certain age," and who has begun attracting the non-terminal health problems associated with that age, this roundup of articles stuck with me.

Even if you are not yet of a certain age, you should read this stuff. The challenges are coming for you too.

• Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health

  The idea that a low dose of alcohol was heart healthy likely arose from the fact that people who drink small amounts tend to have other healthy habits, such as exercising, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and not smoking. In observational studies, the heart benefits of those behaviors might have been erroneously attributed to alcohol, Dr. Piano said.

• Are You Aging Well? Try These Simple Tests to Find Out.

  As the old saw goes, "that which is measured is managed." These tests will help you know where you are so you can decide what to do. The goal isn't to ace the test, it is to live healthier.

Social connection & talking to strangers

• The Dialogue Dividend

  Intentionally scheduling no-agenda calls with friends you can "water cooler" talk with is critical for your mental health. Professionally, it can be a bit self-reinforcing if you don't grow your network. Therefore, you should talk to strangers, as the next articles suggest.

• The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone - and why you should

  study by the University of Virginia (Talking with strangers is surprisingly informative) … "People tend to underestimate how much they'll enjoy the conversation, feel connected to their conversation partner and be liked by their conversation partner."

  You are just saying, "It's cold today, isn't it?" You are not asking someone to join you on a quest for world peace.

• Why saying hello to strangers can be good for you

  reported on studies showing that simply chatting with strangers has a lasting impact: It can make participants happy.

• The World: Aging well as an introvert

  Considering all the research around socializing and longevity, some introverts can be forgiven for feeling worried.

  I've never felt like I've had a lot of friends. This article focused on the kinds of people you know and should have in your network, even if you're someone who doesn't want or need a lot of people around. The categories really resonated with me.

  Note: This link is to a Newsletter I receive and I've been unable to find a link to it as a published article.

Economics

• Why Japanese companies do so many different things

  With the rise of LLMs, companies spend all of their time talking about how they can cut staff. In contrast, here are Japanese firms awash in labor, diversifying and growing.

• AI Agents Have Already Chosen Their Money: Bitcoin

  The Bitcoin Policy Institute found that AI agents choose Bitcoin, which is shocking(!) The prompts profess a need to be neutral about policy and then describe situations where Bitcoin is theoretically best. It is a first-class example of results seeking.

Evil is done by failures

• Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy-and His Government an Absolute Clown Show

  There are no evil geniuses. There are charismatic fuck ups who find minions to do the dirty work (see the next article). Just because you can't find the intelligence behind the boot on your neck doesn't mean you should stop worrying about removing it.

• Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.

  Over 20 years ago, I remember having a conversation with a friend. We were both unhappy at work and he was debating changing professions entirely. He said he was seriously thinking about joining the US Border Patrol. When I questioned this, he explained that it was known as a fast path to better government jobs and higher level positions in other agencies.

  Reading this article and looking back at 20 years of US border and immigration policy, I believe I now understand this on a whole new level.

Recently Finished Books

I've been tracking my book reading on my blog, but those notes never get surfaced anywhere. I've decided to start including links here. Head to my reading page to find detailed notes or reactions for each book, similar in style to this post.

And finally

• I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform

  This one has some real banger quotes, but also hits on the core issue of code as craftsmanship. In a departure from the norm, I'll let quotes drive this.

  Who was going to hire this band of Eastern European programmers who chain smoke during calls and whose motto is basically "we never miss a deadline". As it turns out, a lot of people.

  How pleasant and well-organized that code is to work with is not really a thing that matters in the long term.

  It's $7000 a year for the servers, with two behind a load balancer. That's absolutely nothing when compared with the costs of what having a team of engineers tune it would cost

  Visual imagery aside, when you buy for a deadline, you are not buying for beauty. Keep that in mind.

  I delight in craftsmanship when I encounter it in almost any discipline. I love it when you walk into an old house and see all the hand crafted details everywhere that don't make economic sense but still look beautiful. I adore when someone has carefully selected the perfect font to match something.

  "well great doesn't matter at all" effectively boils down to "don't take pride in your work" which is probably the better economic argument but feels super bad to me. In a world full of cheap crap, it feels bad to make more of it and then stick my name on it.

  So now I'm paying $20 a month to a company that scraped the collective knowledge of humanity without asking so that I can avoid writing Kubernetes YAML.

  "You know what the difference is between you and me? I know I'm a mercenary. You thought you were an artist. We're both guys who type for money."

  The companies paying for the creation of open source aren't hiring craftspeople or artists. They aren't the Medicis handing out money to support the creation of great works of art. They are hiring bands of mercenaries. The key is that most of them have used the cult of open source and the identity of developers as craftspeople and artists to avoid having to pay for quality and instead get it for free. You got hired to mulch the flower beds. You trimmed the bushes, edged the lawn, and planted more flowers for free. Maybe you did it for "the users" which is great when they are real people who really exist. However, a lot of the code we work on for commercial open source companies is being consumed by other commercial entities, not humans. They didn't care about the flowers either.

15 Jul 2026 7:50am GMT

14 Jul 2026 5:54pm GMT

14 Jul 2026 12:41pm GMT

Hoy te vengo a contar sobre un desmadre con el que me topé instalando Steam en mi Fedora 44. La neta es que instalar el cliente con un simple dnf -y install steam parece que hace todo el paro, pero a la hora de la verdad, jugar de manera fluida y sin fallas en Linux requiere afinar varios detalles que dnf no te va a solucionar por sí solo.

Si tú tienes una tarjeta de video AMD Radeon (en mi caso una RX 7900 XTX) y crees que con el comando por defecto ya estás del otro lado, déjame decirte que te vas a quedar a medias. Aquí te platico lo que aprendí que es indispensable para que tu setup de Vulkan y Steam funcione al cien, y por qué el metadato por defecto del paquete de Steam se queda corto.

# Instalar MangoHud, compositor, decodificadores de video y drivers freeworld
# Corre esto como root
dnf -y install --allowerasing \
    vulkan-tools \
    gamescope \
    mangohud.x86_64 \
    mangohud.i686 \
    gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld \
    gstreamer1-plugins-ugly \
    mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld.x86_64 \
    mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld.i686 \
    mesa-va-drivers-freeworld.x86_64 \
    mesa-va-drivers-freeworld.i686 \
    libclc-spirv.x86_64 libclc-spirv.i686 \
    libclc-devel.x86_64 libclc-devel.i686

13 Jul 2026 10:20pm GMT

When I was just about getting used to the time zone shift and the hotel bedding, 17th June 2026 came, and I had to leave Prague. Even though I did my packing beforehand, I still found myself waking up as early as around 0500am Central European Summer Time. My scheduled flight, Emirates EK0140, was going to take off from Prague (PRG) for Dubai (DXB) at 0400pm Central European Summer Time, so I had plenty of time to connect with family and friends back home. After having a quick breakfast by myself at around 0730am Central European Summer Time, I saw Tomáš Hrčka leaving the Ibis Praha Mala Strana hotel at that time. I made a brief return to Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre to purchase more goodies for my folks before returning to meet with a departing Lenka Segura at breakfast.

I also met with Kamil Paral briefly, who was on his way out too, and Lukas Ruzicka and Adam Williamson at the hotel lobby, who were planning on leaving too. After dropping my goods at the hotel, I headed over to the nearby Rossmann Cosmetics outlet for some purchases, as advised by my sister-in-law and my mother. As the Douglas Lifestyle inside the Nový Smíchov Shopping Centre did not open by then, this also allowed me to walk a little further on an overcast morning, after it seemed to have rained heavily the previous night. Taking the scenic route while heading back to the hotel, I clicked a bunch of pictures while being on a video call with my family members along the walking route. As the designated check-out time was 1200pm Central European Summer Time, I had plenty of time to pack my goods.

Thanks to the spring balance that I was carrying with me, I got my checked-in luggage to around 24 kilograms - staying well under the Emirates standard limit of 30 kilograms, while my travelling backpack was barely about 5 kilograms heavy. I started heading downstairs at around 1150am Central European Summer Time, and with the checkout done, I started looking for cabs on the Uber application. It took forever for a ride to be booked on that platform, so I instead relied on the Bolt application, which got me a ride in about the next 10 minutes or so. I was able to swiftly make it to Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) by around 1245pm Central European Summer Time, and after a failed attempt at securing the VAT refund, I decided to have myself checked in for the journey without wasting more time on it.

At the designated Emirates check-in gates, there were automated kiosks for self-service with multiple human attendants too, for if (read whenever) someone faced difficulties with the novel process. After having my luggage sent and a quick chat with the human attendants to ensure that the check-in kiosk also accounted for layover journeys, I headed into the immigration checks. Surprisingly enough, the immigration process, both during arrival and departure, was stamp-free and very seamless. I, for one, loved getting immigration stamps on my passport, so while that did ease the process significantly, I realized that we were giving away yet another organic process for convenience's sake. The crazy short immigration time meant that I had more time (read money) to spend at the Aelia Duty Free Stores!

