Across various Fedora groups, a major shared focus this week was preparing for the upcoming Fedora 45 release cycle, which included executing mass rebuilds, coordinating early manual validation testing, and finalizing change proposals ahead of the imminent branching deadline. Infrastructure transitions were another critical common item, particularly the project-wide effort to gather requirements for replacing Red Hat Bugzilla and the successful migration of source control requests from Pagure to Fedora Forge, which requires maintainers to update their fedpkg toolchains. Hardware architecture improvements were also prominent, with multiple groups dedicating resources to testing and expanding build capacities for ARM and RISC-V devices. On the community front, organizing teams focused heavily on preparations for the FrOSCon 2026 event, while several other groups—including Packaging and Diversity & Inclusion—chose to pause regular meetings or shift to ad-hoc structures to prevent organizer burnout. Finally, navigating the rise of Artificial Intelligence emerged as a cross-cutting theme, prompting discussions around user privacy, default opt-in policies for third-party packages, and strategies for local AI development.

Announcements

Major workflow transitions are underway for Fedora contributors, starting with the planned decommissioning of Red Hat Bugzilla within the next six months. FESCo has opened a ticket tracker for planning and gathering requirements for a future Red Hat BugZilla replacement to document workflows impacted by this shift. Additionally, the fedora-scm-requests queue has officially migrated from Pagure to Fedora Forge following its scheduled start on August 5th. Maintainers must update to the new fedpkg version 1.48 to continue submitting new package and branch requests, as the old Pagure system is now obsolete. In other maintenance news, a final reminder was issued listing long-term FTBFS (Fails to Build From Source) packages slated for retirement from Fedora 45, urging maintainers to fix or seek exemptions for affected software. Finally, the Fedora RISC-V community is seeking testers for an updated Fedora 44 server image that features out-of-the-box support for SpacemiT K3 boards and improvements for K1 hardware.

For the broader Linux community, new guides are available detailing how to run Ollama locally with Podman on Fedora Linux for containerized, private AI development, and how to monitor your drive health with Performance Co-Pilot to prevent sudden data loss from failing NVMe or SSD drives. Lastly, a recent attendee shared a positive retrospective on developing with Fedora and their first Flock conference, highlighting the community's welcoming culture and the behind-the-scenes efforts of volunteers and sponsors.

Council

Between August 3 and 9, 2026, the Council discussed a new user concern regarding the introduction of AI-powered features in third-party packages, highlighting the need for packaging guidelines around user privacy and opt-in defaults. The Council also continued reviewing the proposed Fedora Forge Usage Policy, incorporating community feedback into a new draft. Additionally, a temporary "private issues" workaround was proposed for Fedora Forge while native support is being developed upstream, sparking discussions on how the Council and other sensitive groups will handle private tracking.

Decisions

• No formal Council decisions were finalized during this period.
• The Fedora package maintainer for Atuin decided to disable its new AI and hex features by default due to dependency creep and privacy concerns, pending a more robust opt-in or sub-packaging strategy.

See the detailed report for the Council team.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo focused heavily on reviewing and voting on F45 and F46 Change Proposals, handling administrative tickets, and addressing updates policy exceptions. Several major Change Proposals were formally approved for Fedora 45, including the modernization of the ODBC Stack, enabling systemd-oomd and zram swap for CoreOS, and transitioning to Sequoia for openpgpverify. Conversely, the committee rejected the proposal to hardcode nss-altfiles in authselect profiles, encouraging further collaboration among affected initiatives like CoreOS and atomic bootc.

In addition to changes, FESCo initiated a project-wide requirements gathering phase for Fedora's eventual Bugzilla replacement. They also approved an urgent updates policy exception for thermald to resolve power management issues on newer Intel laptops, and handled several non-responsive maintainer tickets to ensure long-term package health.

Decisions

• Accepted multiple F45 Changes: ODBC Stack Modernization, LibreOffice Dictionaries, Native Butane Config Support in Ignition, LibreOffice html help, Authselect Remove NIS Profile, Enable systemd-oomd and zram swap for CoreOS, and Sequoia openpgpverify.
• Rejected the F45 Change: Authselect: Hardcode nss-altfiles in profiles, requesting further collaboration among atomic, bootc, and coreos teams to find a viable solution.
• Approved an urgent updates policy exception for thermald across all Fedora branches to fix Intel power management issues.
• Approved a Soname Change Policy Exception Request for Qt-Advanced-Docking-System.
• Approved non-responsive maintainer actions for benzea, granting ngompa co-maintainer admin rights for thermald, libfprint, fprintd, and fwts.
• Agreed to launch a project-wide requirements gathering tracker to collect user stories and identify a suitable Bugzilla replacement.
• Updated the release schedule for F46 onwards to move the Major Toolchain Updates/Changes deadline to a week before the mass rebuild.

See the detailed report for the FESCo team.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

The Packaging Committee held a brief meeting this week. The agenda was notably light, with no new tickets submitted for review. The only active item mentioned was a work-in-progress pull request for Node.js. Due to upcoming vacations for key members, the committee agreed to suspend meetings for the rest of August.

Decisions

• The committee will skip its next scheduled meeting in two weeks due to member vacations, postponing the next gathering until the first week of September.

See the detailed report for the Packaging Committee team.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

Mindshare held a brief meeting this week but concluded early due to a lack of quorum. Despite the early adjournment, organizers noted ongoing progress on various tickets and highlighted upcoming events, specifically FrOSCon and Data Con LA.

Additionally, community members are actively organizing the Fedora presence for FrOSCon 2026. The project booth is confirmed and swag items are being gathered, alongside an open call for volunteers to assist at the booth and share their work with attendees.

See the detailed report for the Mindshare team.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Ambassadors

The Ambassadors group focused entirely on final preparations for the Fedora booth at FrOSCon 2026, which takes place August 15-16 near Bonn, Germany. The team has successfully secured a booth space, promotional materials, and a new tablecloth, and they are actively seeking volunteers and project showcases from the community to help run the event.

See the detailed report for the Ambassadors team.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Diversity & Inclusion

The Diversity & Inclusion group is putting its regular team meetings on hiatus to prevent organizer burnout and shift focus toward concrete, event-driven goals. Discussion in the "Time to take a break?" thread confirmed that regular meetings have become stagnant without specific deliverables, and organizers will now lean into forming ad-hoc teams for events like the Fedora Mentor Summit, Fedora Week of Diversity, and Fedora Appreciation Week.

Calendar entries for the regular DEI meetings are being removed, but this will not halt ongoing initiatives. Future activities will be organized through dedicated calls for volunteers and planned in their respective event repositories.

Decisions

• Regular DEI Team meetings are officially placed on hiatus, and corresponding Fedora and Google Calendar entries are being deleted.
• Future DEI efforts will shift to an ad-hoc, event-specific model focusing on time-boxed initiatives rather than standing meetings.

See the detailed report for the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation Working Group discussed upcoming upstream GNOME changes, including plans for GNOME 52+ to replace GNOME Software with a Flatpak-focused installer called "Bazaar" and a new system updater, though Fedora will stick with GNOME Software for the time being. The group also evaluated newly integrated features like the IBus speech-to-text functionality, noting performance delays and missing default models, and reviewed the transition of GNOME Boxes to a Flatpak-only application which currently requires further polish on fractionally scaled screens.

On the forum side, community members engaged in a technical discussion regarding Btrfs RAID1 and nodatacow files (such as Libvirt virtual machine images), proposing theoretical file system mechanisms to ensure data recoverability during bit rot without full metadata checksumming.

