These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of May 1st, 2008.
The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via Jigdo and Torrent starting Monday, May 5th, 2008.
Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!
We have included CD Image sets for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.
With this particular Re-Spin, fixes for the following bugs are included, like on our last Fedora 8 Re-Spin releases[1,2]:
We have incorporated the updates image made by Jeremy Katz (comment #11 in the bug), and we have verified that a full Fedora 7 installation upgrades to Fedora 8 without issues.
On i586 hardware, the installation media wouldn't boot and thus renders itself unusable. We have backported the fix for this issue from anaconda development to the Fedora 8 stock anaconda, as anaconda is not updated during a release.
A dependency problem in selinux-policy-strict during upgrades is resolved in an updated selinux-policy-strict package, which is included in the Re-Spin
Updates to pykickstart incorporated in the rebuilt installer resolve this issue.
The kickstart file name searched for after booting from CD or DVD with option "linux ks" and using a dhcp and nfs server is wrong.
Also, we would like to let you know that NetworkManager is now installed by default, and for people doing minimal installations; this service will need to be disabled before the network starts to work.
We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this Re-Spin:
- Harley-D Dana Hoffman Jr
- zcat Jason Farrell
- iWolf Jeffrey Tadlock
- vwbusguy- Scott Williams
- baard1973 S.A. Hartsuiker
- Southern_Gentleman Ben Williams
- nirik Kevin Fenzi
- kanarip Jeroen van Meeuwen
A full test matrix can be found at our Test Matrix
A full list of bugs, packages and changelogs that have been updated in this Re-Spin can be reviewed on http://spins.fedoraunity.org/changelogs/20080501/
Due to limited resources, this spin will immediately obsolete 20080331, which will be deleted from our mirrors in the next few days.
Fedora Unity has taken up the Re-Spin task to provide the community with the chance to install Fedora with recent updates already included.
These updates might otherwise comprise more than 2.05GiB of downloads for a full install.
This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process.
Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!
If you are interested in helping with the testing or mirroring efforts, please contact the Fedora Unity team.
Contact information is available at http://fedoraunity.org/ or the #fedora-unity channel on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net).
To report bugs in the Re-Spins please use http://bugs.fedoraunity.org/
]]>Today I've created a rawhide Everything spin just to see what a Fedora 9 Everything Spin would look like. Again, there's a CD, a DVD, and a DVD Dual Layer version, and of course you'd want to use the CD version, just for kicks. Here's what it would look like:
If Fedora continues like this, and IT WILL, I'll need to log a bug against anaconda in the Fedora 10 development cycle, because the list won't fit on any screen, and hence the buttons to confirm or cancel won't be available.
]]>"I'm sure that they are not tested, at least not enough, or not by normal people." - Davidson Paulo
The rest of the blog sounds like he's doing a number 2, and all he gets is a red face. I gotta admit he's right though. I never test enough, and I'm not a normal person. Anyway the real question remains: Are the tools developed by the Fedora team tested?
I think I can answer that, but first let me set the record straight:
That being said let's get back to the real question at hand: "Why this wasn't fixed before packaging Revisor? Were Revisor checked by its packager? Were Revisor tested by its developers?"
Why wasn't this fixed?
The current version of Revisor in Fedora 8 is 2.0.5-15.fc8. Use:
yumdownloader --source revisor
and download the Source RPM, or navigate to the Source Tree for this version.
Either way, you won't find $releasever, $arch or $basearch anywhere in the package other then commented out in sample kickstart files, and in the cfg.py where we so subtly replace all occurrences with the proper values, should they appear in 'repo' directives in the kickstart you supplied. So, Revisor ships with valid configuration files.
If anything, it's the packaging guidelines that prevent us from replacing old (possibly bad) configuration files in /etc/ with new ones. I know I had released Revisor once or twice with bad configuration files. You may have had Revisor installed previously, and have a couple of .rpmnew files in /etc/revisor/conf.d right now.
FWIW, I agree with the packaging guidelines in this aspect as well as the other aspects and I'm not going to change the location of the configuration files, nor am I going to bluntly replace existing configuration files with a newer copy as these files may hold customized configuration such as the inclusion of third party packages. I can only assume someone spent a little time crafting them.
Was Revisor checked by it's packager?
Since I am the packager, this one lands right in my lap. Yes, I do check things before I release them. Yes, things will slip through the cracks. I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience it may have cost you, seriously.
Was Revisor tested by it's developers?