Restricting my needless purchases to just chocolates and collectibles, I finally came to Gate B8, from where my Emirates EK0140 was going to be boarded. At around 0230pm Central European Summer Time, I had a Chicken Cheddar Panini Meal for lunch because I knew it would take a while before lunch was served during the flight. At around 0300pm Central European Summer Time, when the flight was finally starting to board, the Prague Airport (PRG) had another shocking surprise for me. Not only was my water bottle discarded - only for them to have a water vending automated machine on the other side of the checks - but I was also frisked physically after passing through the metal detectors without any buzzing concerns, and my purchases from their duty free airport stores were separately checked too.

Being a frequent traveller, I always made sure to remove my metal-hooked boots too to ensure that the security checks went through just fine, so believe me when I say - I was absolutely shocked when that actually happened. To add further insult to injury, their automated water vending machine was fancy enough to get my purchased water bottle stuck, with no one to help me with it. Not only was I forced to stay thirsty until I could board the flight, but there were also additional checks using German Shepherd sniffer dogs that everyone was subjected to. As you could imagine - I was super pissed at the overall situation, but I stayed calm regardless, as the last thing I wanted to do was spoil my mood further and worsen the ongoing affair - also not a choice note on which I wanted to end my Flock 2026 journey...

The flight finally took off, with us being seated in the flight after the final checks, at around 0400pm Central European Summer Time, and I decided to catch up on some respite. I knew that with the rush that I had to make in Dubai (DXB) during the short ninety-minute-long layover, I would be able to use some of the recovered energy. Unlike my arrival flight, which had almost eight hours of dreadful layover, I had a shorter one this time, which could have ended up being even more tricky if the transit buses were involved. After being served meals and finishing off the third season of Oshi No Ko (2023), I finally had some sleep on the six-hour-long flight. The fact that I had an empty seat between my window seat and the aisle seat also helped me avoid the overcrowded affairs in flying economy on longer flights.

At around 1230am Gulf Standard Time, I found the flight closing in on Dubai International Airport (DXB), and yet again, we were at an airport concourse - not an arrival gate. With the transit bus taking away almost thirty minutes for me to make it to the arrival gate, I was thankful that the security checks passed with zero hitches. The fact that I landed at different gates hurt as now I also had to give fifteen minutes on a transit train to travel closer to the Series A departure gates. Minus the peak rush, I had to sprint to the travelator escalator in Terminal 3 with my lightweight backpack to finally make it closer to my designated gates. At that defining moment, moving all the heavy things to the checked-in luggage felt like the right thing to do, and I was able to sprint on for a longer duration as a result.

The layover rush finally ended when I finally made it to Gate A12, where the boarding process had begun for Emirates EK0570. Even though I had roughly 15 minutes before the boarding gates eventually closed, it was way better to be there earlier. Plagued with the classical Gate Lice situation, I had to weave through the passenger crowd as my boarding group was called, being seated at the tail end of the Emirates flight. With nothing to make a rush for, I wanted to relax on the last leg of my struggling journey with the larger footspace and lesser stuffiness at the twin seats. While I was briefly requested by a fellow passenger to swap seats for one of the more cramped seating regions, I respectfully declined their request as not only did the seat cost more, but I also really needed some rest on this flight.

Awkwardly enough, they had run into some trouble with the Emirates staff due to their seat-swapping request attempts, as I was the second person that they asked to swap with. After clearing up the boarding confusion, we took off from Dubai International Airport (DXB) at around 0130pm Gulf Standard Time, and we were soon provided with the health reporting self-declaration by the flight helpers right after. While my co-passenger left that to be done later, I wanted to get this out of the way so that I could finally get some undisturbed rest. While drifting into sleep and enjoying some flight meals at the break of dawn, the flight was finally closing in on Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (CCU), and after a lengthy deboarding, I was back on the ground in my hometown of Kolkata, India.

Of course, I had to go through immigration here too - but as I had the health reporting self-declaration filled in advance, passing through with the immigration stamps on my passport was a breeze. While my fellow passengers struggled to find a writing surface at the arrival gates, I was glad that I did that even when I was just about to fall asleep on the Emirates flight. Right when I thought that my travel struggles were about to end, the luggage belt started its operation late at around 0830am Indian Standard Time, and I had to wait for almost an hour to obtain my checked-in luggage. Having not received an SMS notification, I also contemplated reaching out to the Emirates staff due to the abnormal duration, but not having to do that saved my return journey from getting any worse than it already had been.

13 Jul 2026 6:30pm GMT

Across the various Fedora teams, the primary focus is squarely on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 45 release, driven by the impending July 15th mass rebuild and critical change proposal deadlines. Concurrently, a massive, project-wide infrastructure migration is underway as multiple groups transition their repositories, issue trackers, and CI/CD pipelines away from legacy systems like Pagure.io toward Forgejo and GitLab. Security and system stability also remain top priorities, highlighted by the enforcement of mandatory 2FA for packagers, active patching of high-severity CVEs in groups like EPEL and Perl, and proposals to gate stable release updates on reverse dependency checkers (rmdepcheck). Finally, there is a strong, unified push to improve contributor onboarding and cross-team collaboration through standardized documentation, centralized Kanban boards, and the restructuring of community governance, such as the formalization of the new Atomic SIG and the proposed AI Working Group.

Announcements

The Fedora Council has paused the Community Initiatives process effective immediately, noting that the current framework has proven ineffective for surfacing new ideas. Consequently, the AI Developer Desktop proposal has been closed as an official initiative, though independent exploration and collaboration within the community are still highly encouraged. While existing approved initiatives (Fedora Forge, Atomic, and Docs 2026) will continue their scheduled terms, the Council is actively seeking community feedback on a proposed "sandbox" lifecycle process to better evaluate and champion future innovations in a more open, transparent way.

For Fedora 45 contributors, several critical deadlines are approaching to ensure a smooth release. The F45 Mass Rebuild is scheduled to begin on July 15, 2026; maintainers needing to exclude packages must add a noautobuild file to their dist-git repositories. Also due on July 15 is the keepalive deadline for Spins and Labs, requiring maintainers to acknowledge their tracking tickets and ensure packages are up to date to guarantee inclusion in the upcoming release. Finally, a list of long-term FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) packages failing since F42 has been published; these will be retired around August 5 unless maintainers intervene to fix them or request an exemption from FESCo.

Council

The Council discussed the Draft Council Proposal for the Fedora Innovation Lifecycle (also tracked in Ticket #564), which aims to create a structured pathway for experimental features, though some members raised concerns about potential process overhead. In other community news, the Council is exploring Open Collective for external fundraising targeting the Fedora Linux 45 cycle, seeking to address moderator burnout by formalizing support and escalation pathways, and reviewing the Authorized Analytics Volunteer Agreement to safely manage community health data under GDPR. Additionally, a recap of the 2026 Strategy Summit was published, highlighting discussions on governance, engineering, and community initiatives, while a ticket regarding FESCo election voting rights was closed and deferred to FESCo.

On the infrastructure and legal side, updates were debated for the Fedora Forge usage policy regarding repository archiving, and AI agent context was merged into the Council Tickets tracker. Legal and trademark discussions continued regarding FedoraCVE.org, 3rd-party community sites, Red Hat's EU CRA Stewardship proposal, and confusing Weblate Terms & Conditions for translators, where it was affirmed that the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement takes precedence. Finally, the Council agreed to migrate the historical Fedora Budget repository and acknowledged the need to enhance Fedora's public-facing presence.

Decisions

• Fedora Atomic Naming: The Council approved the use of the "Fedora Atomic" name for bootable container base images of Fedora.
• Provenpackager Revocation Disclosure: The Council decided not to publicly disclose the confidential details or voting record of a past provenpackager revocation incident, opting instead to focus on improving the project's Conflict of Interest policy to prevent future governance issues.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo focused on reviewing upcoming Fedora 45 Change Proposals and refining packaging policies. Key community discussions centered around disabling DNF vendor changes by default, enabling Shadow Stack on x86_64, and adding Stratis storage support to Anaconda. During their weekly meeting, the committee postponed discussions on the Forgejo dist-git migration and the Engineering representative's responsibilities to gather more input. Furthermore, FESCo is seeking volunteers and feedback for an upcoming proposal to make 2FA mandatory for all packagers, following the recent enforcement and grace period announcement of 2FA for provenpackagers.

Decisions

• Cryptography Libraries: Dropped the signoff requirement from the defunct "Fedora crypto team" for new cryptography libraries. FESCo will act as the gatekeeper until a new public review process is established.
• ELN Draft Builds: Permitted the ELNBuildSync (EBS) service to use and promote draft builds in Koji side-tags inherited from eln-build for ELN rebuild batches.
• Non-responsive Maintainer: Approved adding ankursinha and jflory7 as additional admins to the ledger package.
• Change: Lazarus with multiple widgetsets: Approved the proposal to offer the Lazarus IDE built with multiple widgetsets.
• Change: LLVM 23: Approved the system-wide update of all LLVM sub-projects to version 23.
• Change: Grub EFI For Confidential Computing: Approved the introduction of an independent, minimal GRUB bootloader package for UEFI to quickly boot Unified Kernel Images (UKI).

