With Fedora 33 just around the corner (and such a long time since the last update), I thought it would be best to post a new update today. Since the last update, there has been a Mass Rebuild for Fedora 33, both Beta and Final Freezes, and Fedora 33 will be officially out tomorrow. The Mass Rebuild introduced many failures, but several of these were transient. There was a break in gcc/annobin, which once fixed, meant a simple rebuild afterwards fixed most of my packages.

It’s been quite a long while since the last packaging update. If you’ve not followed me on Twitter, you may not have seen that I started working on Matplotlib. While I have not stopped packaging, I have had somewhat less time for some of the extras, like writing up these posts. One major impetus for putting this one together is that Fedora 30 has reached End-of-Life. I did fall behind slightly with R packages again, so that lead to a few batches of many updates at once.

It’s been around a month since the last packaging update post, and a thing of major note is that Fedora 32 was branched from Rawhide last week. This means one extra branch on which builds must be made, but for now it’s mostly in sync with Rawhide. Fedora 32 is also in Beta Freeze, so updates don’t really flow out right now either. Leading up the Branch point, I went on a little run to try and get in as many updates as possible.

It looks like it’s another month since the last update. This long span seems to be becoming a trend, but I had good reason, being on vacation for much of this one. Since, as mentioned in the last update, the home Internet was down for a bit, that meant a bit of catch-up after both of these periods. Additionally, this was also the period in which the Mass Rebuild for Fedora 32 was run, and I took a little break for that.

It’s been another little while since the last update. Mostly, this has been because the home Internet has been down for a while, so I’ve not been doing much Fedora stuff the last month. Prior to that little break though, updates were relatively steady. As a followup to the last update, I’ve now removed automated Suggests when they do not exist in Fedora yet from R packages that I do not own.

Somehow, my semi-weekly updates turned into monthly things. Mostly, updates per week have been rather light and stable, so it always seemed that there was no need to write an update. Of course, that ends up meaning one really large update after a long time. This past week was pretty busy, so I thought it best to finally write up a post. One small changeset was removing automated Suggests from R packages when they do not exist in Fedora yet.

If you use Docker, you may or may not have already heard of Podman. It is an alternative container engine, and while I don’t have much knowledge of the details, there are a few reasons why I’m switching: Podman runs in rootless mode, i.e., it does not need a daemon running as root; Podman supports new things like cgroupsv2 (coming in Fedora 31); Docker (actually moby-engine) is difficult to keep up-to-date in Fedora (which may correlate with point 2), and people seem to complain about this (though I’ve not cared too much.

The past two weeks have been rather simple, just catching up on the remaining updates from release monitoring, and also those that monitoring missed. I’m also working through some build/test failures for various reasons. Most failures are around the Python 3.8 rebuild. Generally, upstreams are aware of the problems, or I could have reported a bug about it. So fixing these involve backporting fixes that are to be in the next releases.

It’s been a couple of weeks, so it’s time for another Fedora packaging update. There were two major things over that time: 1) Fedora 31 was branched from Rawhide, and 2) release monitoring started working again. The branch point also meant that the Change Code Complete deadline was passed. As part of the Go SIG, I was one of the packagers behind the Adopt new Go Packaging Guidelines Change. As mentioned in the last post, this was mostly handled by @eclipseo and the tracker bug was marked complete for it just earlier.