Since I am the developer, this one lands right in my lap also. Again, all I can say is that I test stuff. Again, yes, things will slip through the cracks. You can imagine there's some cracks in developing software in one's free, spare time. Between my 40-hour dayjob, my life, my family, my girlfriend and the occasional getting-drunk-friday-night, there's a couple of "not-seeing-$releasever-or-$basearch" moments and if I happen to be releasing Revisor at one of these oblivous moments, it ends up on your PC (and then later on your blog).
So, now that we've gotten the questions out of the way...
Would you mind logging a bug against the appropriate package? I'm too ignorant to Google the web in search of bugs reported in blogs or newsgroups or any other location then http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ You neglected to file one against Revisor.
Last but not least, another quote: "Software testing is not an obligation of end-users.", and again I can only say you are so right. It is not an obligation to you, me, or anyone else. Neither is using or developing software. I consider using or testing new software to be a chance, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Writing new software is a challenge. Getting bugs reported properly is a motivator. Reading blogs like yours is hilarious.
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So, what I'm trying to say is: Thank you, additional 40 voluntary seeders! And thank you, 45 original seeders! In 4 days after my original blog post requesting additional seeds, you doubled the amount of seeds and took some weight off my shoulders. I can breath again! The torrent tracker is also the master mirror for the release via Jigdo, the primary compose host for our Re-Spins and Revisor development, and my workstation -the load average makes me work on my laptop instead.
]]>Imagine you get to choose between two programs that do the same job, more or less.
One program is used a lot by the general public. How it works is obscure and you don't know exactly what it does if you press a button, but you do know that, in general, the program just works -duh, lots of people are using it. You may find documentation on how to use the program -which is often very conceptual and superficial- but still it doesn't give you any insight in the programs operations -the exact how, when and why fact sheet. Although I actually do know, let's assume that I don't; A user will think that it's all vague and obscure but it works.
The other program is made by a bunch of people that are extremely passionate, it's broadly used, it's well-documented, it has the proper fact sheets, and you can join news groups and mailing lists with any questions, problems and ideas you might have, and even talk to the developers directly. If push comes to shove you can also track down what it is the program is doing exactly -hence where things go wrong, behave differently from what you expect or where you need it to do something different. Not that you need to, but a huge number of other people to do it either because they're just as passionate, or they need a specific piece of the program to do what it is they need it to do -or because someone like you requested something that made them dig through all the code and fix something for you.
The principles on proprietary and freedom put aside, ask yourself;
If you're a user: Which program would you trust to work now and improve in the future?
If you're a developer of course the question for users applies as well, but also: Which one would you care most passionately about -bug tracking/solving, hacking, developing? Which poses the bigger challenge (greater reward)?
]]>[jmeeuwen@bofh005 ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
737 git
490 ssh
435 svn
302 ll
261 ls
255 pico
252 sudo
163 ln
143 rm
95 autoreconf
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Anyway, we do want our Re-Spins to be available to as many users as possible, and as it seems, Torrent is popular, still. Because Fedora Unity only has so much fast seeds (one that can handle the amount of disk space and traffic involved, actually), I'd like you to seed some, if you can. Right at this moment I have 154 peers (and growing) wanting to download one or the other Re-Spin, and I could certainly use your help seeding it to them. Check http://spinner.fedoraunity.org:6969/ to see which spins are most popular, and please note that most of the seeds you see are actually duplicates ;-)
Of course you are also welcome to consider becoming a Jigdo mirror for us, carrying about ~20GB of data, serving around 1GB/day.
Here's the Torrent files,
and here's the primary torrent seed:
Thanks, in advance,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
]]>The purpose of the Spin SIG is oversee the development of an evolving set of technical best practises to be applied to all community spin concepts. The Spin SIG will also oversee the continued maintenance of approved community spins in the Kickstart Pool, and will regulate the use of any infrastructure as it becomes available for use for the Spins SIG. For example webspace at spins.fedoraproject.org will be made available for spin descriptions and links to externally hosted binaries. New spin concepts first come to the Spins SIG for discussion and technical review. Once the Spins SIG comes to a consensus as to technical merit of a proposed spin, that spin concept is passed to the Board for trademark approval.
I'm volunteering to get this show on the road. If you have interest in a Fedora Community Spin, whether it be an existing, new or localized version, sign up and/or attend the first meeting Tuesday April 8th, 21:00 UTC, in the #fedora-meeting channel on the FreeNode IRC Network.
]]>this is a personal message to you! Fedora EMEA is looking for Free (as in Libre) Accounting software that fits the need of an non-profit organization. Do you know what software your local soccer-, football-, hockey-, ice-skating- or computer hobby club is using? If you do -or if you can find out-, would you then please be so kind to drop us a note with the website of that piece of software so that we can give it a good close look?