Decisions

• Fedora will continue using GNOME Software for the time being, despite upstream GNOME's long-term plans (GNOME 52+) to replace it with a new installer called Bazaar.
• The memory retention issue in IBus speech-to-text, where the model remains loaded after the input method is removed, will be officially treated and tracked as a bug.

See the detailed report for the Workstation / GNOME team.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

The KDE group discussions this week focused on a user-reported issue regarding computer freezes under Plasma (Wayland) after upgrading to Fedora 44. The system becomes unresponsive during screen lock, with the nvidia-modeset/kthread_q process consuming 100% of the CPU, requiring a sysreq reboot to resolve.

See the detailed report for the KDE team.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

This week, the Server Working Group officially reached quorum with the addition of new members and made progress on release testing and automation infrastructure. Discussions centered heavily on upcoming Fedora 45 changes, identifying bugs in VM and ARM partition types, and reviewing default packages to prevent unnecessary bloat in server environments.

The group also advanced its Ansible support project by merging initial post-installation modules and beginning work on a CI pipeline using self-hosted Forge runners. Furthermore, the WG continued refining its documentation structure, debating the best ways to present post-installation configuration tasks to users.

Decisions

• The Working Group decided to contact the upstream Cockpit team to request the removal of unnecessary dependencies, such as SPICE, from the Cockpit VM module to prevent unwanted package bloat on standard server installations.
• The Server Working Group's Ansible repository will be formally structured around small, tightly focused roles that are assembled into larger playbooks, avoiding monolithic scripts.

See the detailed report for the Server team.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team was highly active this week, handling multiple system migrations, upgrades, and investigating service anomalies. Key efforts included advancing the RHEL 10 migrations for miscellaneous hosts, rolling out OpenID Connect enrollment for the Release Schedule Planner, and addressing intermittent authentication issues following the recent IPA cluster reinstall. The team also announced an upcoming scheduled outage for the Copr servers and discussed transitioning Matrix moderation duties to official Fedora infrastructure, including a formalized policy for official Matrix rooms.

Additionally, developers introduced substantial updates to Tahrir, the Tahrir API, and Forgejo, improving performance and enabling new features like private issue tracking in the forge environment. Investigations were also launched into src.fedoraproject.org 503 errors caused by heavy scraper activity and Fedora mailing list emails being falsely flagged as spam by the SpamHaus blocklist.

Decisions

• Migrate the Matrix moderation bot hosting to official Fedora infrastructure (@moderation:fedoraproject.org).
• Implement a new policy for official Fedora Matrix rooms, requiring the moderation bot to be present, a :fedoraproject.org room alias, and appropriate sub-space assignment.
• Block the creation of a Bugzilla component and FAS group for Security Bugs until FESCo formally approves the proposed security policy changes.
• Create new Fedora Account System (FAS) tracking groups for Copr projects: netfyr and sosreport.

See the detailed report for the Infrastructure team.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, the Release Engineering team focused heavily on infrastructure migrations and preparations for the Fedora 45 release cycle. A major milestone was the successful migration of the scm-requests repository from Pagure to Forgejo on August 5th, which necessitates that community members update their fedpkg utilities to version 1.48 or greater. The team also began extensive preparations for the F45 mass branching scheduled for August 11th, which included executing the mass re-signing of F45 content with the new F46 key.

In addition to release cycle preparations, the group handled various system and package fixes. They deployed a fix to prevent releng-bot from pinging unrelated users during SCM requests, resolved an issue where ELN packages were signed with the wrong key, and bypassed a Bodhi sidetag limitation affecting shadow-utils. Multiple package unretirement and stalled maintenance requests were processed, and the team highlighted that unretirements can now be executed directly via the updated fedpkg CLI without requiring a ticket.

Decisions

• The fedora-scm-requests repository was officially migrated from Pagure to Forgejo; maintainers must update to fedpkg v1.48 or greater to submit new package and branch requests.
• Package unretirements no longer require a Release Engineering ticket; maintainers should now use the newly introduced fedpkg request-unretirement command.
• Created a dedicated forge-releng-scm-validators group to handle SCM request approvals, preventing releng-bot from unnecessarily pinging unrelated community members.
• Created the quay.io/fedora/eln-bootc repository to enable the uploading of ELN bootc images from composes.

See the detailed report for the Release Engineering team.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team focused heavily on early manual validation for Fedora 45 this week, placing a special emphasis on ARM devices to catch significant bugs before the branch and freeze periods. The team is also actively organizing the next round of Fedora Test Days and collaborating with the Data team to identify interesting QA and build metrics—such as Bodhi karma and Koji completion rates—for future data visualizations.

In addition to testing, the group discussed hardware monitoring defaults, noting that the mcelog daemon consistently fails on modern AMD CPUs. They are currently gathering community feedback on potentially replacing it with rasdaemon. Tooling improvements were also a major theme, with updates to fedora-easy-karma, a revived issuebot in staging, and discussions around deploying a shared test asset server for openQA and Fedora CI.

Decisions

• Begin early manual validation testing for Fedora 45 prior to branching and freezes, with a particular focus on ARM hardware.
• Initiate a broader community discussion regarding replacing the mcelog daemon with rasdaemon by default due to hardware incompatibility on modern CPUs.
• Add the currently proposed Test Day events to the Fedora Test Days calendar to prevent concurrent scheduling overlaps.
• Explore the integration of actual user-runnable regression test suites (e.g., Vulkan/GL conformance, kernel test suites) into upcoming Test Days.

See the detailed report for the Quality team.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

The Design team concluded the community poll for the Fedora 46 wallpaper inspiration, selecting American mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck as the winner. Following the poll, the team is organizing a mind map meeting to brainstorm the wallpaper's conceptual design. In other activities, community members shared a proposed wallpaper on the mailing list, and drafts for revamped Design Documentation pages were posted for review.

Decisions

• The Fedora 46 wallpaper design will be inspired by American mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck.

See the detailed report for the Design team.

Learn more about the Design team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization (i18n) group held a meeting this week to review the progress of Fedora 45 changes and coordinate upcoming release deadlines. Key discussions involved tracking the completion of F45 changes, ongoing bug triaging efforts for Fedora 43, and scheduling the upcoming internationalization test week.

Decisions

• The Fedora 45 i18n test week is scheduled to take place from September 7th to September 13th, 2026.

See the detailed report for the Internationalization team.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group focused significantly on improving the repository structure and mirror paths for EPEL 11 to avoid user errors during mirroring and upgrades. The steering committee successfully voted to adopt a new "de-z-ification" policy for EPEL 11, which will rely on the $stream variable for CentOS Stream users rather than adding a 'z' suffix for RHEL minor versions. Additionally, the community discussed potential breaking updates to packages like certbot, uv, and ruff in EPEL 10, and highlighted a new way to track RHEL lifecycle milestones via the Red Hat Insights roadmap.

Decisions

• Approved the EPEL 11 portion of the "de-z-ification" policy, which will restructure repository names, redirects, and symlinks to utilize the $stream variable for CentOS Stream rather than the $releasever_minor 'z' suffix for RHEL systems.
• Agreed that the official branch naming for the CentOS Stream variant in EPEL 11 will be 11s.

See the detailed report for the EPEL team.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG met this week to discuss significant updates to their build pipeline and image generation processes. Key highlights include the production deployment of ELNBuildSync 2.0.1, the inclusion of bootc images in standard composes, and the successful migration of all major cloud images (EC2, Azure, GCE, qcow2) to image-builder.