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Mindshare

During the Mindshare Committee meeting, members highlighted the impending shutdown of Pagure.io at the end of the month, urging contributors to migrate any remaining repositories to avoid disruptions. The committee also reviewed a funding request for All Things Open 2026, noting a need for more local community engagement and outreach to staff the event before approving the budget. Meanwhile, on the forums, the Polish Fedora community discussed their upcoming infrastructure migration and confirmed that their continued use of Fedora domains and logos complies with the project's Community Sites and Accounts trademark guidelines.

Decisions

• Assigned new term owners for the committee's charter areas: @theprogram will lead Regional Event Support, @t0xic0der will lead Digital Ambassadorship, and @jnsamyak will lead the Recognition Service.
• Decided to hold an asynchronous ticket vote to select the Fedora Council Representative, with @t0xic0der and @jnsamyak running as candidates.
• Deferred the budget vote for All Things Open 2026 pending further outreach to identify and include more local attendees.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Diversity & Inclusion

During their weekly meeting, the DEI team reviewed early survey feedback from the 2026 Fedora Mentor Summit, noting that the topic-based mentor lunches were highly praised, though ambient noise levels were a concern to address for next year. In infrastructure news, the team successfully completed their migration to Forgejo and is currently updating their issue templates to match the new platform. The team also concluded a discussion regarding age verification legislation, deciding that any official project-wide stance falls under the purview of the Fedora Council rather than the DEI team.

Planning is officially underway for the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity, which is targeted for October. The team is organizing a 2-3 hour virtual event featuring short 10-20 minute talks and is currently brainstorming an overarching theme, with "Respect the Culture" as an initial proposal. There are immediate opportunities for contributors to get involved with the event by volunteering for speaker management, event logistics, content marketing, and design roles.

Decisions

• Approved Mat H (@theprogram) as a new official member of the DEI Team.
• Agreed to format the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity as a short virtual event and transition execution planning to its dedicated repository.
• Decided to close the age verification policy discussion, deferring any official project statements to the Fedora Council.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation Working Group focused heavily on desktop stability and upcoming upstream improvements during their July 7 meeting. Key technical discussions highlighted the need for better GNOME Shell reliability during power management events and GPU resets, particularly on AMD and hybrid graphics systems. The group also debated desktop crashes caused by inotify instance exhaustion-likely tied to web process leaks in Epiphany-and plans to consult the Linux UAPI Group for a resolution. On the feature side, GNOME Shell is adopting SVG cursor support to eliminate blurry pointers on high-resolution displays, and progress continues on integrating voice control (Anthony) with IBus.

In the community forums, a user started a discussion regarding the new in-kernel NTFS driver (NTFSPLUS) merged in Linux 7.1. The user noted that the driver is currently disabled in Fedora's kernel configuration and inquired if there are plans to enable it as a module or by default, replacing the existing ntfs-3g symlink.

Decisions

• The Working Group agreed to consult the Linux Userspace API (UAPI) Group to help resolve the ongoing inotify resource management issues.
• Matthias Clasen will engage with the upstream release team to monitor new package dependencies and will advocate for rearchitecting Mutter to better survive GPU resets.
• Due to member unavailability during the first half of August, the group decided to adjust the schedule for upcoming meetings.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

The rollout of KDE Apps (Gear) 26.04 on Fedora 43 appears to have successfully reached users. Previously, this update was blocked because it required a newer version of the gpgme package (2.0+), which would have introduced a soname bump that conflicts with Fedora's stable release update policies. Recent user feedback confirms that a workaround or solution has been implemented, and the KDE Gear 26.04 update is now actively landing on Fedora 43 systems.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

In their July 8th meeting, the Server Working Group focused on streamlining Fedora 45 release testing and expanding server documentation. The team reviewed ongoing pull requests for DNSmasq and PXE boot configuration, noting successful validation for UEFI clients while continuing to troubleshoot legacy BIOS network loading issues. Additionally, the group discussed the initial steps for organizing Kiwi development for the upcoming Fedora home server spin-off, identifying the need for a comprehensive development environment setup guide, and shared various homelab storage use cases involving NFS, Samba, and Syncthing.

To improve community engagement in quality assurance, the group is overhauling its testing tracking by moving to a Kanban-style project board on the Fedora Forge. This new system will feature individual tickets for specific tests, making it significantly easier for community contributors to pick up testing tasks, run them in local virtual machines, and report results for each new Rawhide build.

Decisions

• For release testing, the group will create one ticket per test on a project board, including the build date in the title. Tests will start in a "To Do" column and move to either "Passed" or "Failed." Upon a new build release, the ticket titles will be updated and moved back to "To Do."

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team is preparing for the Fedora 45 mass rebuild starting July 15, which includes enabling autosigning for the f45-rebuild tag. On the monitoring and operations front, the team successfully removed legacy Nagios and collectd systems, fully transitioning to Zabbix, and refined COPR Zabbix warnings to reduce alert fatigue. Hardware maintenance is ongoing, with several RHEL10 virthosts being reinstalled with minimal downtime. Additionally, recent Koji server timeouts caused by wiki scrapers overloading proxies were identified and resolved.

In development news, major progress was made on Private Issues functionality for Forgejo, and CI infrastructure was expanded with new Forgejo Actions runners. To improve code quality, the team merged a pull request to restore pre-commit hooks in the infra/ansible repository, pinning them to hashes and introducing an .ansible-lint-ignore file to allow for gradual compliance. Furthermore, discussions are underway regarding Datanommer PostgreSQL operations, specifically exploring a migration to Kubernetes using CloudNativePG and upgrading to Timescale/PG18.

Decisions

• Squash commits were enabled for the infra/ansible repository.
• The OpenQA memory alert threshold in Zabbix was increased to 95% to reduce unnecessary notifications during heavy loads.
• The copr/certbot role was officially moved to the main ansible/roles directory.
• The openshift-apps playbooks are actively being converted to use the app-actions role, with a significant batch of playbooks successfully migrated and merged this week.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, Release Engineering focused heavily on preparations for the upcoming Fedora 45 cycle, with the F45 Mass Rebuild scheduled for July 15th and the creation of F47 release signing keys underway. Significant infrastructure improvements are also in progress, including the successful production migration of the fedora-scm-requests repository to Forgejo and the ongoing integration of Konflux CI with Fedora's Forgejo using a newly established global bot account. Additionally, Koji tags were configured to allow image-builder to build for ELN, and a script issue preventing the creation of detached signatures for the butane release was resolved.

Contributors should be aware that the web-based git blame feature in Fedora Package Sources has been disabled to mitigate abuse from AI scrapers; users are advised to clone repositories and use git blame locally instead. Maintainers receiving orphaned package warnings for oxygen-icon-theme dependencies can safely ignore them, as this is a known false positive stemming from its migration to kf6-oxygen-icons and will not result in auto-retirement. Finally, multiple packages were unretired, and stalled EPEL requests were processed to keep community packages moving forward.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 Spins: The Robotics Spin will be dropped starting with the Fedora Linux 45 release.
• Koji Policies: Following FESCo approval, the Koji hub policy was updated to allow draft builds for ELN within specific eln-build-side* tags to improve the reliability of ELN rebuild batches.
• Infrastructure Security: Web-based git blame endpoints in dist-git are intentionally blocked due to massive crawler abuse.
• Konflux CI Integration: The team decided to use a global konflux-bot token via Pipelines-as-Code global repository settings rather than distributing secrets to individual tenant namespaces, improving security and simplifying operations.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team successfully concluded the Kernel 7.1 test week and is currently reviewing the Fedora 45 change list to plan upcoming test days for major transitions like RPM 6.1, GNOME 51 Alpha, and Stratis Anaconda support. There are several new opportunities for community testing and feedback, including a newly developed GTK4 frontend for DNF5 and a secure automated build workflow for pre-built NVIDIA kernel modules. Furthermore, contributors can now show off their team affiliation using the new Quality group on Discourse, which syncs with FAS and provides a custom bug flair for user profiles.

In testing infrastructure and policy, a major proposal was introduced to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck, a reverse dependency static checker designed to prevent updates from breaking dependencies in Fedora and EPEL. Tooling continues to improve, with the openQA dist-git PR test feature nearing production and new event banner features merged into testdays-web. Internally, the team is also discussing process refinements, including experimenting with four-week sprints and maintaining a curated board of accessible issues for new contributors.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

The Fedora Design team has finalized the F45 wallpaper and officially launched the Fedora 46 Wallpaper Epic. The F46 design will be inspired by a famous STEM figure whose last name begins with "U," with a community inspiration vote and mindmap session scheduled for July and August. Alongside release artwork, the team is actively developing branding for several community projects, including a lobster mascot for the LoLa AI Package Manager, a logo for the Testing Farm's Artemis provisioning service, and a Mobility SIG logo for the Phosh Tour.

There are several excellent opportunities for community engagement this week. Anyone in the Fedora community is welcome to contribute to the F46 Wallpaper sketches and drafts phase. Additionally, designers can jump into fun, low-pressure tasks like creating an avatar for the Matrix Moderation Bot or helping to illustrate Community Personas that will visually represent the diverse types of Fedora contributors.

