Following @t0xic0der and @humaton's talk on the Git forge ARC (Advance Reconaissance Crew) investigation during Fedora Linux Release Party 40 and more recently, @humaton's talk on the topic during Flock To Fedora 2024 - we have opened up our ARC investigation to all contributors within the Fedora Project. Please refer to the ARC initiative page to create or retrieve the use case requirements for the Git forge replacement. As part of that we created community deployments for GitLab and Forgejo.

Testing GitLab instance

The GitLab instance has limited access and needs manual approval of the account. To get an account on this instance please follow the instructions below:

1. Create an account on the GitLab instance
2. Open a ticket on Fedora Infrastructure issue
   1. Use Approve my user on GitLab test instance as summary
   2. In Types choose gitlab_testing_request template
   3. Fill in the template
3. Wait for us to approve your account

Our test GitLab instance doesn't allow SSH pushes. You need to use HTTPS to push changes to the repository.

Testing Forgejo instance

Forgejo test instance is much more straightforward when creating an account as it is connected to our staging Fedora Account System. To get an account follow the instructions below:

1. Create an account in staging Fedora Account System (you can skip this step if you already have the staging Fedora account)
2. Login to Forgejo test instance with your staging Fedora account using Sign In with Fedora Accounts button

Our test Forgejo instance is hosted in the same environment as the GitLab test instance so it doesn't allow SSH pushes either. You need to use https to push changes to the repository.

Since the Forgejo test instance is using a staging Fedora account you can use the same username for HTTPS push, but for the password you need to generate a token in Settings->Application->Access Tokens.

Sharing feedback with us

To share your testing results use this discussion thread and let us know if either Forgejo or GitLab is suitable for tested use cases.

How to contact us

You can reach us with any question either in this discussion thread or in our Matrix ARC investigation room.

16 Sep 2024 8:00am GMT

Last February 2024, after FOSDEM, the Fedora Council met for a couple of days to discuss strategy and future of Fedora. As part of this discussion, the council also discussed the proposed initiatives, Community Ops 2024 Reboot and Mentored Projects 2024. We are glad to announce that the council approved both of them!

What is the Fedora Mentored Projects initiative?

Fedora is a place where people with very different backgrounds and skills come together, from experienced professionals to students just starting out on their journey, and spanning various sectors such as engineering, marketing, design, and more. This diversity makes it the perfect place to promote mentoring programs.

Historically, the Fedora community has participated in the Outreachy and GSoC mentoring programs. However, we aim to simplify the process for mentors and mentees, making it easier to apply to existing mentoring programs under Fedora or even coordinate new ones!

From our initiative wiki, our mission is:

The Mentored Projects team improves the overall onboarding experience for
Fedora Mentored Projects by equipping participants with role handbooks,
by creating community spaces for mentors to connect with each other,
and by advocating the new role handbooks and community spaces. 

What have we already accomplished?

The initiative was created in November 2023, and since then, we have made significant progress. Here's an update on our work:

• We presented the initiative to the Fedora Council, receiving their approval and feedback.
• We identified past mentors and mentees and conducted several interviews to gather feedback on their experiences.
• We applied to Outreachy, Google Summer of Code, and Google Season of Docs and secured a budget for three Outreachy interns.
• We've begun drafting role handbooks, although they are not yet complete.
• We created a new private matrix room for mentored project mentors to collaborate and discuss. We used this actively during the project application period with Outreachy.
• We facilitated the use of a public Matrix room for all project applicants and mentors to ask general questions about participating in Fedora.

What do we want to do next?

There is still plenty of work to do to consider the initiative completed.

• Finish the role handbooks and translate the one for accepted interns into three major languages.
• Present the Mentored Projects Showcase at Flock 2024
• Present the Mentored Projects Initiative at Flock 2024
• Work with the Mindshare committee to properly schedule future mentorship opportunities' timeline
• Create custom swag for mentees and mentors recognition.