Additionally, the group discussed restructuring ELN variants, introducing a new AltImages variant for live images and a new Extensions variant to decouple RHEL Extensions from EPEL. Plans were also outlined to completely split ELN Extras into its own target to cleanly bootstrap EPEL N+1 and preview CentOS SIGs, with a call for community feedback on the design.

Decisions

• Re-tool ELN Extras to build in a completely separate target and compose to properly isolate EPEL macros and facilitate CentOS SIG previews.
• Separate RHEL Extensions content into a distinct Extensions variant rather than an EPEL allowlist due to a lack of overlap.
• Migrate WSL image builds to image-builder following the successful migration of hyperscaler cloud images.
• Merge GitLab MR 86 to minimize dependencies in go-vendor-tools and cut a new release.

See the detailed report for the ELN team.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The Fedora Atomic Initiative met this week to discuss infrastructure updates and package releases. Progress was made on configuring Konflux service accounts for the Fedora Forge, with a new merge request proposed to unblock testing. Additionally, a recent policy change for the bootc package means that Bodhi updates now only require a +1 score to proceed, which should clear up the backlog of aging updates. In release news, bootc 1.16.6 has reached the stable repository, and work is underway for the 1.16.7 release.

Decisions

• Bodhi updates for the bootc package now only require a +1 score to proceed, which will prevent updates from sitting in the backlog until they become obsolete.

See the detailed report for the Atomic team.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

CoreOS held a meeting on August 5 to review ongoing action items and prepare for the upcoming Fedora 45 branching. Key discussions included ongoing tests for the /boot partition size to prevent data corruption during re-provisioning, preparations for the Fedora 45 Test Day, and the integration of approved FESCo changes into Rawhide. Additionally, the team discussed the pending archival of the Butane repository into Ignition.

Decisions

• Contributors with pending pull requests to the Butane repository should hold off or expect delays, as the repository is being archived and its codebase is being merged into the Ignition repository following the approval of FESCo ticket #3650.

See the detailed report for the CoreOS team.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

AI & ML

This week, the AI & ML group focused on administrative tasks, specifically processing a membership update. A contributor requested to be removed from the group and related access lists due to time constraints and the challenges associated with packaging complex upstream AI projects. The request was completed, and the contributor was successfully removed from the relevant groups.

Decisions

• Approved and processed the removal of contributor salimma from the AI/ML and PyTorch Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

See the detailed report for the AI & ML team.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group focused primarily on the ongoing Fedora 45 mass rebuilds, successfully resolving a major Python 3.15 Beta 4 ABI breakage and completing the bootstraps for Perl 5.44 and Rust. Rebuilds for OCaml have started, with Golang and R queued up next.

Significant hardware additions were made to the build pool, including five Milk-V Titan (DP1000) machines and four SpacemiT K3 systems, to improve build capacity. The team also addressed hardware instability challenges with SpacemiT K1/K3 SoCs linked to vector instructions and OpenSBI issues, and discussed a gnulib/glibc conflict that required a workaround.

Decisions

• Implemented a workaround in Fedora to address a gnulib/glibc compatibility bug (Sourceware BZ 34437 / Fedora BZ 2502638) that was causing build failures.
• Expanded the RISC-V build pool by officially integrating five Milk-V Titan machines and four SpacemiT K3 systems.

See the detailed report for the RISC-V team.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

This week, the Security group discussed recognizing vulnerability reporters with a dedicated Fedora badge and evaluating compliance with the linux-distros mailing list rules. In the forums, a community review of the new Fedora-maintained hardening documentation led to minor improvements, while the OpenScanHub team published their latest static analyzer findings for Fedora 45 critical path packages.

Decisions

• Approved moving forward with a Vulnerability Reporting Badge to reward individuals who report security flaws.
• Decided to consult Fedora Legal to determine if the existing Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA) satisfies linux-distros rules, or if a separate Fedora Pre-Disclosure-Agreement (FPDA) is needed.

See the detailed report for the Security team.

Learn more about the Security team.

DotNET

The DotNET group confirmed the final steps for the end-of-life (EOL) transition for .NET 8 and .NET 9. Omair Majid announced that the dotnet8.0 and dotnet9.0 packages will be dropped from Rawhide shortly, timed to occur just before the Fedora 45 branch day on August 11, 2026.

While they are being removed from Rawhide, both versions will remain available and continue to receive updates in existing Fedora versions (up to Fedora 44) until their official EOL in November 2026. Michael Cronenworth acknowledged the change, noting that Jellyfin 12 is currently on the horizon with release candidates available.

Decisions

• The dotnet8.0 and dotnet9.0 packages will be dropped from Rawhide ahead of the Fedora 45 branch day.

See the detailed report for the DotNET team.

Learn more about the DotNET team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused heavily on routine package maintenance, consisting of upstream version bumps and importing packages into EPEL branches. Key updates included merging newer releases for packages like perl-ExtUtils-CppGuess, perl-PDF-Reuse, perl-HTTP-Cookies, perl-Crypt-SMIME, and perlbrew. Additionally, successful efforts were made to integrate perl-Protocol-WebSocket into EPEL8 and EPEL9, alongside establishing the first EPEL10 build for perl-SQL-Abstract.

Decisions

• Merged version bumps for perl-ExtUtils-CppGuess (0.271), perl-PDF-Reuse (0.44), perl-HTTP-Cookies (0.12), perl-Crypt-SMIME (0.34), and perlbrew (1.02) to keep packages aligned with upstream releases.
• Approved and merged EPEL package imports for perl-Protocol-WebSocket (EPEL8 and EPEL9) and perl-SQL-Abstract (EPEL10) to expand package availability for Enterprise Linux distributions.

See the detailed report for the Perl team.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Ruby

Vít Ondruch announced that following the recent landing of Ruby on Rails 8.1 in Fedora, an update for version 8.1.3.1 was also released this week. The community is encouraged to test these new releases and report any issues they might encounter.

Decisions

• Pushed the Ruby on Rails 8.1.3.1 update to Fedora.

See the detailed report for the Ruby team.

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Other Discussions

This week in the Fedora community, discussions focused on transitioning away from Red Hat BugZilla, establishing style guides for mailing lists, and managing the email volume on the devel list. Additionally, there were multiple package soname bumps, discussions about orphaning outdated packages, and warm welcomes to several new package maintainers.

Contribution opportunities

Contributors with testing and quality assurance skills can easily jump into numerous highly accessible opportunities. The community is invited to test the Packager Dashboard staging environment and report bugs on its issue tracker. Testers are also needed for Fedora 45 manual validation (especially on ARM), F45 Server bare-metal/VM images, fedpkg v1.48+ features, Flatpak-only GNOME Boxes on fractionally scaled displays, newly landed Ruby on Rails 8.1, dotnet10.0, and Atomic's bootc 1.16.6. Hardware owners can evaluate /boot partition scenarios (notes), test Omni F44 images on SpacemiT K1/K3 or Milk-V Titan, and assist with testing LLVM pull request 629. Additional opportunities include Fedora 43 i18n bug triaging and contributing to Test Day planning.

For those with strong communication, writing, or organizational skills, community feedback is actively sought on the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, the AI-powered features policy, and hardware monitoring defaults (mcelog vs. rasdaemon). Contributors can submit user stories to the FESCo Bugzilla replacement tracker, restructure Server post-installation guides, or review Design Processes documentation. Event enthusiasts can volunteer for the FrOSCon 2026 booth, give talks, create A4 teaser pages for project showcases, or join organizing efforts for Fedora Week of Diversity, Appreciation Week, and the Mentor Summit.