Decisions

• The Fedora 46 Wallpaper will be inspired by a famous STEM figure whose last name begins with "U".
• The Community Personas project was converted into a larger Epic to be properly scoped and broken down into smaller tickets during the upcoming sprint.
• The upstream fedora-logos repository will be adopted and moved off pagure.io into the Fedora Design Team space to ensure it is maintained.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Fedora Docs team focused heavily on structural improvements and cross-team collaboration. A major initiative was proposed to unify Fedora Multimedia Documentation, aiming to consolidate scattered guides on third-party codecs and hardware drivers into a single authoritative source to improve the user experience. To support this and other cross-team efforts, the team is organizing a "Fedora Docs Captain" pilot program with the Kernel, Multimedia, and AI/ML groups to decentralize documentation leadership and pair subject-matter experts with Docs team sponsors. Additionally, efforts to improve contributor engagement are underway, including welcoming a new volunteer writer and restructuring the contributor guides (and its introductory article) into a dedicated, highly visible module on the landing page.

Behind the scenes, several repository alignment tasks were completed to streamline workflows and avoid confusion for existing contributors. The team successfully finalized a standardized issue labeling system and common README format across the organization. Furthermore, all project boards were migrated from individual repositories to the organization level to provide a better overview of ongoing work.

Decisions

• Project Boards: All project boards have been successfully migrated to the organization level, and per-repository boards should no longer be used (Ticket #48).
• Issue Labels: A simplified, standardized set of issue labels (categorized by type, effort, priority, and status) has been finalized and deployed across all repositories within the docs organization (Ticket #40).
• Repository READMEs: A common README format has been approved and successfully implemented across key documentation repositories (Ticket #36).
• Repository Alignment: The overarching repository alignment tracker was closed, with any remaining incomplete subtasks now being tracked in their own dedicated issues (Ticket #18).

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

During the Internationalization meeting, the team discussed upcoming changes for Fedora 45, highlighting that an initial draft for the LibreOffice Dictionaries change has been submitted. Contributors are encouraged to propose any additional Self-Contained Changes before the July 21st deadline. The group also reviewed the upcoming release schedule, noting the major toolchain updates deadline on July 13th and the mass rebuild starting on July 15th.

To help with ongoing maintenance, a call to action was issued for Fedora 43 bug triaging. Contributors are asked to engage by reviewing the 45 remaining bugs reported against Fedora 43 to either fix them or move them to a later release.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL community evaluated a proposal to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck, a reverse dependency static checker designed to prevent updates from breaking package installability. While the initiative is generally supported to ensure stability, mailing list discussions highlighted concerns regarding transient CI network failures and the potential burden of fixing dependent packages maintained by unresponsive contributors. Additionally, maintainers are coordinating major incompatible updates to resolve severe CVEs. This includes a planned upgrade of ffmpeg in EPEL 9-which will first receive a 5.1.10 patch before transitioning to version 7.1.5 via epel9-next-and an update to rust-routinator 0.15.2 that removes a vulnerable, off-by-default feature.

Decisions

During the weekly meeting, the steering committee voted to approve a documentation pull request clarifying the policy against building packages against non-default modules. The committee also initiated asynchronous in-ticket voting for the ffmpeg and rust-routinator incompatible update requests to prevent blocking contributors from moving forward.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG met on July 7 to discuss significant infrastructure and tooling upgrades. Notably, ELNBuildSync 1.3.2 has successfully migrated from CentOS Stream hosting to Fedora Infrastructure, and FESCo has approved draft build support in EBS, which is currently being prepared for deployment. The Content Resolver has also been ported to dnf5 by new contributor James Troy, cutting run times in half (from 6-7 hours down to 2-3). Additionally, the team is finalizing bootc images and coordinating with release engineering to ensure they are properly synced to Fedora's Quay registry.

To align ELN with RHEL 11 expectations, the SIG is preparing to migrate several image types to use image-builder in the pungi configurations, starting with qcow2 guest images and modernizing the boot.iso. Contributors should prepare for the upcoming Fedora 45 mass-rebuild, which will trigger a flurry of activity to fix build failures. There are also immediate opportunities for contributors to help resolve the remaining ~17 failures and OpenSSL 4.0 porting issues from the recent ELN mass rebuild.

Decisions

• Transition ELN non-cloud images (starting with qcow2 and boot.iso) to image-builder to lead RHEL 11 development, with cloud images to follow pending coordination.
• Publish bootc images to a dedicated quay.io/fedora/eln-bootc repository rather than grouping them with other containers.
• Delay the production deployment of Koji draft build support in EBS until after upcoming maintainer PTO to ensure stability.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

During their weekly meeting, the Fedora Atomic Initiative discussed ongoing efforts to migrate the fedora-bootc repository to the unified pipeline. While organizational access on the forge is ready, the team must implement a workaround for the Konflux service account token by creating a dedicated FAS account for repository owners to properly restrict namespace access. Contributors also briefly discussed the future of boot media, noting a shared desire for a neutral Anaconda GUI installer capable of pointing to any bootc registry. In the forums, community interest continues to grow around the proposal to create a systemd-sysexts SIG, which aims to build and distribute systemd system-extensions for atomic systems.

Decisions

• Following the Fedora Council's approval of the "Atomic" name, the group officially agreed to formalize the Atomic SIG.
• The team will set up a wiki page for the new SIG and request a dedicated Fedora calendar so contributors can subscribe specifically to Atomic meetings without inheriting events from all other Fedora SIGs.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

During the CoreOS meeting, the team reviewed the upcoming Fedora 45 release schedule, noting the mass rebuild on July 15 and the change proposal deadline on July 21. Contributors discussed submitting official change requests for Ignition Native Butane Support and the Ignition submodule split to increase visibility across the broader Linux community. The team also evaluated enabling UEFI boot and TPM support on AWS. Because requiring TPM would drop support for legacy instance types, they opted to defer TPM enforcement to future unified kernel image (UKI) releases to avoid disrupting existing users.

In community discussions, interest continues to grow around the proposal to create a systemd-sysexts SIG. This Special Interest Group aims to build and distribute systemd system-extensions using Fedora content, providing a new way to extend atomic systems with software that doesn't run well in containers or Flatpaks. Contributors interested in helping set up official builds (likely in Konflux), documentation, and distribution methods are encouraged to join the effort.

Decisions

• The team agreed not to enable TPM support on current Fedora CoreOS AWS AMIs to avoid breaking compatibility with legacy instance types. Instead, TPM support will be applied exclusively to the sealed/UKI images once they are ready.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

Alternative Images

During the Alternative Images meeting, the project's migration from Pagure to GitLab was reported as complete for both the website and image building. A remaining task-and an opportunity for contributors-is to retire the old Pagure repositories or update their README files to point to the new locations. In broader news relevant to the Linux community, CentOS Stream 9 and 10 are rolling out new Secure Boot certificates and shims. The quarterly image builds were paused to wait for final package updates (such as fwupd for CentOS Stream 9) and will commence next week.

Additionally, CentOS Stream RISC-V repositories are now built, signed, and ready. The team is currently waiting on a CentOS infrastructure ticket to create the necessary targets and tags before they can begin generating the RISC-V images.

Decisions

• The quarterly image builds were scheduled for next week to ensure all new Secure Boot certificates and updated packages are fully integrated.
• The initial RISC-V rollout will consist of two specific images: a generic qcow2 image meant for virtual machines and a raw image designed for P550 hardware.

Learn more about the Alternative Images team.

AI & ML

This week, the AI & ML group announced that pre-built binary NVIDIA open kernel modules are now available for community testing outside of the AI Desktop Remix. On the organizational front, the group is heavily focused on improving contributor onboarding and defining its community structure. Active discussions include evolving the SIG into the "Fedora AI Working Group" to reflect a broader scope encompassing both hardware enablement and open AI best practices, creating a welcoming first-page navigation experience, and establishing a formal "Skills Reviewers" sub-team to curate shared AI skills.

To avoid conflating general community participation with hardware privileges, a proposal is underway to scope gpu01 host access exclusively to the ai-packagers-sig while keeping the main ai-ml-sig open to all interested users. This infrastructure management theme is also reflected in ongoing efforts to clean up GitLab group mappings.

Decisions

• A rewrite of the repository README was merged to better guide new and returning contributors on how to find work, file tickets, and communicate.
• A request for experimental development access to the gpu01 host was closed after clarifying that the machine is strictly reserved for CI testing (such as testing the ROCm stack) rather than personal development.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group is currently progressing through the F45 rebuild, which is approximately 20% complete, and preparing for the upcoming F46 mass rebuild expected around July 15. On the infrastructure side, Jason Montleon successfully consolidated the RISC-V kernel repositories, moving builds from GitHub to Copr and integrating 'omni' kernels directly into the RISC-V Koji. Additionally, a proposal has been drafted regarding migrating the RISC-V documentation from the Wiki to Forge, presenting a great opportunity for community feedback and contributor engagement.

