Weekly roundup – 2017, week 8

So, this weekly roundup is a new thing that we were wanting to try, with the hope that it will bring more attention to the day to day changes in both Mageia 5 and Cauldron, and what the various teams are working on right now.

The big thing going on right now is ISO testing for the next Mageia 6 milestone, sta2 (short for “stabilisation snapshot 2”). New images have been built with fixes for mga#20074, the partition table corruption bug we mentioned in a previous post. If the tests are successful, the release won’t be far away.

There were a few big updates too, Cauldron saw kernel 4.9.12 land whereas Mageia 5 has had kernel 4.4.50 in updates testing, with various bug and security vulnerability fixes. Short of being validated, a new build was made with cherry-picked patches to fix CVE-2017-6074, a critical security vulnerability which was announced yesterday and made the headlines of the specialised press. It will appear on the mirrors after going through QA validation, probably today given its critical nature.

The update of ffmpeg to 3.2.x and the associated other updates and rebuilds in Cauldron is also ongoing; ffmpeg 3.2.4 is available in the testing repositories, and will be moved to release once we’re confident that all reverse dependencies will work with this version or can safely be dropped.

There have also been updates to the NetworkManager stack in Cauldron, and parts of XFCE are being tweaked and updated so that the new ISOs shipping with XFCE give a great experience, more on that to come in a following blog post.

The other big bit of news is that team elections are coming, some teams have already started to candidate and will vote soon, so if you’re involved with any of the teams, look out for the mails about voting.

While not specific to any updates or things that you will see, we had an interesting council meeting on Tuesday where we discussed possible blog posts that we want to write. An interesting part was that we tried some video conferencing after the meeting, and it was good to put faces to names and actually hear voices, so hopefully this will help facilitate some faster decisions and be useful for other meetings and the association’s annual general meeting. On a bigger note, Schultz was disappointed to find out that he was beaten on the hair and beard front…

More seriously, there should be lots more content appearing on Facebook and Twitter, so look out for more things there. Also, a new blog post about the Mageia documentation process was recently published which is a pretty good read giving a good insight into what goes on to make the documentation what it is and the differences between the wiki and the “official documentation” that ships with each release. There are also a list of other blog posts about collaboration with other distros, games and other changes in the distro coming soon, so look out for them too.

As this is the first of these updates, we’d like to hear your feedback on it: was it informative enough, too much information, or anything else that you could suggest?

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23 Responses to Weekly roundup – 2017, week 8

  1. Pingback: Тижневий огляд – 2017, тиждень 8 | Mageia Blog (Україна)

  2. kmr says:

    This is great. At least we now can follow the development instead of being in a black hole waiting

    • schultz says:

      How was the level of detail for you, was it technical enough or too verbose? Also reporting on non development things like the council meeting and such, was that worth it?

      • lumpinator says:

        I didnt read it yet 🙂
        But im apreciating all sorts of news.
        Technical facts, social news about gatherings, also i like the developers introduction/portraits.

        All in all keeping the flag up, showing where mga is active, whats going on behind the scenes is great for me.

        I know i could dig into commits and such things, but i prefer some easy reading.

        Keep it up, thanks!

        • lumpinator says:

          Its actually a great mix!
          Could be even a wee bit more technical, like the beginning, but that largely depends on the audience targeted.
          As I think including mostly all users of mga is a sensible thing, in my opinion the current mix is great.

      • Jojo says:

        I think it’s good enough! Thanks! Keep up the good work!

      • kmr says:

        The level ov details was fine. Those who want to dig deeper can follow the links in the document. Council meeting info is also of interest.

  3. calderham says:

    An excellent update summary! Not too much, not too little, IMO. Am looking forward to more of the same in the future. Nice to be able to get a ‘feel’ for how things are going.

  4. Doug says:

    I agree with kmr. People are still downloading 5.1. A weekly update would be good. What should it contain? Things that directly affect the audience. That could include matters decided at council meetings, but not administrative issues.

  5. Pingback: Resumo semanal – 2017, semana 8 | Mageia Blog (Português)

  6. DK says:

    I really liked this update. I found it was enough technical detail to allow me to get a grasp of what was going on, and the information about council meetings and results thereof was good as well. Looking forward to the next one!

  7. Pingback: Wöchentliche Neuigkeiten – 2017 – Woche 8 | Mageia Blog (Deutsch)

  8. Carlos Filho says:

    Great idea, this summary will be very important to let users informed of the news of the community.

  9. hazard157 says:

    It’s great to hear the news. I think current level of details is enough and not too deep. If such news will appear every week, I believe even less details will be good.
    Regularity of news is much more important than amount of news. Please, keep us informed every week, or even once in two weeks, but don’t miss awaited posts.

  10. Stan Towianski says:

    Wow, Mageia is alive after all! You desperately needed to let people know this. Also the post was good info, and easy to read. Thanks!

  11. Great post, thank you. I agree with everyone else – this is just the right amount of information to convey important info on status and progress. Not necessary, but nice to have.

  12. woldewolde says:

    I like the description oft the dokumentation process so much (is linker above in the blog), as it is so clearly and brilliant

  13. Lance D. says:

    I was wondering if there will be any support for Flatpacks and/or Snaps?

    I Love Mageia, and have been using Mandrake==>Mandriva==>Mageia since 1999 with Mandrake 5.2 “festen”.

    Keep up the excellent work, thanks!!

  14. Zen_Floater2 says:

    I’m just waiting patiently for the updater to upgrade me to Mageia 6
    Boy, I can’t wait…

  15. Jon LeBlanc says:

    Thank you for this update, and it is great to get a “helicopter view” of progress. Please keep up this new feature.

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