Developers, designers, and system architects can tackle highly specific technical challenges across the project. Programmers can debug memory leaks in GNOME's new IBus speech-to-text, troubleshoot KDE Plasma Wayland screen lock freezes with NVIDIA drivers, and investigate OpenSBI bugs on RISC-V K1/K3 SoCs. System architects are invited to help design the ELN and ELN Extras separation (Issue #61 and Issue #62). Designers can streamline GNOME's action dialog buttons, design the Vulnerability Reporting Badge, or join #design:fedoraproject.org for the Fedora 46 wallpaper brainstorm. Data enthusiasts can also suggest QA-related data visualizations.

Contributors experienced in package maintenance and systems administration can make an immediate impact by adopting orphaned or non-responsive packages such as nextcloud-client, rust-zoxide, cinnamon-screensaver, and python-pivy, or by helping the AI & ML group package PyTorch. Packagers are also needed to resolve Failing to Install (FTI) EPEL packages, test EPEL 10 uv and ruff updates, minimize go-vendor-tools dependencies, and apply OpenScanHub security patches. Systems administrators can write Server Ansible roles, configure self-hosted Forge runners, and help implement RPM macro and Lua support for the Fedora 45 PURL proposal.

Across the various Fedora teams, a major shared focus is the ongoing infrastructure migration to Fedora Forge (Forgejo) and the formalization of its usage policies, a coordinated effort involving the Council, Infrastructure, Release Engineering, and Security groups. Quality assurance and release readiness for Fedora 45 also dominate the updates, highlighted by approaching testable deadlines, mass branching preparations, and FESCo's system-wide approval of gating all stable release updates using the rmdepcheck dependency checker. Meanwhile, user-facing and quality teams are heavily collaborating to troubleshoot critical system issues—most notably a Fedora 44 Workstation login lockout bug—while language-specific SIGs (Go, Perl, Ruby, Rust) are addressing routine maintenance, unannounced soname bumps, and evolving packaging standards. Finally, community outreach and organization remain highly active, with teams like Mindshare and Ambassadors rallying volunteers for upcoming events like FrOSCon 2026, and multiple working groups actively streamlining their documentation and meeting structures to improve contributor onboarding and combat maintainer burnout.

Announcements

Important deadlines and policy updates are approaching for Fedora contributors. First, the Fedora 45 Changes TESTABLE deadline is set for August 11, 2026, requiring all change owners to verify their tracker bugs are in a testable state. Additionally, maintainers should review the list of long-term FTBFS packages scheduled for retirement from Fedora 45 around August 5. On the infrastructure side, the Fedora Council has opened the proposed Fedora Forge Usage Policy for community feedback until August 13, establishing clear scopes and guidelines for the project's internal Forgejo instance. Finally, the long-running CLE "Community update" is officially retiring and being replaced by this new "This Week in Fedora" report to keep contributors informed.

In broader community news, a recent article highlights Peter Boy's work with the Docs Team to explain why Fedora needs more than just technical contributors. For those who missed the recent contributor conference in Prague, a new Flock 2026 Afterburn retrospective shares insights and survey results from the successful event. The project's multimedia outreach continues to see steady audience growth across platforms according to the Fedora Podcast 2026-Q2 metrics report. As part of that ongoing output, the team has just released Episode 057 diving into the history and mechanics of EPEL with Red Hat's Carl George, exploring a tool relied upon across the entire enterprise Linux ecosystem.

Council

The Council focused heavily on policy formalization and infrastructure migration this week. During their bi-weekly meeting, they agreed on edits to the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, settling debates on automated repository archiving by favoring manual oversight, and initiated the official community feedback phase. They also debated a draft Conflict of Interest Policy to handle sensitive governance decisions, and officially closed outdated requests to abolish the Fedora Contributor Agreement. Furthermore, discussions opened regarding the transition of the Digital Public Goods Alliance representative role following the FCA transition.

The Council also handled several operational and community requests. They approved an exception for FreeIPA to be hosted on Fedora Forge and decided to migrate the Fedora Budget repository while explicitly purging old private financial issues. Finally, the Council addressed trademark and organizational queries, declining a suspicious SIG creation request, signaling support for a trademark request for community stickers in Slovakia, and clarifying rebranding requirements for Fedora Remixes.

Decisions

• Approved an edit to the Fedora Forge Usage Policy regarding repository archiving, removing the automated 6-month rule, and initiated the official policy change process.
• Closed tickets #410 and #460 (Abolish Fedora Contributor Agreement / Re-license fedora-logos) as deferred/wont-fix due to a lack of capacity and legal constraints.
• Agreed to migrate the Fedora Budget repository to the Council space on Fedora Forge and delete all of its old private issues containing personal data.
• Approved an exception request (Ticket #575) allowing the FreeIPA organization to be hosted on Fedora Forge.
• Denied a suspicious Forge organization request for a new "Software Engineering SIG" (Ticket #573) because it did not follow the documented process.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo approved several significant system-wide changes, most notably retargeting the Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 change to Fedora 46 to ensure ample time to fix PyPI and Nvidia driver compatibility. Other major approvals include ODBC Stack Modernization, Native Butane Config Support in Ignition, and the libxml2 2.15 update which officially deprecates Python bindings and requires a mass rebuild. FESCo also fast-tracked and approved a proposal to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck to enhance update stability.

In contributor and project news, FESCo granted Proven Packager status to mschorm, merged an adjusted mid-term election policy, and sent final reminders for the upcoming 2FA requirement for all provenpackagers. Ongoing discussions are exploring the Forgejo distgit migration, a Bugzilla replacement tracker, and handling prohibited pre-built binary executables in node_modules. Furthermore, proposals to enable systemd-oomd and zram swap for CoreOS and use Sequoia's OpenPGP implementation are currently under active vote.

Decisions

• Approved the 'Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64' Change, retargeting it for Fedora 46.
• Approved the 'libxml215' Change for Fedora 45.
• Approved the FastTrack proposal to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck.
• Approved the 'Native Butane Config Support in Ignition' Change.
• Approved the 'ODBC Stack Modernization' Change.
• Approved the 'LibreOffice Dictionaries' Change.
• Approved the 'LibreOffice html help' Change.
• Approved allowing the ELNBuildSync (EBS) service to use draft builds in Koji sidetags inherited from eln-build.
• Approved an adjustment to the election policy regarding seats filled after a member steps down mid-term.
• Approved a one-off slightly incompatible update request for rust-routinator.
• Approved the Request to become Proven Packager for mschorm.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Mindshare

This week, Mindshare welcomed a new contributor who expressed interest in joining the CommOps team, pointing them to the Matrix chat and Forgejo issue tracker for immediate engagement opportunities. Additionally, preparations are actively underway for FrOSCon 2026, a free FOSS conference happening August 15-16 near Bonn, Germany. The team has secured a booth and is calling on community members to volunteer, create A4 project teasers to spark conversations, and join the pre-event hike to Drachenfels castle.

Decisions

• Confirmed that a Fedora project booth will be hosted at FrOSCon 2026.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Ambassadors

The Ambassadors group is calling for all hands on deck to prepare for FrOSCon 2026, scheduled for August 15-16 near Bonn, Germany. A Fedora booth is confirmed, and contributors are highly encouraged to engage by joining the Matrix room, adding their names to the event Wiki, or creating A4 teaser pages to spark conversations about their Fedora projects at the booth. Additional community-building activities include a planned Friday evening hike to Drachenfels castle, while work on the official event badge is currently pending.

