The evening wind was cold, but I protected myself by the fire spell. It was nice to sit outside and look at the whole release-monitoring.org realm in the sunset. One could see the beauty behind all this hard work and it’s ignites a nice feeling inside one’s heart. Lately I didn’t have much time to appreciate this beauty. To be honest I didn’t have much time to work on this realm in the last few months. But still some work was done even here.

I heard the footsteps behind me. “Traveler, it’s nice to see you again. Do you want to join me?” Footsteps stopped beside me and my companion was looking at the sunset with me. “I suppose you are here to hear about the news from this world. I assure you there are many things I want to share with you. Just listen…”

Wizard’s journey to OpenAlt

At the beginning of this month I visited the symposium of mages OpenAlt in ancient city of Brno (Czech Republic). It was a nice place with interesting people, I learnt plenty of new things and as every mage knows, magic is about knowledge. If you want to see how it was, there are already some pictures (Saturday and Sunday gallery) painted by the talented artist. If you look at the gallery more closely, you can see that I represented this realm with my pointy hat. 😉

Saturday on OpenAlt

On Saturday I visited few interesting talks from different realms. First was about the realm of Bootloader from wizard Jan Hlaváč. He talked about history and current state of Bootloader realm in Fedora Universe. It was interesting to hear about the various solutions introduced in the Bootloader realm. Like MBR, GPT, Grub and SecureBoot to name a few.

The second really interesting talk was Freedom and openness of internet in Europe. This talk was presented by Marcel Kolaja, who is vice-president of European Parliament. I think the mage of release-monitoring.org still sounds better, but it is pretty impressive title nonetheless. This talk was introducing legislations that are serious threat to the freedom and openness of the internet. One is the Digital Copyright Law, which was unfortunately already accepted by European Parliament and the second is trying to solve the terrorist content on the internet, which is now in phase of trialog (which is discussion between three parties). This talk showed much about the processes in European Parliament and it was interesting even for wizard from completely different realm.

I spent rest of the day talking with other mages about various topics from different realms, it was nicely spent time and I learnt a few new spells.

Sunday on OpenAlt

On Sunday I was more busy, there were so many interesting talks I didn’t know where to go first. But there was one talk I couldn’t miss. My own. But let’s go through the talks one by one.

First one was from Jiří Konečný about Anaconda world. This world is part of the Fedora universe and it’s the first thing you will get in touch if you want to become a part of Fedora Universe (Anaconda is OS installer, not only for Fedora). This talk was about the various other realms that were created thanks to Anaconda. It was nice to see how many things could develop from the world like Anaconda.

Than it was time for my own talk. On this symposium I talked about something different then release-monitoring.org. I started by introducing myself and why I have a wizard hat. Than I started talking about the world of Silverblue and LibreELEC and how you could use those to create a vision impairing spell (Home Theater PC). I even had some nice performance with tricks (demos) prepared, but one of them didn’t worked. But in the end we spent most of the time discussing various topics about these worlds. I think the talk went well and it was interesting for everyone who attended.

Next talk was again from Jiří Konečný, but this time he talked about the Python universe and it’s history and current state. This was funny presentation with plenty of Monty Python’s humour (Python is named after Monty Python). I learnt few new things I didn’t knew and in the second part of the talk I also saw what is wrong with some new things in this universe. I think this was interesting talk to anyone, who is visiting the Python universe.

Next talk was from Pavel Baksy and it was a little darker talk about security and privacy. Security is pretty important topic for number of mages. It is interesting to see how some organizations are trying to invade privacy of people. He recommended to join the world of NextCloud and use it to keep all your magical books and manuscripts safely hidden in there. It was interesting talk for anyone who wants to take security and privacy seriously.

The last talk on Sunday for me was Gaming on Linux from Jiří Folta. This was a pretty nostalgic talk for me, because I played most of the games he talked about in his gaming history. I was and still am an active Linux gamer by myself, although my wizard responsibilities are taking much more time these days. He also talked about the current state of Linux gaming world and it’s a pretty happy world to live in right now. I should take a vacation and travel there for some time.

I also spent some time with mages from the world of Mozzila and Fedora Silverblue, both of them talked about very interesting topics like flatpaks and what we could expect from them in the future. To summarize all this, it was really nice weekend although it was really tiring.

Anitya 0.17.2 released

Anitya 0.17.0 was released on 3rd September and after some time in the purgatory (staging) a few issues were identified, which were fixed in 0.17.1 and 0.17.2. This version is now live and available for entities (users), who want to use the latest features, like:

• Teach new languages to Anitya scribes (Add semantic and calendar version scheme). This will allow us to better understand the news we are receiving (sorting other than by RPM version scheme).
• Don’t bother projects, we are watching, too often (Use If-modified-since HTTP header when checking for new versions)
• Add new worker for libraries.io (Libraries.io consumer is now part of the Anitya)
• Lifting curses (Fixing bugs)

the-new-hotness 0.12.0 released

Version 0.12.0 of the-new-hotness was released on 26th September and it’s currently in purgatory. We need to synchronize with my collegue from world of Pagure to be able to make it available for everyone. Both of these contains changes which are dependent on each other. Otherwise the purgatory trial seems good and no issues were seen so far. The new version has two main changes:

• Collaboration with world of Pagure, which will now replace the Great Oraculum (scm-requests pagure repository) (Retrieve the monitoring status from dist-git instead of fedora-scm-requests)
• Preventive solutions against letting the same messenger go to world of Bugzilla again and again (Handle the Bugzilla error by not acknowledging the Fedora messaging message)

What awaits us?

Now to a serious question, why I’m not that active on release-monitoring.org anymore? Some time ago our conclave of mages started to change and these changes are good, because there is a more collaboration between mages and different worlds we are taking care of. But as this is progressing I’m having much less time to actively work on the release-monitoring.org. Right now I’m helping other mages finish the work on Bodhi’s Rawhide Gating initiative and it’s nice to work with others, finding solutions to problems together and having some discussion in the meantime. But as I said this is taking time away from the realm of release-monitoring.org.

What this means for you? This means that releases will not be that often and the same will be true for this blog as you could see the gap between this post and the previous one. I’m still working on the release-monitoring.org, so no worry, there will still be something new. 🙂

Post scriptum

This is all for now from the world of release-monitoring.org. Do you like this world and want to join our conclave of mages? Seek me (mkonecny) in the magical yellow pages (IRC freenode #fedora-apps) and ask how can you help. Or visit the Bugcronomicon (GitHub issues on Anitya or the-new-hotness) directly and pick something to work on.