Fedora Weekly Report: 7th - 13th January

Another week passed by, but not without some interesting things happening in the Fedora world. The FUDCon Raleigh event has just ended yesterday. Let's take a look over the last week, and go through the most important aspects.

At FUDCon, more than 150 persons attended and the event started with Max Spevack's yearly "State of Fedora" speech. Paul Frields will take over the position as Fedora Project Leader from February, replacing Spevack. The latter will still be involved in Fedora and, for the coming two months, he will be helping Frields to accommodate in the new job.

The developers discussed about an initscript replacement, so the init time can be decreased. Eric Tanguy started this discussion referring to "Mudur", an init system used by the Turkish GNU/Linux distribution "Pardus". Mudur uses startup scripts rewritten in Python to run in parallel and avoid unnecessary I/O. Anyway, this approach will not replace initd.

Adam Jackson, in a long post on the fedora-devel-list, talked about the idea that "Linux is about choice" in a somewhat negative way. He said the following: "If I could only have one thing this year, it would be to eliminate that meme from the collective consciousness. It is a disease." He added, referring to software development: "There is a legitimate discussion to be had about where and how we draw the line for feature inclusion, about how we increase and formalize our testing efforts, and about how we develop and deploy spike solutions for corner-case problems like the one device class that juju happens to do worse than the old stack. But the chain of logic from 'Linux is about choice' to 'ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work' starts with fallacy and ends with disaster."

The hard-working developers did some good job over the past week. Here are the security advisories:

For Fedora 7:

￭ mantis-1.1.0-1.fc7
￭ python-cherrypy-2.2.1-8.fc7
￭ qimageblitz-0.0.4-0.3.svn706674.fc7
￭ drupal-5.6-1.fc7
￭ libxml2-2.6.31-1.fc7
￭ tog-pegasus-2.6.0-3.fc7
￭ postgresql-8.2.6-1.fc7

And for Fedora 8 are:

￭ python-cherrypy-2.2.1-8.fc8
￭ mantis-1.1.0-1.fc8
￭ libxml2-2.6.31-1.fc8
￭ postgresql-8.2.6-1.fc8
￭ drupal-5.6-1.fc8
￭ qimageblitz-0.0.4-0.3.svn706674.fc8
￭ tog-pegasus-2.6.1-3.fc8

You can download Fedora 8 right now from Softpedia.