Decisions

• Confirmed Fedora's booth presence and participation at FrOSCon 2026.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Diversity & Inclusion

Justin Wheeler proposed putting DEI Team meetings on hiatus to protect the mental health of the chairs and prevent burnout. The team agreed that regular meetings had become stagnant and decided to shift their focus toward ad-hoc, event-specific teams with concrete goals and timelines, such as the Fedora Mentor Summit or Fedora Week of Diversity. General discussions will continue in the team chat room as needed.

Decisions

• Put regular DEI Team meetings on hiatus and transition to an ad-hoc, event-specific meeting model.
• Delete the regular DEI Team meeting entries from both the Fedora and Google Calendars.
• Open a volunteer call for Fedora Week of Diversity to evaluate if there is enough interest to execute the event later this year.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation/GNOME team discussed a login bug in the Fedora 44 Workstation ISO where users are occasionally locked out after setting their credentials. Contributors are working to gather logs and pinpoint the exact cause within gnome-initial-setup. Additionally, a new implementation restoring Google Drive integration in GNOME is currently under review by upstream maintainers, presenting a great opportunity for community testers to provide feedback.

In networking discussions, the team explored IPv6 prefix delegation issues involving routers that fail to invalidate old prefixes after rebooting, which leads to dropped connectivity. It was noted that router manufacturers like Mikrotik are currently working on firmware updates to align with RIPE recommendations, circumventing the need for immediate workarounds in Fedora's default network behavior.

Decisions

• Determined that the Fedora 44 Workstation login bug is related to user creation during first boot (gnome-initial-setup or shadow-utils) rather than Anaconda, which does not handle user creation on the Workstation Live image.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

A user reported experiencing system freezes under Plasma (Wayland) after upgrading to Fedora 44, specifically noting that the nvidia-modeset/kthread_q process was consuming 100% CPU. The issue occurred on a hybrid graphics setup utilizing an AMD CPU and a discrete NVIDIA GPU running the proprietary NVIDIA drivers (610.43.03).

In the ensuing discussion, a community member advised checking the system and user journals via SSH before performing a forced reboot to isolate the root cause. The user was also directed to seek further assistance on the Fedora Discussion forum, which hosts a larger pool of contributors experienced with NVIDIA troubleshooting.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

During this week, the Server Working Group held a meeting to coordinate Fedora 45 release testing, Ansible support, and the Home Server spin-off. Contributors are encouraged to help test Brett's newly finalized Kiwi development environment for the Home Server project. On the automation front, the group is exploring the "AnsibleByExample" standard project layout and GitLab workflows for their upcoming Ansible roles, and an initial post-install role PR is being merged for member testing. For F45 testing, Emmanuel Seyman will review the upstream release changes for potential Server Edition impacts, and interested contributors were directed to the QA SIG to assist with openQA test automation.

Outside of the meeting, a forum discussion regarding IPv6 preferred_lft address routing issues with non-persistent prefixes concluded. A user shared a temporary workaround using Unique Local Unicast (ULA) and NAT while awaiting an upcoming patch from router manufacturer Mikrotik.

Decisions

• Emmanuel Seyman will review the Fedora 45 change list to identify potential issues for the Server Edition.
• The group will evaluate the 'AnsibleByExample' playbook structure and GitLab workflows to standardize their Ansible support repositories.
• John Himpel will merge Emmanuel Seyman's draft post-install Ansible PR to enable wider testing among members.
• The working group will begin testing and providing feedback on Brett's newly established virtualized Kiwi development environment for the Home Server spin-off.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team focused heavily on resolving post-migration issues following the upgrade of the IPA cluster to RHEL 10. Efforts were directed at stabilizing authentication services, addressing sporadic login errors on accounts.fedoraproject.org, fixing Ipsilon auth failures caused by browser tracking protection, and correcting LDAP schema replication errors. In the forums, a proposal was introduced to place an HAProxy load balancer in front of the IPA cluster to bypass ongoing DNS TTL caching problems. Work also continued on restoring the Koji staging database and migrating miscellaneous infrastructure hosts to RHEL 10.

Other notable discussions included optimizing Zabbix monitoring by implementing service-level layers, re-notifying on critical alerts, and exploring read-only guest access. The team also reviewed a proposal for a "test assets server" designed to drastically reduce network traffic by caching update repositories for Fedora CI and openQA. In parallel, Forgejo integration saw substantial updates, with new monitoring templates and continued progress on the highly requested private issues feature.

Decisions

• Set ipsilon02 as a backup server in HAProxy to mitigate authentication transaction failures caused by browser tracking protection.
• Completely disable (ensure absent) the mod_mime_magic Apache module on proxies and package servers to fix dist-git lookaside cache HTTP header issues.
• Add DNA range variables directly to the IPA Ansible playbook to automatically set them per host.
• Implement a 🔥 keyword highlight in Matrix clients to help administrators quickly spot Disaster-level Zabbix alerts.
• Patrikp will act as the chair for the August 13th Infrastructure meeting.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering team focused heavily on the final steps for migrating fedora-scm-requests from Pagure to Forgejo. To minimize disruption for contributors, the team agreed to coordinate the fedpkg tooling updates with a firm "flag day", ensuring developers receive appropriate upgrade warnings before the legacy Pagure API is fully disabled. Meanwhile, preparations are underway for the upcoming mass branching tentatively scheduled for August 11th, which includes updates to related Ansible tooling.

On the operations side, the group processed a dozen tickets, yielding several updates relevant to the broader Linux community. The F47 Release Signing Keys have been generated, a new eln-bootc repository was created on Quay to host bootc images for ELN composes, and the f45-perl side tag was successfully merged into Rawhide. Contributors are also reminded that package unretirements (for packages retired less than 8 weeks ago) can now be handled directly via the fedpkg request-unretirement command without needing to open a manual releng ticket.

Decisions

• Coordinate the fedora-scm-requests Forgejo migration using a synchronized 'flag day' to safely transition users to the updated fedpkg CLI, rather than attempting to maintain dual APIs.
• Provide access to staging compose hosts for Pungi PR testing by adding the requesting users to the sysadmin-releng staging group.
• Merge the f45-perl side tag into Rawhide following successful openQA testing.
• Direct package maintainers to use the fedpkg request-unretirement CLI command for recent unretirements rather than processing manual infrastructure tickets.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

This week, the Quality team saw a major workflow change as FESCo approved gating all stable release updates on the rmdepcheck tool, a rule that has already taken effect for in-flight updates. In the forums, contributors highlighted a critical login lockout bug on the Fedora 44 Workstation ISO and issued an important call for testers to evaluate a new Google Drive integration implementation for GNOME.

Additionally, quality engineering efforts successfully pushed a large Python rebuild update through testing and identified issues with Fedora 45 backgrounds via openQA. The team is actively preparing for upcoming Test Days and making numerous infrastructure updates to tools like Issuebot, Testdays-web, and Fedora Easy Karma ahead of the upcoming Fedora branches.