You can email all of your ideas, specs, URLs and such to board@fedoraemea.org. Thanks, in advance!
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
]]>It's time for me to make a suggestion for the verification process on the images I produce:
I am Jeroen van Meeuwen, certified engineer for all kinds of stuff that have or do not have anything to do with Fedora and all that crap, you know where I live, and I've signed the CLA. I'm with Fedora Unity, the long-standing project with more then just a proven track record. We've been around for a couple of years, as I'm sure you know already. You might have met me at one or the other FUDCon, some other event, you might be able to Google me and start digging from there. I'm not really sure how much information you need about me to be able to verify where the images come from and therefore trust what the contents are exactly. I'm not sure there's a viable concern about my systems potentially being hacked or badly maintained so that not even I could tell what is on the images exactly, but if there is, make sure to notify all the greater parties that certify me, you'll find them on my fedoraproject.org wiki page.
Regardless, I'm the one that composes these Re-Spins. When I publish the images I produce, I sign off on them. Yup, that's me, personally. With or without backported anaconda hacks which are not in Fedora proper, but help the community. And not just me, the entire Fedora Unity Test Team signs off on them, after the 138 tests they perform. When these Re-Spins are released, an estimate 3000 users (per month) use these images to install one or more systems. I can see why a verification process is needed so much.
Thank you though, for trying to draft up a process concerning spins in general instead of getting rid of the show-stopper for Re-Spins that is called verification. I understand the concern, I'm not new to this world. Someone though might think it's a little far-fetched and that you're overreaching. Please make sure that doesn't cost you, I hate to see good people turn away from the project or become outcasts.
I've not even addressed the real, technical issue. There is no way to verify an image, whether it be an installer image or a live image. This is a catch-22 pur sang. I'm definitely going to kiss the one that comes up with a solution (if it's a girl, that is, boys can get a beer ;p). It might take a while, but being able to verify externally composed (binary) images would just be gallery play.
Now here's a picture: Compared to this, the issue of being able to link to third party repositories went over smoothly. Where's the verification process for that? I'm not sure what concerns me most, but the lack of consistency sure looks like a winner to me.
]]>Today I'll be helping someone with boot problems -I didn't have the correct Re-Spin DVD with me and he promised to come back today, but before I start doing that, I usually browse through my e-mail and then mark everything read, and while I was doing so, my eye catched the message from Max Spevack saying he was aggregating all the blogs and pictures about FOSDEM (I'll add this one), and I came across this blog post on his LiveJournal blog.
I love Filet Americain! I ate it Friday, and I ate it again yesterday. The waiter warned me -he must have learned his lesson last year, but I knew what I was getting ;-)
This second day at FOSDEM (or third actually) I'm going to meet up with z00dax from CentOS and talk/brainstorm a little about Revisor on Enterprise Linux 5 or recomposing and rebuilding in more general terms, and look into the future a little given that he knows a lot more of what is going to happen in EL6 then I do. It promises to be a very useful and educational sit-together for me at least ;-)
Later today Yaakov Nemoy and myself will look into Revisor and the Server/Client model we've been talking about that FUDCon in Raleigh and express some ideas based on the code we've seen so far. The good thing is, this will shape up as we move forward and we do not really have a design set in stone or anything. Just the general goals. We've promised to just get some ideas up on some white-board first, and then discuss which one would fit best for what we need right now, and then look into what would be best in the long-term. I'm sure we're gonna end up with a solid plan.
That's all for now, time for some coffee.
]]>Anyway we arrived at the hotel around 14:00, en decided to hit the center and walk around for a while and get some chocolate and a charger for my phone, waiting for the rest of the Fedora Ambassadors and Developers to arrive. Brussels is a beautiful town but I'm amazed with what they did to it. On our way over from Central Station to the real center there's a dozen building sites; every street you walk through seems to have at least one. What are they doing? Other then that, Brussels is still very nice to just walk around and do nothing ;-)
At 18:00-ish, the others arrived and a little later we headed off for dinner. We didn't go to the BeerEvent but we had a good time anyway. There's lots to talk about on the pre-eve of Fedora EMEA, of course, and so we did. It's all going down today...
The booth is set up, a schedule has been made so that we're not swarming our own booth. I'm sitting in the general Hackers room right now as the Fedora Developers room isn't available yet. Check out the new posters, and other pictures More coming up! ;-)
]]>This amount of music files apparently Rythmbox cannot handle if you set it to update your media library automatically. And, so it seems, neither can XMMS, Audacious, or Amarok. Any tips are welcome!
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