End goals

We envision a future where mentors and mentees know what is expected of them when entering a Fedora Mentored Project and have a smooth onboarding process. In addition, there is a culture of recognition for all the effort they put into the projects to be successful.

The post Fedora Mentored Projects - Council Hackfest appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

16 Sep 2024 8:00am GMT

I've stopped calling it weekly…until it's actually weekly again. Read on for a little roundup of some of the things happening around the Project!

Fedora Linux Development

Fedora Linux 40

We hope you are enjoying this release of Fedora! To shine a light on some of the folks who helped with in the quality department of this release, make sure to read the blog post Heroes of Fedora Linux 40. If you would like to help out with any Fedora release, make sure to get involved with Test Days. We are always happy to have more testers!

Fedora Linux 41

The F41 Beta will be arriving on Tuesday 17th September! We are really looking forward to hearing how the Beta performs, we know it wont be perfect, but its important to get some feedback so we can make sure F41 Final continues the trend of 'the best version yet!'. Keep an eye out for announcements on the Beta in Fedora Magazine and in the usual places like discourse and mailing lists, and if you find a bug, please report it on the Blocker Bugs app.

We are going in to Final Freeze on 15th October, so please make sure you have made any necessary changes or updates to your work by then, as we are still on track to release F41 Final on 5th Novmeber 2024 at this time. Keep an eye on the schedule for a more detailed view of tasks and remember that F39 will EOL on 19th November 2024.

Fedora Linux 42 & Co.

A.K.A, the answer to life, the universe and everything. But this is also a fast approaching Fedora release! Development is now underway and change requests are starting to come in. We also have some changes accepted for this release too, so for a preview of what the release should include, check out the Change Set page. Here is also quick reminder of some important dates for changes if you are hoping to land one in time for this release:

• December 18th - Changes requiring infrastructure changes
• December 24th - Changes requiring mass rebuild
• December 24th - System Wide changes
• January 14th - Self Contained changes
• February 4th - Changes need to be Testable
• February 4th - Branching
• February 18th - Changes need to be Complete

Be sure to keep an eye on the Fedora Linux 42 release schedule, and for those who are super-duper organized (I am very jealous), the Fedora Linux 43 and Fedora Linux 44 schedules are now live too to bookmark.

Hot Topics

Git Forge Replacement

The git forge replacement effort is still going strong, with members of the ARC team working through testing these user stories against instances of GitLab and Forgejo that are deployed in the Communishift app. We are asking anyone who would like to help out with testing to get involved by requesting access to these instances and working through the use cases in the investigation tracker. The team are collecting results as comments in the discussion thread for now and are working with Fedora QA on creating Test Days in the coming weeks.

At Flock this was a general topic of conversation, and as someone who is overseeing this work on behalf of the council, I was able to meet with Tomas Hckra who is leading this investigation and work on a proposed timeline. We are aiming to adhere to this high level timeline:

• End of October '24 - the report comparing the two git forges against the list of user stories/requirements is finished and submitted to Fedora Council for review.
• Around the same time - the report is also made public
• Mid - End of November '24 - A decision is made on what git forge the project will migrate to
• December '24 - A migration plan for the project is created and shared publicly
• January '25 - A Giant Change Proposal, likely spanning many releases, is created and proposed.
• Sometime a little later (probably Feb/Mar '25) - The change proposal is iterated on based on feedback if appropriate, and the Change is broken down into smaller changes targeting specific Fedora releases so the migration can be rolled out slowly and with care

I expect next year we will see the git forge evaluation well concluded, a migration plan in place, and the project will begin to migrate to the new platform. The ideal milestone is that by F44 we will successfully be using the new git forge to build and release Fedora Linux, and by F45 we will look back on pagure with great fondness for the service it did provide us all for so many years

You can get involved with and follow the conversation by using the #git-forge-future tag on discussions.fpo and joining the ARC matrix room.

The post Fedora Operations Report appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

15 Sep 2024 11:13pm GMT