Decisions

• FESCo approved gating all stable release updates on the rmdepcheck reverse dependency static checker. This rule was implemented in production immediately and applies retrospectively to in-flight updates.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

This week, the Websites and Apps group discussed a proposal to add a warning banner to the Fedora 44 download page regarding a login-blocking bug that reportedly prevents users from logging in after a fresh Workstation install. While the initial request suggested pointing users to a Respins SIG image with a patched Anaconda, QA representatives clarified that user creation is handled during first boot (gnome-initial-setup or plasma-setup), not by Anaconda. Consequently, the discussion pivoted to accurately reproducing the issue, presenting an opportunity for contributors to help collect diagnostic logs for first-boot login failures before any website changes are considered.

Decisions

• No changes or warning banners will be added to the download page until the reported login issue is properly reproduced and the root cause is correctly identified.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Design team saw a community member propose a custom wallpaper set for future Fedora releases, though it was noted it may not fit the current Fedora 46 theme. In ticket discussions, progress continued on the Contributor Onboarding Video Series, with the team agreeing on specific public-domain music tracks and moving forward with generating video previews.

Additionally, new UX/UI design requests were opened for a Fedora website credits page and a Project Resistor site redesign, prompting the team to propose a discovery call for the latter. Finally, the team discussed modernizing the outdated "What can I do for Fedora" site, ultimately closing the ticket with the decision to contact the upstream infrastructure maintainers before committing to new mockups, while also dropping the broken link from a new contributor poster.

Decisions

• Proceed with the chosen public-domain music tracks ("Jupiter" and "Never Speak of the Devil") for the Contributor Onboarding Video Series.
• Schedule a discovery call with the Project Resistor team to clarify whether they need mockups or full web development.
• Close the "What can I do for Fedora" redesign ticket to first check with the upstream repository maintainers before doing any design work.
• Remove the outdated "What can I do for Fedora" link from the new contributor poster.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

During the July 28 meeting, the Docs team discussed information architecture updates for the site's frontpage. Visual redesigns are delayed for 2-3 months while the Design team is busy, but a new staging landing page (docs.stg.fedoraproject.org) is currently live to test structural changes. The team also evaluated technical challenges regarding Antora repository module splits, noting that future structural updates might require significant URL redirects to maintain links. In broader community news, attendees were informed that a Flock 2026 recap and session videos will soon be available on Fedora Magazine and YouTube.

To improve contributor engagement, the staging site now features a dedicated section for new contributors, and the team is actively seeking collaboration with the Join SIG to refine it. There are also immediate, bite-sized opportunities for community members to get involved: volunteers are highly encouraged to help clean up obsolete Wiki pages in the Docs_Project category by applying a simple redirect macro, and anyone with CSS experience is welcome to help style the new frontpage.

Decisions

• Postpone major visual and CSS updates to the frontpage until the Design team has availability in 2-3 months, focusing entirely on content and information architecture in the meantime.
• Restrict the ongoing wiki deprecation and cleanup efforts strictly to the Docs_Project category to prevent scope creep.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Legal

This week, the Legal team addressed questions regarding firmware distribution and open-source license text anomalies. In a discussion about the foo2zjs printer driver, contributors asked if Fedora could package scripts that download necessary HP printer firmware. Legal clarified that scripts downloading from unofficial third-party mirrors (getweb) are not permitted, but a script fetching from the official OpenPrinting website (getweb-hpplugin) could be acceptable, pending a formal license review of the firmware to ensure it meets Fedora's technical criteria.

Additionally, in a thread concerning "All rights reserved" clauses appearing alongside FOSS licenses like BSD-3-Clause, the team concluded that this phrase is largely a redundant "cargo-cult" addition. Contributors are advised not to worry about it, as it can be safely ignored provided it is associated with a clear, acceptable open-source license grant.

Decisions

• Scripts downloading firmware from unofficial, third-party mirrors are not permitted in Fedora.
• Scripts downloading firmware from official sources (like OpenPrinting) may be acceptable, but the specific firmware license must first undergo a formal legal review against Fedora's technical firmware requirements.
• The phrase "All rights reserved" found alongside upstream FOSS licenses is considered redundant and can be safely ignored as long as it is paired with an acceptable open-source license grant.

Learn more about the Legal team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL team focused heavily on the EPEL 11 and EPEL 10 directory naming scheme proposal to address feedback from enterprise rebuild communities (such as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux) regarding private mirrors and repository redirection. During their weekly meeting, the team laid out a timeline to evaluate and implement these changes before the RHEL 10.3 branching to avoid disrupting early adopters. Additionally, on the mailing list, it was announced that FESCo has approved gating all Fedora stable release updates using the rmdepcheck reverse dependency static checker, a policy that will soon be evaluated for EPEL as well.

In broader contributor and community news, routine package maintenance and quality assurance continued, including the introduction of new EPEL 10 packages and efforts to resolve failing-to-install (FTI) and policy-breaking packages in EPEL 9. Community engagement was also highlighted, with an upcoming Fedora Podcast interview featuring Carl George to discuss the EPEL 11 proposal and raise broader Linux community awareness.

Decisions

• The team agreed to schedule a vote on the EPEL 11 portion of the naming scheme proposal for August 5th, and a vote on the EPEL 10 portion for August 12th.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

During the July 28 ELN meeting, the team announced that ELN bootc images are now building regularly on Konflux. Contributors are currently resolving minor early-testing issues and working to establish an automated pipeline to the production registry (quay.io/fedora/eln-bootc). Additionally, qcow2 and ec2 images are now being successfully built using image-builder and have been validated on AWS, with pull requests open to integrate Azure and GCE support.

Looking ahead to RHEL 11, the group also debated whether to drop hardware firmware (such as linux-firmware) from cloud images. Acknowledging that hardware passthrough is still utilized on some hyperscalers, the group opted to move this conversation to a dedicated issue to carefully evaluate how closely ELN should mirror future RHEL decisions without disrupting existing use cases.

Decisions

• Tasked Simon de Vlieger with investigating how to properly upload and publish Konflux bootc builds to the quay.io/fedora/eln-bootc registry.
• Decided to move the discussion regarding the removal of hardware firmware from ELN cloud images to a separate issue tracker.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

In the weekly meeting, the team highlighted continued progress on ELN and Konflux integration, specifically regarding plans to migrate base images from GitLab. A blocker regarding a Konflux service account is currently being addressed by the infrastructure team, which is expected to unblock development shortly. Leadership also noted pending action items to formalize the SIG's setup process and establish a dedicated Fedocal calendar for contributors.

Meanwhile, an ongoing forum discussion regarding the proposed systemd-sysexts SIG focused on the administrative steps for launching the group. To navigate confusing documentation rules, contributors agreed to initially outline the new SIG's scope on a standard Fedora Wiki page before requesting a dedicated Forge organization and Matrix channel.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS group focused on upcoming release testing, tentatively scheduling the Fedora CoreOS 45 Test Day and live video meeting for September 21st. Technical discussions highlighted the Ignition Native Butane Support proposal, which will remove the need for an external conversion step during provisioning; the team plans to gather feedback on this from the Flatcar community. Additionally, contributors addressed issues with the CodeRabbit PR bot leaving unprofessional comments in the Afterburn repository, planning to establish a dedicated repository to manage global configuration defaults.

In the forums, progress continued on establishing the systemd-sysexts SIG. Contributors discussed the optimal way to host the SIG's initial documentation, ultimately recommending starting with a Fedora Wiki page before requesting a dedicated Forge organization to bypass current procedural documentation challenges.