During the July 7th meeting, the team highlighted ongoing hardware developments, notably the active investigation of virtualization on RVA23 hardware (SpacemiT K3) alongside upstream QEMU and kernel developers. While there are known issues currently being documented for upstream resolution, hardware capacity is expanding, with a new K3 unit en route to serve as an additional Koji builder. Contributors should also note that general group activity is expected to slow down through July and August due to summer holidays.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

During the Security SIG meeting (agenda outlined in the forum discussion), the team focused on establishing official Fedora representation on the linux-distros mailing list to better coordinate embargoed CVEs. To support this, the group will draft a formal policy for reading members into embargoed issues to present to FESCo. The SIG also discussed the organization of security documentation, concluding that upcoming systemd and SELinux hardening guides will be published in Fedora's Quick Docs to ensure optimal search engine visibility for end users.

Discussions regarding the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the formulation of a "Vulnerability and Incident Response Policy" were deferred to the next meeting due to time constraints. Contributors interested in shaping Fedora's security policies, managing vulnerability responses, or writing technical security documentation are highly encouraged to join the upcoming meetings and assist with these foundational efforts.

Decisions

• Bugzilla will be used to manage private tickets for linux-distros issues until the new Forge platform fully supports private issues.
• The SIG will draft a formal policy for handling embargoed security information and present it to FESCo for feedback and approval.
• Initial security hardening documentation will be placed in Quick Docs rather than the Security SIG team pages to improve discoverability.

Learn more about the Security team.

Perl

This week's activity in the Perl group focused entirely on package maintenance and security updates. The most critical update for the broader Linux community was the version bump of perl-DBI to 1.650 across multiple branches (PRs 3, 4, and 5), which successfully patched three security vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-14739, CVE-2026-14740, and CVE-2026-14380.

Other routine maintenance included version bumps for perl-WWW-Salesforce to 0.400 and perl-Razor-Agent to 2.88. For contributors managing database dependencies, a pull request for perl-Test-mysqld was merged to utilize -any virtual provides for MariaDB and MySQL, which should streamline future package builds and dependency resolution without causing disruptive surprises.

Decisions

• Security Patches: The group approved and merged updates for perl-DBI to version 1.650 to resolve CVE-2026-14739, CVE-2026-14740, and CVE-2026-14380.
• Dependency Management: The group decided to implement -any virtual provides for MariaDB/MySQL dependencies in perl-Test-mysqld.
• Package Updates: Version bump pull requests were approved and merged for perl-WWW-Salesforce (0.400) and perl-Razor-Agent (2.88).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

Elliott Sales de Andrade initiated a discussion on updating Zarr to v3, noting that the current v2 build fails to build from source (FTFBS) on Python 3.15. While an initial mass prebuild attempt a year and a half ago encountered several failures, those underlying issues have since been resolved or the affected packages have been retired.

To successfully move forward with the Zarr v3 update, contributor assistance is currently needed to review the python-donfig package.

Learn more about the Python team.

Other Discussions

• How can we improve the Changes Process?: Discussion continued on improving the Fedora Changes process. Maxwell G summarized the feedback, noting support for both a git-based approach and the current wiki workflow, while highlighting the pain points of split discussions across devel@, Discourse, and other platforms. He proposed focusing first on the discussion process, suggesting keeping initial feedback on the devel list and posting read-only digests to Discourse, and asked for co-owners for a formal FESCo proposal on this matter.
• F45 Change Proposal: Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 (system-wide): Aoife Moloney announced a proposed change for Fedora 45 to enable Shadow Stack protection by default on supported x86_64 machines for applications built with gcc, clang, and rustc. Christoph Erhardt clarified that this protection applies to all binaries carrying the SHSTK note, regardless of the programming language they were written in.
• Proposal: gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck: Adam Williamson proposed gating all stable release updates (Fedora and EPEL) on the rmdepcheck reverse dependency static checker to prevent updates that cause unsatisfiable dependencies. The proposal received strong support, with discussions on whether to extend this to Rawhide and Branched, how to handle waivers, and the technical implementation details, leading to a consensus to submit a lightweight FESCo ticket for approval.
• Packages providing Flatpak sandbox escapes via vulnerable MIME Type Handler: Sebastian Wick raised concerns about packages like wine providing Flatpak applications a way to escape sandboxes via vulnerable MIME type handlers that execute arbitrary code. The discussion explored the root causes, the responsibilities of different projects (Flatpak, Wine, Freedesktop), and potential solutions, with Michael Cronenworth agreeing to drop the .desktop file registration in favor of the binfmt-misc handler in the core wine RPM to mitigate the issue in Fedora.
• F45 Change Proposal: Disable Vendor Change by Default (system-wide): Aoife Moloney announced a Fedora 45 change proposal to disable automatic vendor changes in DNF5 by default, preventing packages from silently switching vendors during transactions. The discussion highlighted that while some users prefer the current behavior for testing third-party repos like Copr, the change provides better consistency and safety, especially for derivatives like Fedora Asahi Remix, and still allows explicit vendor changes via command-line options.
• Looking for zig co-maintainer for Fedora and EPEL: Jan Drögehoff sought a co-maintainer for the zig package, especially for EPEL, and Marko Kostic volunteered to help. After some initial issues with FAS account synchronization, Marko was successfully added as a co-maintainer, and Rénich Bon Ćirić also joined to assist.
• Help needed with matrix-synapse: Kevin Fenzi bumped an older thread asking for help with maintaining matrix-synapse, inquiring if there had been any progress on getting Synapse's latest version to build on F44 and below.
• Spins and Labs Keepalive Deadline: 2026-07-15: Aoife Moloney reminded maintainers of Fedora spins and labs to acknowledge their Pagure tickets by July 15, 2026, to confirm their inclusion in Fedora 45. Dan requested and received a ticket for the Cinnamon spin.
• review request - dupeguru - a GUI tool to find duplicate files: Carl Byington submitted a review request for dupeguru, a Python/Qt5 GUI tool for finding duplicate files. Barry asked about Qt6 support, and Carl noted an outstanding upstream pull request for the conversion.
• Looking for a new maintainer for Phoc and Phosh DE packages: Tomi Lähteenmäki sought new maintainers for several Phoc and Phosh packages due to a lack of time. Sam Day volunteered to take over as the primary maintainer for phoc, phosh, phosh-mobile-settings, phosh-tour, and stevia.
• Other discussions included a list of new packages in Fedora Linux, an issue with GCC plugins packaging for AFL++, troubleshooting s390x cloud images hanging on libvirt/qemu, an F45 Change Proposal to adopt PURL Metadata, the Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild Notification, a request for a sponsor for the sckoc package, a request to unretire sugar packages, and the announcement of the Koji 1.36.1 release.

Orphaning packages

• EPEL SIG should clean up their own mess: Leigh Scott expressed frustration over being expected to maintain the EPEL Cinnamon stack, stating it wasn't his responsibility and giving notice to orphan and retire the entire stack. This led to a discussion about appropriate communication and the structural issues with Bugzilla assignments for EPEL packages.
• Orphaning hexchat: Kevin Fenzi announced plans to orphan the hexchat package, suggesting it be retired since upstream was archived in 2024 and it currently fails to build in Rawhide. He recommended users switch to zoitechat, a GTK3 drop-in replacement that recently entered Fedora.
• List of long term FTBFS packages to be retired in August: Miro Hrončok posted the second weekly reminder listing long-term FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) packages scheduled to be retired from Fedora 45 on August 5, 2026. Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski requested a PR to add mingw subpackages to the gsm package to resolve a dependency issue.

Package updates

• Protobuf update: Petr Menšík provided an update on the Protobuf rebase, noting that he prepared updates for the protobuf-c and protobuf3-c libraries, ensuring compatibility and creating a COPR repository for testing.
• [heads-up] mutter and gnome-desktop3/4 soname version bump for rawhide: Milan Crha coordinated rebuilds for packages affected by the mutter and gnome-desktop3/4 soname version bumps in the GNOME 51.alpha updates. Sam Day assisted by rebuilding phoc, phosh, phosh-mobile-settings, and stevia in the side tag, allowing the update to be successfully pushed to Rawhide.
• libical 4.0 for rawhide (when?): Milan Crha provided an update on the transition to libical 4.0 in Rawhide, listing packages that build successfully, those with available patches, and those with generic build failures. Mamoru TASAKA backported a PR for cairo-dock-plug-ins to assist with the transition.
• [heads-up] gvfs dropped 'archive' and 'afp' in 1.61.1 (rawhide): Milan Crha notified maintainers that gvfs dropped 'archive' and 'afp' support in version 1.61.1, causing build failures for packages like nemo. Leigh Scott quickly rebuilt nemo in the side tag to resolve the issue.
• OCaml 5.5.0 rebuilds: Jerry James announced and completed a mass rebuild of OCaml packages for the update to OCaml 5.5.0 in a side tag, which was subsequently merged into Rawhide.
• RFC: incompatible update for routinator for Fedora and EPEL 9 and 10: Michel Lind issued an RFC for an incompatible update to routinator (version 0.15.2) for Fedora and EPEL to address multiple high-severity CVEs and a path traversal vulnerability. He disabled automatic pushes and submitted a FESCo request for approval.
• Sequoia-PGP updates with PQC support: Fabio Valentini announced updates to sequoia-pgp applications and libraries that include support for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms following the ratification of RFC 9980.
• gnome-shell 51.alpha update for rawhide changes gnome-shell api to 51: Milan Crha notified maintainers that the gnome-shell 51.alpha update changes the API to 51, requiring updates for several GNOME shell extensions.
• [Scitech]LabPlot rebuild for liborigin update: Alexander Ploumistos requested rebuilds of LabPlot for F43, F44, and F45 following the release of liborigin 3.0.4, and confirmed the removal of obsolete transition tags from version 2.0.0.

