The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora 8.

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!

CD Media Included

We have included CD Image sets for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.

Bugs solved in this Re-Spin

With this particular Re-Spin, fixes for the following bugs are included, like on our last Fedora 8 Re-Spin releases[1,2]:

• #372011, "depsolve hang in F7 to F8 upgrade"

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.

• #367731, "anaconda fails on Via VPSD motherboard"

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.

• #369611, "yum upgrade with selinux-policy-strict installed fails"

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

• #404601, "anaconda crashes on 'cdrom' line in kickstart"

Updates to pykickstart incorporated in the rebuilt installer resolve this issue.

• #420281, Cannot find kickstart file during unattended installation

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.

Attention: Changes in this Re-Spin

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.

Thanks to

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

Testing Results

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/

Previous Re-Spin (20080331) will expire

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!

Assistance Needed

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/

Like with the last two Fedora releases, I'm planning on releasing a Fedora 9 Everything Spin. With Fedora 8, I gave you a sneak preview of what it would be like to install Fedora, selecting everything, using the CD version.

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.

Someone blogged about how he feels uncomfortable with some of the Fedora tools being released, since it appears to him they are not tested, and I quote:

"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:

1. I am the main Revisor developer (just so you know, remember that while reading the rest of this blog post),
2. I am the Revisor packager as well,
   
3. I'm with Fedora (duh, wearing the Ambassador Polo Shirt right now),
   
4. I love Fedora being, (and I quote) "a beta-testing distro by some developers/packagers". If that's how you see it, then that's what I love.
5. I'm not getting paid anything other then the gratitude of users like you </sarcasm>

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.

Like I stated in a previous blog post, Torrent is a real bandwidth consuming way of distributing things. I'd rather use Jigdo, which is very light-weight for both the client and the server. Better yet, clients could use our own version, pyJigdo, and give us feedback so that we can improve it.

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 Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora 8.

These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of March 31st, 2008.
The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via Jigdo starting Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008.

We have included CD Image sets for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.

During the Testing phase the following was found:

1) a full x86_64 install with many optional packages or languages requires at least 768MB of RAM rather than the recommended 512MB.

2) the ftp utility in rescue mode will not work (missing libreadline.so.5) -which doesn't affect FTP installations.

With this particular Re-Spin, we address the following problems experienced by many community members, in addition to the problems we've resolved in previous Re-Spins[1]:

- #420281, Cannot find kickstart file during unattended installation
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.

We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this respin in 2 days

- Harley-D         Dana Hoffman Jr
- zcat             Jason Farrell
- iWolf            Jeffrey Tadlock
- baard1973        S.A. Hartsuiker
- Southern_Gentleman     Ben Williams
- kanarip         Jeroen van Meeuwen

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 1.33GiB 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.

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/20080331/

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/

Kind regards,

The Fedora Unity Team

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-December/msg00008.html

Yesterday was an interesting day at FOSDEM. I've been working on pyJigdo mostly -in order to get the proposed feature for Fedora 9 done, and while I was doing so I attended talks (mostly in the Fedora/CentOS developers room). After FOSDEM (all work and no play :P), we went to a restaurant by lack of a conference in the Hotel we are staying, and founded Fedora EMEA. Greatly anticipated, now finally done. I've taken some pictures you can view at my Fedora Unity space. Announcements in all the proper places coming up soon.

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.

Revisor 2.1.0... I want it to get out about the same time Fedora 9 is released.

What are the changes?

For one, it has documentation. The Revisor Manual.odt needs a lot of work still, and it is merely content whereas the form it is going to be presented in isn't set in stone yet. We could do a .pdf to go to /usr/share/doc/revisor-%{version}/Revisor Manual.pdf, but if someone wants to make it DocBookXML/yelp/XHTML/whatever, that'd be great to go into the regular Fedora Documenation process... Anyway, there is a little documentation, more then there was before. Contributions are very much welcome.

Modules. Plugins. Whatever you call them, they are cool. Really, they are. No doubt about it. What do they do?

The GUI is a module in 2.1.0, and as such, Revisor does not pull in too many unnecessary packages the GUI depends upon anymore. To install the GUI, people will still be able to use 'yum install revisor', which is now a meta-package. For CLI capabilities only, people should start using 'yum install revisor-cli'.

Besides the other modules for cobbler, deltarpm, jigdo, server and virtualization, in 2.1.0 you can now write your own module, and stick it in. How someone can write a plugin and stick it in, is ... obscure. Another reason for the documentation to take shape ;-) Basically it comes down to these modules having hooks that are to be executed by the Revisor base program.

One of the coolest uses for modules we have seen so far comes from Yaakov Nemoy, who has been working on getting the client/server model done, in which the client could very well be the much anticipated Web Interface(TM). More work to be done here ;-)

Now, getting back to work on shaping up 2.1.0 some more, with some background noise some people describe as "Alternative Rock"