Decisions

• Tentatively schedule the Fedora CoreOS 45 Test Day and live video meeting for 2026-09-21, pending the final Beta Release schedule.
• Address inappropriate CodeRabbit PR bot comments by disabling them in affected repositories and creating a central coreos/coderabbit repository for global default configurations.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

AI & ML

This week, the AI & ML group announced that GPU CI testing is now operational and available for contributors in the AI/ML SIG. Furthermore, the AI Developer Desktop has achieved its initial integration with OpenShell, marking an exciting step forward for the project.

In administrative updates, a contributor requested to be removed from the SIG due to time constraints and burnout. The group processed this request, removing the member from the SIG-related GitLab groups and the pytorch-sig membership to ensure an accurate representation of active contributors.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

Security

During their weekly meeting, the Security SIG focused on formalizing internal vulnerability management processes and establishing documentation standards. A primary initiative is preparing for Fedora's representation on the private linux-distros mailing list to safely handle embargoed pre-disclosure vulnerabilities. To support this, the team is defining clear policies, establishing a secure Bugzilla workflow, and setting up dedicated access groups. In news relevant to the broader Linux ecosystem, the group is defining and documenting Fedora's role as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) and auditing existing documentation to align with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) requirements.

To improve contributor engagement opportunities, the team successfully migrated the Defensive Coding Guide from Pagure to Forgejo, opening the door for new community contributions. Discussions are also underway on the forum to review Fedora-maintained hardening guidelines and on the tracker to explore creating a vulnerability reporting badge as a non-monetary bug bounty alternative.

Decisions

• Draft comprehensive documentation detailing Fedora's scope and guidelines as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA).
• Create a new FAS group named sec-bugzappers to manage access for Fedora representatives handling the linux-distros pre-disclosure mailing list.
• Establish a dedicated, private Bugzilla component (proposed as distribution-private or fedora-security) to track embargoed vulnerability reports.
• Draft a platform-neutral policy for handling pre-disclosure vulnerabilities and submit it as a PR to the Security team's documentation.
• Grant all Security SIG members the privilege to create new repositories within the Forge group to remove documentation bottlenecks.
• Close the Pagure repository and officially migrate the Defensive Coding Guide to the Security SIG's Forge namespace.

Learn more about the Security team.

Go

During the Go SIG meeting, the team discussed standardizing CGO_CFLAGS and related compiler flags across Fedora by introducing a new %go_set_cgo_flags macro, which will undergo mass prebuild testing to avoid disrupting existing packages. The group also approved a new SIG membership policy that will be appended to the project README, clarifying the justification required for elevated package privileges. For contributors looking to get involved, assistance is needed to patch downstream packages broken by recent Go 1.27 updates, specifically those affected by changes to json v2, compress/flate, and grpc.

In broader Linux ecosystem news, the unmaintained license-scanning tool askalono has been forked into a newly maintained project named scallion. Fedora's Go packaging stack will pivot to use scallion as its default license detector. Additionally, efforts are underway to provide a minimal go-vendor-tools package for RHEL 11 by stripping optional build-time dependencies, an initiative that presents immediate opportunities for contributors to write tmt-based integration tests.

Decisions

• Approved the new Go SIG membership policy, which will be formalized via a PR to the project repository.
• Agreed to introduce scallion as the replacement for the unmaintained askalono license scanner, with upcoming changes planned for both go-vendor-tools and go2rpm.
• Decided to release go2rpm v2 with the default configuration set to the vendor profile.
• Agreed to support go-vendor-tools in RHEL 11 by isolating the RHEL-specific changes in a separate GitLab branch and developing new tmt-based integration tests.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused heavily on package maintenance, compatibility updates, and version bumps. Several pull requests were merged, including conditionalizing dependencies for perl-Module-Build-Tiny, disabling optional dependencies for perl-Compress-Raw-Lzma in RHEL, and addressing Wx 3.2.9 compatibility in perl-Wx. A patch for OpenSSL 4 ASN.1 strings was integrated into perl-Crypt-SMIME. Additionally, routine version bumps were applied to perl-LWP-Protocol-https (6.17), perl-HTTP-Message (7.04), and perl-ExtUtils-XSpp (0.19).

Other ongoing discussions involved resolving an expected installability failure during the bootstrap of perl-SQL-Abstract and addressing MySQL 9.7 rebuilds for perl-DBD-MySQL, though the latter's PR was closed as the fix was committed directly to the rawhide branch.

Decisions

• Merge pull request to conditionalize CPAN::Requirements::Dynamic dependency in perl-Module-Build-Tiny.
• Merge pull request to disable optional dependencies for perl-Compress-Raw-Lzma in RHEL.
• Merge pull request applying a compatibility patch for Wx 3.2.9 in perl-Wx.
• Merge pull request containing an OpenSSL 4 ASN.1 string patch for perl-Crypt-SMIME.
• Close the perl-DBD-MySQL PR for the MySQL 9.7 rebuild without merging, as it was fixed directly in the rawhide branch.
• Merge version bump pull requests for perl-LWP-Protocol-https (6.17), perl-HTTP-Message (7.04), and perl-ExtUtils-XSpp (0.19).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

A contributor raised a packaging question regarding the dupeguru package (Bugzilla 2497737), which is currently waiting for review. The upstream code uses generic top-level modules (core, hscommon, qt), which could cause namespace conflicts with other applications. The main subject of inquiry was whether reorganizing the source tree to place these folders under a specific dupeguru namespace is the recommended approach for Fedora packaging.

Learn more about the Python team.

Ruby

Vít Ondruch announced that the upgrade to Ruby on Rails 8.1 (specifically version 8.1.2) has officially landed in Fedora. An update to the recently released version 8.1.3.1 is planned for the near future, as it was temporarily delayed to meet the change deadline. From a packaging perspective, there were no major structural changes, with the notable exception of Trix being extracted into a separate new package. Contributors and users are highly encouraged to test the new release and report any issues.

Decisions

• Upgrade the Ruby on Rails package to version 8.1.2.
• Extract Trix into a new, separate package.
• Delay the update to Rails 8.1.3.1 temporarily to ensure the 8.1.2 update meets the change deadline.

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Rust

Frank Dana proposed a new packaging method for Rust and Python that would replace feature-specific subpackages with a conditional Requires: ... for syntax in RPM. He argued that the current glut of subpackages creates excessive metadata, bloats dnf search results, and clutters local systems.

During the discussion, Fabio Valentini pointed out that Rust packaging tooling must maintain backward compatibility with RHEL 9, making this unfeasible to implement in the near future, and suggested using fedpkg mockbuild instead of local builds to avoid cluttering personal environments. Carl George noted that since some Python extra subpackages contain actual files (like CLI commands or man pages), the proposed mechanism could not fully replace subpackages, though both systems could potentially coexist.