New contributor introductions

• Ikar's introduction: Ikar introduced themselves as a software engineer and long-time Linux user looking to contribute around 5 hours a week to Fedora.
• Mohab Soliman's introduction: Mohab Soliman, a mechatronics engineer from Egypt, introduced themselves and expressed interest in contributing to Fedora's engineering and gaming parts.
• Raul Perez' introduction: Raul Perez, a software engineer from Spain, introduced himself and shared his extensive background with Linux and open source, expressing a desire to start with small contributions to Fedora.

12 Jul 2026 8:45pm GMT

I found the sunrays hitting my face at around 0430am Central European Summer Time on 16th June 2026, as I forgot to put the curtains on the night before. Being in the Northern Hemisphere, the cities of Czech Republic enjoyed longer durations of sunlight as compared to us living near the equatorial line. Even though I woke up a couple of hours before my scheduled alarm, I could state that I was gradually getting used to the time zone shift and the hotel bedding. As there were only two planned involvements for me on that day, i.e. Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session and Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 Contributor Recognition Awards Programme, I decided to have myself assigned to the registration duty for the first part of the day to ensure that I was able to be of assistance for however long I was present there.

After having a (slightly better) breakfast meal with Tomáš Hrčka and Cristian Le at around 0700am Central European Summer Time, Tomáš left early for a morning walk while Cristian and I decided to leave for the event venue a little while later. I got to know from him that he was planning on leaving for Brno that evening after the conference finished as we made it to Orea Hotel Andel Prague. Moving up from my designated slot with Michal Konecny, Cristian and I hung out at the front desk of the event. While we were not expecting many registrations at the tail end of the conference, we also had to be there as a source of information. I was also reached out to by Rajan Shah on WhatsApp, who was planning on visiting a Flock event for the first time before travelling on to attend DevConf.CZ 2026 in Brno.

Putting my work laptop on charge there and helping Cristian with a power bank, I saw Jennifer Schimmoller and Dorka Volavkova arriving at the registration desk. While helping Dorka bring the sweets from the International Candy Swap event to the main table, Jennifer swiftly onboarded me to the (very intuitive) Pretalx ticket scanning application. It was interesting to see just how the ecosystem application also provided the metadata information about what size of tee shirts I was tasked to offer to the attendees, thus lowering the entry barrier towards volunteering in conferences by quite a lot. We also faced a couple of exceptional cases there, with attendees requesting tee shirt switches due to incorrect sizes and incorrect status, both of which were handled by us volunteers present at the registration desk.

Even though we were almost certain that there would not be a lot of new check-ins on the third day, Jennifer still advised me to request folks who were seeking more tee shirts to return at around 0300pm Central European Summer Time. It would allow us to hand over the last ones to the longtime Fedora contributors for their (potentially possible) forward distribution in their respective regions. Placing the badge card ahead also got Maxwell G to reach out to me as the Fedora Badges service administrator, as the social event badge achievement had expired by then. While I did award him the badge achievement manually, I reactivated the specific invitation so that it would expire that midnight, as manually awarding those to almost hundreds of people after the event's end would not be a scalable solution.

At around 0900am Central European Summer Time, I met up with Jeremy Cline and Brian Exelbierd at the registration desk. Just like a lot of my Fedora Project friends, it was great to meet up with them after over a year since our previous chat during Flock To Fedora 2025. Amidst our discussions on our interactions with agentic tooling for software development and our frustrations related to business travel policies, I was surprised (read horrified) to notice that Brian (of all people) had somehow begun preparing slides for his presentations. While he was more than capable of "winging" the talk - an impressive quality that he had more than exhibited in the Fedora Project and at Red Hat for years - it was interesting to see how veterans like him also sought practice for the stage talk, every now and then.

The three of us also debated the use of agentic technologies among (mostly newer) engineers. I stated that the immediate utilization of generative tooling by incoming developers was much akin to young students' direct usage of calculators without ever starting by calculating on their fingers. He disagreed with the notion, stating that it does not matter whether a cook knew about the internals of a microwave oven or not, as long as they knew how to use it. We both eventually agreed on it being important for human developers to know what they wanted for them to be able to get there. Upon being joined by Jaroslav Řezník, I left for Kevin Fenzi's infrastructure presentation at around 1000am Central European Summer Time, while working with Jona Azizaj on the planned event of Fedora Mentor Summit.

She had to scrap the work done by Eduardo Javier Echeverria Alvarado on the slide deck to create a new one during the previous night. Through a brief spat with Michel Lind on the eligibility for obtaining the social event badge achievements, I took the feedback of potentially introducing newer ones that could also be received by our remote attendees. After another chat with Michael Scherer in the Sapphire room, we moved into the Topaz + Quartz shared room to attend the next couple of talks on Fedora Accessibility Test Days and Accelerating Microsoft Contributions To Fedora Project at around 1130am Central European Summer Time. Finishing up a chat with Artur Frenszek-Iwicki and Cristian, I finally met Rajan, whom I also invited to join us at the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026's Lunch And Learn Activity.

Offering the Forgejo Project's peel view for reviewing artwork asset differences during Emma's interactive presentation on Open Source Design Considerations, it was finally time for the lunch break at around 0100pm Central European Summer Time. With how Rajan had been leading DevConf.IN for the last couple of years, I knew that he was a reliable ally for the Fedora Project whenever we wanted to bring the community presence to India. Maybe we could have the next iteration in India? We never knew what the future had in store, but we did our best to make the most of Flock 2026's last day. After sharing lunch with him, Ankur Sinha and Michael, I was briefly pulled aside by Aoife Moloney for some schedule changes.

She wanted to reduce the effective duration of the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session by about fifteen minutes to squeeze in all the lightning talks. I was split on this as this was Fedora Mindshare's visible presence after many years, I also knew that fifteen more minutes would allow all the lightning talks to be covered. Being the session chair, I conditioned my approval by asking her to be highly strict with answering times so that we were able to keep the session as interactive as possible. After all, the Townhall Session was planned to be a pathway towards the intricate conversations after the event's proceedings. Being a means for folks to know more about the committee's charter after the recent election, I wanted for it to empower to organize more localized events and encourage ways to recognize contributions.

Finally, being seated at the Plenary Hall for the Lightning Talks at around 0200pm Central European Summer Time, I discovered that all the speakers did a great job of finishing their planned content on time. As I had a slide deck to present during the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session, I was extremely grateful when we ended up getting Ankur's laptop to present from. From the previous charter, only Emma and I were present there, while Matthew Holmes represented the incoming one on the stage. Helping set up the seats myself, we started off with a round of charter introductions before elaborating further on the progress made by the team during the previous term. As the Mindshare Representative to Fedora Council, I have had a statistical approach towards observing both our progress and our learnings.

The interactive session went well, with us taking feedback on what we could build on from Peter Boy's and Jef Spaleta's questions. Finishing this session at around 0315pm Central European Summer Time, I had a chat with Vít Smolík and Jonáš Hubený, who reflected on the rarity of the Stroopwafel achievement. Shockingly enough, not only did we have Justin Wheeler at the stage and Kevin seated in the front rows, but we were also joined by Adam Williamson - the three of whom were amazing (read crazy) enough to make the top cut. It was also impressive to see just how successful Vít had become in his contributions to the Fedora Project in a short period. At around 0400pm Central European Summer Time, we finally kicked off the Fedora Mentor Summit 2026 Contribution Recognition Awards Programme.

With Jona kicking off the final session by marking the 2026 iteration as the fifth iteration of the Fedora Mentor Summit's proceedings, I took over soon after to explain how the process worked in the background. We were also grateful to Benson Muite, Cornelius Emase and the Nairobi GNU/Linux User Group, who got us laser-cut tangible trophies for the winners. Speaking of the winners, the three winners were Fabio Valentini, Justin Forbes and Ankur this time around, with the session attendees taking part in celebrating their recognition. This programme finally paved the way for the Closing Ceremony, and with the event finally brought to a successful closure by around 0430pm Central European Summer Time, it was time for farewells, goodbyes and forward travelling to DevConf.CZ 2026 too!

