Developments

So, I had some grand plans for this week, which I haven't yet managed to work on as I've been busy following up the F11 release around the news sites, IRC and forums, as I used to do for Mandriva. This probably isn't strictly part of my job description, but it does 'feel' right. I want to have a good idea of what the heck is broken. :) Some neat developments this week: well, yes, we released Fedora 11. You may have heard about this. Go download it, it's awesome. I've been busy warping everything into the shape I'm most comfortable with, so here's the good old pair of documentation links I like to have for releases: Release Notes Common Bugs (what we called Errata, at Mandriva) Aside from that - there was a Fedora Activity Day to discuss potential changes to the Fedora 12 development cycle. It seems to have gone off really well. Unfortunately I couldn't really attend as I had Ekiga issues (something strange between Ekiga and my headset...the Ekiga guy said "I don't like ALSA. It makes my head ache. I can't help you."), which was probably a blessing in disguise as otherwise I'd be even more behind than I already am. Fedora Community was released. It looks, well, incredibly awesome. It's a sort of centralised front end to a lot of other tools, intended to provide a useful 'launch control' for Fedora contributors - seemingly mostly for packagers at the moment, but hopefully it'll become more generalized over time. It's sort-of-but-not-really a bit like Launchpad, only it's 100% open source. There's a great introductory blog post on it here, by Máirín Duffy. Go read it. Carl Worth wrote a really great post on Intel driver development. It explains very clearly why the Intel driver seems to have gone backwards in some ways lately, why that's not exactly the case, why you shouldn't worry about it too much, and how to help get things fixed quickly if you're still having problems with it. If you're a suffering Intel user, go read it. Myself and others have continued to develop the Common Bugs page for F11, which is reaching a pleasing length now. Of course, the length of Errata-type pages should never be considered a measure of the quality of a release, only the commitment level of those contributing to it. I'm pretty happy with it now. My experience with Mandriva showed that this kind of page is a valuable resource. We had a great discussion in the QA group about how those in QA and those doing support in IRC or forums could help contribute to the documentation process, and why we should try to keep reference material centralized in one or two well-known and properly maintained locations. On the back of that discussion, I've joined the documentation team, and I'm hoping to provide some more input (and earlier input) into the release notes process for Fedora 12. Hopefully we can get to the point where we don't have little FAQs and references split across many different sites, often with duplicate content, being used in different contexts (mailing lists, IRC support, forums etc). And this morning I wrote a little Wiki page on how to create an xorg.conf file if you don't have one already. This is unfortunately still required in several situations, and it's bugged me that there was no clear reference on how to create one - which has annoyed a fair share of people over time. I hope this page fills the gap. I'll be linking to it anywhere in the Wiki stuff I write which suggests the creation of an xorg.conf file. Phew! Busy week. There's been other stuff going on too, but this is too long already!