Fedlet news, .next work, and Marie Nordin is amazing

Long time no blog, but I had to blog my admiration for the work Marie Nordin has done on Fedora Badges as part of her OPW internship. Just look at that list - and all amazingly high quality work, too. Congratulations and thanks a lot to her. I wish I'd had more time to help with Badges lately, but I just seem to keep piling up the hobby projects, inside and outside Fedora...

Speaking of which, I haven't got around to blogging about it, but I have been keeping Fedlet up to date. The major improvement recently has probably been sound support; it's a bit experimental and it doesn't work out of the box as the required firmware has not yet been released under a sufficiently redistributable license, so you have to go out and find the firmware for yourself and put it in the place the driver expects. Once you do that, though, sound does work.

Quite a few folks at Intel are working hard on the Baytrail support, but it's mostly groundwork right now, no obvious Big Leaps Forward aside from the sound support. However, the groundwork should lead to stuff like the sensors and hardware buttons working and battery monitoring working quite soon. I'm still hoping someone's going to Do Something about SDIO device enumeration on the Venue so I can maybe get the internal wifi going, but there's so much work going on in so many different trees it's getting tricky to keep track!

In "actual work" news, things lately have mostly been focused around firming up the Fedora.next plans. I've been doing my best to be productive on the Server working group and keep track of the Desktop and FESCo discussions also. We've thrashed out some useful bits about default filesystems and stuff lately, and are currently considering tricky questions like how to handle variant default configurations between Products. I'm pretty sure things are moving in a good direction in general, but it'll be nice to get some concrete Stuff built soon.

In the mean time I've been fiddling around on various minor themes - today I built a Rawhide live image with efibootmgr 0.7 to test it for pjones, for instance, and incidentally caught a couple of other bugs. I've also been testing our planned OwnCloud 6.0 update for Fedora 20 - it looks like we still have a bug with migration of PostgreSQL-based instances from 5.x to 6.0 to fix before that can go out.

I also spent a couple of days looking at updates with dependency issues - specifically, looking through updates with AutoQA depcheck failures and seeing how many were false alarms, and how many of the genuine failures caught by AutoQA had actually been fixed up prior to the update going out. It turns out there've been several cases beyond the more high-profile recent ones where updates went out with dependency errors, so I got the ones that were still broken cleaned up, and got FESCo to sign off on a plan to disable karma automatism for updates where AutoQA checks fail. We just need the Bodhi devs to implement that now. We're hoping to have Taskotron in place relatively soon, with an improved depcheck test that will be sufficiently reliable that we can simply block updates from being released if it fails, but until then this will serve as a stopgap.