With some chat with the programme winners to congratulate them and with Adam to thank him for his continued work on the judging panel, Carol Chen gifted me an event souvenir from Finland. I also hung around for a little while longer to take pictures with Michael Winters (as he proudly called us, "The Data Guys" haha) and with Cornelius in his traditional wear. Dropping off my backpack at Ankur's room, since he was staying at the event venue, we planned to visit a drinking place called Beer Time. While it was just him and me initially, we were soon joined by Hristo Marinov, Christopher Klooz, Jeremy Cline, Emma Kidney, Jess Chitas, Matthew and many others. We marched to the next location and, following their suggestion, I also found myself having a sweet-tasting, enjoyable drink with limited alcohol.

After a couple of rounds of (250ml-sized) Van Honsebroucks and countless chats around the community and family, we decided that it was time for late dinner at around 0700pm Central European Summer Time. While we had to bid Cristian farewell as he had to leave for Brno, this additional time with our Fedora Project friends definitely allowed our community bonds to further deepen. On my advice, our collective soon found itself at the Old Hanoi restaurant - almost poetically finishing the Flock conference where it started. Amidst the continued tête-à-tête, I did find myself getting drowsier by the passing minute, so I had to leave at around 0830pm Central European Summer Time post having the Crispy Garlic Duck Dish so that I could get some rest before my long return flights home on the next day.

We also met with a couple of dining groups at the Old Hanoi restaurant, which seemed to have become a household name for the last couple of Flock events that we had in Prague - one with Matthew Miller and the Fedora Quality team folks, and the other with Jef, Aoife and Shaun. Making a stop at Ankur's room yet again for my travelling backpack, I also chanced upon David Duncan and Neal Gompa in the hotel lobby. Leaving the celebration collective at the Anděl crossing, I could not think of a better way to close the event's gathering, with me leaving for the Ibis Praha Mala Strana hotel to call it a night after around 0900pm Central European Summer Time and them continuing along the way. As I was not going DevConf.CZ, despite repeated requests from Hristo, I had to leave for Kolkata the next day.

11 Jul 2026 6:30pm GMT

Here's another short recap of the last week from me. Another shortish week as I was off monday, but still of course a lot going on.

11 Jul 2026 6:06pm GMT

One topic that often takes up more brain space than it needs is the concept of a long-term support (LTS) release. An LTS is what the name implies: a release with a longer support period than the usual for a project. LTS releases can be a benefit to users. To some, having an LTS release may signify that this is a Real, Serious Project. But most projects don't need one.

Why you don't need one

The most obvious downside to an LTS release is that it imposes a significant burden on the project maintainers. The longer the definition of "LT", the greater the burden. I suspect the function is closer to a power function than a linear one. Backporting fixes takes a lot of effort and the effort required compounds the further away a fix is from the original state of the software. If you don't have people with the time, skills, and motivation to maintain an LTS release, it will not go well.

LTS releases are also often in tension with what users want. Some project maintainers admit their LTS patches are poorly tested, which means the LTS release may end up being buggier. That's not ideal. People say they want an LTS release but then they get upset if they don't get access to the new features, too. What they usually want is an easy upgrades with no regressions. The time not spent backporting fixes can be better spent improving test suites and upgrade paths.

When an LTS release makes sense

That's not to say that an LTS is never a good idea. The more of the following that are true, the more sense it makes for your project to have one:

• Upgrades between versions are difficult and cannot easily be improved
• You have a large user base in production use
• Project contributors have the skill, time, and interests to maintain the release
• Someone is willing to pay good money for it
• The project is very large and complex (e.g. a kernel, operating system, or desktop environment)
• The project is a foundation that other projects are built upon (e.g. a language or framework)

You'll note that the list above does not say "other projects do" or "users say they want it." Often, better testing or a longer development schedule addresses the supposed need sufficiently.

This post's featured photo by Joshua Olsen on Unsplash.

The post You probably don't need an LTS release appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

10 Jul 2026 12:00pm GMT

Even though it was not as good a sleep as I would have gotten at my home, I ended up having a far better respite than the day before. Well rested as I was, I woke up at around 0600am Central European Summer Time on 15th June 2026 and had Tomáš Hrčka pick up the snacks and spices that I got for him from my hotel room. After all, the last thing I would want to do was haul them all the way to the venue only to hand them over to him so that he could bring them back to the hotel. He was grateful to have the Meat Masala and the Sabzi Masala that I got from Pune. I headed downstairs at Ibis Praha Mala Strana's dining area for breakfast with the likes of Lenka Segura and Cristian Le at around 0730am after hearing back from Michal Konecny about his possible delay in arriving at the event venue that day.

It was a fun conversation to know how Cristian had been a globe trotter just like another friend of ours, Matthew Holmes, and had been all over from Romania to Japan, and from Vietnam to the Czech Republic. I found it to be an interesting point of view to add to my experience of jumping countries only when I had to participate in or organize free and open source events around the globe. When it came to breakfast though, I found myself to be just as disappointed with the food choices as the day before, so I instead focused on the conversation about Lenka's talk on Forgejo Runners on that day. Sticking to barebones lettuce salad, a warm cappuccino and scrambled eggs allowed me to stay energized for the rest of the day, or until the Lunch And Learn Matching afternoon event at the very least.

Fetching our conference backpacks from our hotel rooms, the three of us marched to the conference venue. As we had checked in to the event on the day before, I had a quick chat with Jef Spaleta, checking on his keynote preparation, while he talked with me about Fedora Mindshare's proposed experiment of using a trusted service funding platform for sourcing/distributing event funding. We also touched base on the ratification of the responsibilities of representatives to the Fedora Council. It included two folks, one from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee and one from the Fedora Mindshare, and we agreed upon just how this had been entirely dependent on the representatives themselves so far. Having documentation could establish a baseline expectation for these liaison reps during their elected terms.

While Jef wanted to first understand the perspectives of the current liaisons, I emphasized just how important it is to have a documented baseline to begin from. As I was Fedora Mindshare's elected representative to the Fedora Council at that point in time, I remarked just how important it was to use the momentum to build the foundation that could then be iterated upon. After wishing him luck for his talk and sharing some Indian snacks with him, I moved away to chat with Tomáš. Since I was also part of the Fedora Council Townhall Session that was scheduled right after the keynote presentation, I knew that the second day was just as occupied for me as the first one. On Tomáš' (rather impromptu) request, I glanced through the draft post that conveyed the Pagure service retirement announcement, slated later.

With just how far Pagure had a reach as a general-purpose collaborative project hosting service, Tomáš chose to publish this on the Fedora Magazine. We wanted to provide a last-minute grace period for the straggling repositories before we rendered the Pagure service read-only for the foreseeable future. We wanted to avoid pushing back the decommissioning process until the end of the year 2026 and instead keep a local copy of the repositories that could be acquired on explicit request. After providing my approval, I went on to chat with Jona Azizaj inside the Plenary Hall about the Fedora Mentor Summit Contributor Recognition Awards announcement planning, and how it had to be done right before the Closing Notes were delivered by Justin Wheeler on the next day at the tail end of the conference.

Following Justin's quick event opening announcements, Jef followed through with his community and userbase metrics on the Fedora Project's growth since the last Flock To Fedora conference at around 0915am Central European Summer Time. I know how he worked with Michael Winters to attain those statistical findings, and this session was swiftly followed by the Fedora Council Strategic Proposals session at around 1000am Central European Summer Time. After a quick round of intros from the Council members, we addressed questions from attendees - both those who were attending in person and remotely. Finishing up with the session allowed me to connect with Carol Chen and Matthew again, with whom I shared some Indian snacks too, before being pulled aside by Cornelius Emase in his discussion.

During the coffee break, Cornelius and I briefly discussed the state of open source mentorship programmes with the rise of AI-assisted contributions. I looped Justin into the conversation as well, as the tireless low-quality contributions had finally pushed me into not wanting to participate as a formal mentor in free and open source software projects for the foreseeable future. My mentoring experience with the Fedora Badges Revamp Project had been the last straw, and it only made us mentors want to reinforce regulations around incessant AI tooling usage. While munching on the cookies, Justin also mentioned that he wanted to keep some time aside for having a conversation about my recent experience and discover pathways to prevent burnout occurring to selfless mentors in free and open source software.

We reflected on just how unfair it all had been - both for the applicants genuinely trying their best to make the cut and for the mentors wasting their human hours reviewing thoughtless contributions. Since Cornelius had continued to contribute to our community beyond his Outreachy mentoring participation cohort, I shared my appreciation for everything he did as a volunteer contributor. Carol joined in to cheer the conversation up as she shared just how hard her first formal mentoring experience would have been, had it not been for the likes of Justin and myself. Her Outreachy intern had been proactively participating in the mentoring programme even while using AI tooling, and that honestly felt like the correct pathway towards regular contributions to the Fedora Project, or any community for that matter.

At around 1130am Central European Summer Time, the townhall session for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee began. As compared to that of the Fedora Council's, a smaller number of elected members were able to make it to the event. I decided to volunteer as fallback session chair personnel while the Matrix chat was being handled by someone else. All I had to do was signal Aoife Moloney, who was hosting the Ask Me Anything Session, to inform her about the time left. This was followed by Stef Walter's fancy presentation on Fedora Linux Hummingbird Linux at around 1230pm Central European Summer Time. I finished the first half of the day with a lively chat with Ankur Sinha and Kashyap Chamarthy around Two Factor Authentication Enablement for effectively securing the packager workflow.

