Miscellaneous Fedora news update

So, here's some miscellaneous bits of Fedora stuff: I put up the new standalone update feedback guidelines page yesterday. This is the document that attempts to explain how you should test updates from updates-testing and when to give the different types of feedback - positive, negative, neutral or none. It's substantially based on text that used to be in the proven testers page, but split out and made independent. We have the first blocker review meeting for Fedora 18 coming up tomorrow: I always think of this as the unofficial marker of the 'test grind' starting up. In my head Fedora QA is very much split into two major phases - for the four months or so prior to a release we're in an intensive test grind for that release, where we're evaluating blockers and performing validation tests on candidate builds almost non-stop. There's also a two month 'slack period' after one release and before the next release ramps up, where things are a bit more relaxed and we get to work on building out our test collections, infrastructure, procedures and processes and so on. So tomorrow, for me, marks the end of the post-Fedora 17 'slack period' and the start of the Fedora 18 'test grind'...bring it on! We had some interesting discussions on the QA list and on the anaconda-devel list about what features we really wanted to make sure made it into the newUI anaconda branch for Fedora 18. After that's been mostly settled, It looks like the new UI will be merged into Rawhide very soon, and all the Alpha TCs will include the new UI. Lots of work coming up to knock the rough edges off, we expect! I've been trying to do some exploratory runs on building Rawhide live images, to check for showstopper issues with package conflicts or dependencies and see if we can get a booting system at all. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that we're planning to switch from livecd-creator to livemedia-creator for building live images in Fedora 18. I've been trying to compose images with both tools, for comparison of the process and the results. After some fixes to livecd-creator (thanks bcl) I can compose an image successfully, and boot to text mode, but booting to graphical mode or starting X from test mode fails in a way that seems rather difficult to debug. Now I'm focusing on trying to get an image built with livemedia-creator, which is a very different process and I'm still in the trial and error phase...