Just like the day before, Michael Scherer and Ankur decided to help Jona and me out with the Lunch And Learn Matching social event. I was glad to note that our move to the earlier partition helped significantly as we eventually ended up having more folks. The topics on that day were Interpersonal Skills, Packaging, Events, and Infrastructure. I invited Stef and his associate into the event as well, and Kevin Fenzi followed soon after. Jona and I went around the tables to click photographs and to inform folks about the Fedora Badges, they could get when they scanned the QR code on the printed menu. Since Michael could not join the interactive workshop on Fedora Badges on the previous day, he was greatly impressed when I shared with him what the staging Fedora Badges deployment looked like at lunch.

Once we were able to establish a respectable presence at the dining tables, Jona, Ankur, and I finally decided to get something to eat. The queue had subsided by that time, and we could calmly march out with our food plates. After a brief chat with Jiri Konecny, who barely arrived at the event just that afternoon, I wished him well for his onward journey to DevConf.CZ 2026. We chanced upon Debarshi Ray in the queue as well, and finishing up a (much improved from the day before) meal allowed us to head into Lenka's talk on Forgejo Runners. I tried my best to salvage the presentation progress, which was dreadfully haunted with intermittent audio video issues. While acting as the microphone runner, I also diagnosed the audio reception by checking in with the remote attendees on the Matrix chat.

As there were a pair of wireless microphones in the Sapphire room, passing one over to Lenka allowed her to have a more hands-on approach with the talk. To add to that, it also helped improve the voice reception since the microphone on the podium was having issues. What baffled me to no end was that the scheduled talk at 0200pm Central European Summer Time managed to "rickroll" all of the folks, both in-person and remote ones - Well played, Lenka haha! Ankur and I headed in the talk on The EU CRA vs Community by Jaroslav Řezník and Roman Zhukov at around 0230pm Central European Summer Time. In the little time before the talk began, Carol reflected on how 2026 was her first time attending the Flock event, even though she usually visited many conferences and events around the globe.

Besides Michael's chat on how the Fedora Mindshare's proposed experiment had previously had auditing challenges, I decided to onboard Carol into my grand plan for the Fedora Project's APAC presence at FOSSAsia 2027. That made her the next person I reached out to, apart from jokingly mentioning it once to Cristian, who also belonged to the APAC region. As I said during the Fedora Council Townhall Session, I felt that it was crucial to meet the community members where they were and hence, intra-regional travel was a logistically feasible and cost-effective way. I spent the remaining time of the session taking notes on the policy exchange, while talking with the audio video engineering personnel to attempt fixing the YouTube livestream that broke due to the inadvertent swapping of the streaming keys.

I was informed by the engineering staff that applying corrective measures would require the livestream to be stopped. I advised them not to do so, at least until the session was finally over, as that would be an effectively less destructive method to resolve the issue. Thankfully, Gregory Sutcliffe jumped right in to swap the stream names, thereby providing an expedient workaround for the same that did not need us to stop the livestreaming then. After a Matrix chat with Michael, I slipped out at around 0330pm Central European Summer Time to discuss with him on how we could join forces in leveraging the Project Hatlas into discovering useful Fedora Badges. For a conversation that was supposed to last for thirty minutes or so, we did not realize how more than an hour had already passed by in the blink of an eye.

While the initial conversations were about how the Fedora Data Work Group and the Fedora Badges Revamp Project could help each other, we delved deeper into what ideas drive each of us towards contributing selflessly to free and open source software communities. I remarked on just how his hands-on approach towards solving effective community health metrics allowed the community to trust him with what he did and the approaches he took to get there. He also shared a great deal of informative resources that guided his core ideas and his motivation to keep pushing on with Project Hatlas. Upon deciding to connect later on the actual topic, I found myself (quite literally) swiftly ambushed by Jean-Baptiste Holcroft and Michael, who wanted to pick my brains on their needs with Fedora Messaging.

They wanted to understand just how easy (read, difficult) it would be to import retroactively about 14.6 million event messages into the Fedora Messaging service by implementing the webhook support for the Weblate platform. To make matters worse, he also wanted Fedora Badges to be awarded based on the events from these many messages. Given the limitations of the application platform, we had to write a one-shot script to process these requests retroactively first before resuming the automated consumption of messages using the webhook support. It most likely was not an easy task to achieve, but as I wanted to help him out with the same, I requested that an issue ticket be created with Fedora Infrastructure so that it could be investigated further and developed upon once we got back from the conference.

Justin quickly dropped in to provide information on the social event, which was to begin 0600pm Central European Summer Time onwards. After finishing the chat on adding approximately 14.6 million messages to the count of 3.5% of the stored Datanommer messages, I had a quick followup with Justin and Michael. I was also able to provide some snacks to both Matthew Miller and Justin when we were just about to leave for the Manifesto Culture Zone Prague for the Flock To Fedora 2026 Official Party. Joined by Carol, our group walked from the event venue, and after a quick round of instructions from Dorka Volavkova and receiving some meal coupons with the drinks, I was seated in a dedicated area with Sarah Julia Kriesch, Michael, Carol, and two more attendees, enjoying starter meals and soft drinks.

With the upper limit of 400 CZK on the meal coupon and a wide variety of cuisines to try out, the official party ended up being quite the culinary experience for us all. Do not get me wrong though - I surely miss being on a cruise boat like the previous time, but this felt like an equivalent tradeoff for someone like me who was easy to please. I stepped out along with Toshio Kuratomi, Carol, and Michael to find some bites for dinner. Being the indecisive folks that we were, Carol and I finally settled for Korean food while Michael got himself an Italian dish. While we were offered a refund for the remaining amount of the coupon price, we declined and were even offered a grape-flavoured soft drink as an appreciative gesture. I fairly struggled wondering how they ran their business with such amazing selfless thoughtfulness.

After informing the organizing committee about a potential mishap, we returned to our tables to have our dining fills. With Toshio sharing with me about new folks coming for the Dancing With Toshio Fedora Badges achievement and a little chat with Michael, the two of us were called back in by Justin and Shaun for a round of commemorative photographs. The three of us went for some gelato after the photo shoot was done, and I settled for a double scoop of raspberry and mango in a dark-coloured edible cone. This is where I met up with Nicolas Chauvet and Dominik Mierzejewski, striking chat on the Fedy project for installing third-party software applications from RPM Fusion repositories. I was surprised that he did remember my progress on the (now deprecated) NVIDIA Auto Installer for Fedora Linux.

Carol checked in with me on whether or not I wanted to leave, and as it was getting darker, it was not that bad of an idea to leave soon. As much as I wanted to stay back for a little while longer, at 0900pm Central European Summer Time - I was better off preparing for the next day of the Flock event. After finishing off the chat with the two and sharing this magical full circle moment with Justin, Carol and I walked back to the Anděl crossing before going our separate ways. I briefly came back to TESCo at around 0930pm Central European Summer Time to purchase some items for my family and friends. Deciding not to extend my activity longer, I headed back to Ibis Praha Mala Strana after around an hour to rest up and prep for the Fedora Mindshare Townhall Session that I had scheduled on the next day.

09 Jul 2026 6:30pm GMT

09 Jul 2026 4:14pm GMT

09 Jul 2026 3:53pm GMT

The second quarter of 2026 is over, and so in this post we'd like to highlight the top Fedora Quality contributors who helped us maintain the quality bar for Fedora during this time period. Fedora wouldn't be a high-quality distribution without its community. Every single person who helped us detect and resolve issues, or verify that things work as expected, deserves our gratitude, thank you!

If you haven't participated yet in testing Fedora, perhaps you'd like to give it a try? We gladly welcome everyone. Please look at our Fedora Quality homepage.

Testing proposed updates

When software packages are updated in Fedora (bringing bug fixes and new features), they are not released to end users immediately. They first go to the updates-testing repository, where they undergo automated testing, and also await manual feedback from human testers. This feedback can be provided through Bodhi, either by using its web interface or CLI tools, see instructions. Alerting package maintainers by posting a negative feedback with a problem description can stop the update from reaching general audience and causing issues to all our users. Testing proposed updates is a simple, yet vital process for keeping Fedora releases of high quality during their whole lifecycle. It is used both for already stable and in-development Fedora releases.

Test period: Q2 2026 (2026-04-01 - 2026-06-30)
Contributors: 408
Updates commented¹: 5103

¹ If a person provides multiple comments to a single update, it is considered as a single comment. Karma value is not taken into account.

Test days participation

Test Days are events which are partly focused on testing Changes planned for an upcoming Fedora release, but they also regularly test important areas of the Fedora distribution, like upgrades, internationalization, graphical drivers, desktop environments, kernel updates, and others. The upcoming and past events can be seen in our Testdays app.

Test period: Q2 2026 (2026-04-01 - 2026-06-30)
Contributors: 25
Test cases executed: 76

We sincerely thank all contributors!

Are you also interested to help? Please look at our Fedora Quality homepage.

09 Jul 2026 1:32pm GMT

09 Jul 2026 1:19pm GMT