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• Jakub Kadlčík proposed a reimagined Fedora Package Review Process using a temporary Forge repository, PRs with CI, and testing multiple packages in one go. After feedback regarding SRPM support and vendor archives, he planned to leverage Packit and Copr's custom build scripts instead of Forgejo Actions.
• A Hummingbird Community Meeting took place to discuss the intersection of Linux distributions and AI. Demos included Project Bluefin's autonomous agentic OS factory using Hive and Red Hat Hardened Images acting as a downstream for Fedora Hummingbird Linux.
• A user reported a privacy issue with Firefox RPMs because geoclue2 was installed as a dependency via xdg-desktop-portal. Community members shared configuration workarounds to disable the service's tracking capabilities.
• Simon de Vlieger published a blog post detailing how the Fedora 45 release is produced, explaining the pipeline from raw packages to final artifacts like ISOs and disk images.
• Tomáš Hrčka announced an update postponing the pagure.io sunset. The delay allows the team to finish migrating critical SCM repositories like fedora-scm-requests and to finalize ForgeFiler, a tool handling private issues temporarily missing from Forgejo.
• After a lengthy thread about too much automated email on the devel list, Kevin Fenzi disabled the Rawhide and ELN compose reports. Users who still want these notifications must now subscribe to the test-reports mailing list.
• A Change Proposal to enable Shadow Stack by default on x86_64 in Fedora 45 sparked discussion around compatibility. Discussions are ongoing regarding PyPI wheels built via manylinux, NVIDIA drivers, and Rust binaries (which have already been updated in Rawhide to build with SHSTK enabled).
• Adam Williamson's proposal to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck was approved by FESCo. The static reverse dependency checker is now active in production, successfully catching several genuine dependency breakages and minor infrastructure blips.
• A proposal to disable Vendor Change by default in DNF5 raised concerns that system upgrades might break for packages transitioning from third-party repos (like RPM Fusion) to official Fedora repos. It was suggested that specific vendor transition configurations could mitigate these issues automatically.
• A Change Proposal seeking to restrict Change discussions exclusively to the devel mailing list while leaving Discourse posts as read-only received mixed feedback. Some members proposed batch-posting announcements or finding a middle ground to minimize the split-brain effect that leads to maintainer burnout.
• Other discussions this week covered issues rendering the f45-backgrounds in KDE, a tech preview for Web Based Remote Installation for Atomic Desktops, a review request for the dupeguru duplicate file finder, the migration of the packager-sponsors tracker to Fedora Forge, community thoughts in regards to Change Proposals, and a reminder about the approaching F45 Changes TESTABLE deadline.

Orphaning packages

• Miro Hrončok posted a list of long term FTBFS packages to be retired in August that have failed to build since Fedora 42.
• Nicolas Chauvet issued a schroedinger retirement notice, retiring the package because it has been unmaintained upstream for 10 years and replaced by ffmpeg.
• Jan Stanek announced that nodejs20 is retired in rawhide following its upstream End of Life, advising users to migrate to nodejs22 or 24.
• Phoebe Harris announced an intention to take ownership of and unretire rust-qrcode and rust-wildmatch to support the clifton application.
• Scott Theisen submitted patches to build the orphaned packages python-markups and retext, though he has not formally adopted them.
• Sergio Pascual started an orphaning blitz by retiring the obsolete C++ array library blitz.
• The automated report of orphaned packages looking for new maintainers detailed numerous unmaintained packages at risk of retirement within six weeks.
• Richard Shaw asked if anyone wants to save python-pivy before it breaks completely due to missing dependencies.

Package updates

• An unannounced soname bump for nettle caused several FTBFS issues; a nettle3.10-devel compat package was shipped to unblock builds while maintainers port to Nettle 4.
• An unannounced soname bump for openssl-pkcs11 broke dependencies for nextcloud-client, requiring provenpackagers to merge PRs and rebuild the client in a side-tag.
• Iker Pedrosa announced a shadow rebase and libsubid SONAME bump being prepared in a side-tag, asking container tool maintainers to rebuild their packages.
• Michel Lind issued an RFC on an incompatible update for routinator due to a major security fix removing a vulnerable feature, which has now been pushed to stable.
• Ben Beasley gave a heads-up about an ABI-incompatible update for rapidyaml 0.16.0 coming to Rawhide.
• Pavel Valena requested testing for an upgrade to dracut 111 in Rawhide.
• Milan Crha announced a short-notice libedataserver soname version bump in Rawhide, providing a side-tag for dependent package rebuilds.
• Fabio Valentini warned of an unannounced soname bump for libgnome-desktop-3 affecting dozens of GNOME-related packages.

New contributor introductions

• Phoebe Harris: An embedded software developer aiming to package the SSH connection manager clifton and Typst.
• Dawid Wrobel: A KMyMoney developer returning to Linux who wants to adopt outdated GNOME extensions and package Betterbird.
• Myriade: A young Rust developer intending to adopt and maintain the orphaned supercollider package.
• Nikolay: A software engineer developing qTox who is interested in deep neural networks and machine learning.
• Vivek Denny: A backend/cloud developer with an interest in low-level systems and networks wanting to give back to open source.

Across the various Fedora working groups, the primary shared focus this week was the successful completion and subsequent fallout management of the Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild, which required extensive coordination from Release Engineering, Quality, and language-specific SIGs (like Python and Perl) to triage build failures and ABI changes. Another major cross-team initiative is the ongoing infrastructure migration to Forgejo, with the Docs, Infrastructure, Design, and Release Engineering teams actively working to transition repositories away from Pagure ahead of strict deadlines. Security, cryptography, and compliance also emerged as a prominent theme, highlighted by FESCo's new two-factor authentication (2FA) mandate for packagers, the Security SIG's efforts to align with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), and system-wide cryptography updates like the transition to Sequoia. Finally, teams are heavily engaged in Fedora 45 feature stabilization and policy refinement, actively addressing cross-desktop bugs—such as the memory-crashing default wallpaper in KDE—while updating governance and packaging guidelines to reduce contributor burnout and streamline community workflows.

Announcements

For Fedora contributors, the Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild has officially completed, and a reminder was issued that the F45 Self-Contained Change proposal deadline has closed. To reduce contributor burnout and avoid split-brain conversations, an F46 Change Proposal aims to move all future Change discussions exclusively to the devel mailing list, ending simultaneous threads on Discourse. In other community news, the long-running Community weekly updates are being replaced by "This Week in Fedora". Developers looking to test new tools can engage with a proposed F45 Change to introduce encapsule, a new CLI utility for safely running untrusted internet scripts in isolated containers, which pairs nicely with a recent Fedora Magazine guide on sandboxing AI coding agents with microVMs.

Numerous technical Change Proposals were announced this week, notably for Fedora Atomic Desktops, which are slated to adopt the new Anaconda WebUI and gain web-based remote installation support. On the security and cryptography front, Fedora plans to transition RPM signature verification to Sequoia via a new %openpgpverify macro to support Post-Quantum Cryptography, and will begin phasing out the deprecated in-kernel Crypto Userspace API. System-level updates include deprecating the low-memory-monitor package in favor of native GLib handling, enabling systemd-oomd and zram swap by default on CoreOS, and updating authselect to both hardcode nss-altfiles and remove the outdated NIS profile. Finally, desktop users will benefit from an update to IBus 1.5.35, which improves XKB keymap handling across Wayland environments.

Council

The Fedora Council is currently seeking community feedback on a draft Conflict of Interest Policy intended to guide governance groups. Following initial discussions, the draft will be revised to ensure it only applies to governance bodies, removes overly strict recusal requirements (such as preventing FESCo members from voting on their own changes), and protects contributor privacy under GDPR by not requiring the disclosure of the specific nature of a conflict. In infrastructure news, the Council advanced the Fedora Forge usage policy after reaching a compromise to mandate a "tickets" repository for all organizations as a unified contact method, rather than automatically archiving inactive repositories after 12 months.

Additionally, the Council addressed a few administrative requests. They investigated suspicious Forge organization requests originating from newly created accounts; while a vague Software Engineering SIG request was rejected, the situation successfully led to the revitalization of the Java SIG by an established contributor. The Council also reviewed a trademark permission request to sell Fedora community stickers on a Slovak open-source web shop, and granted an exception for FreeIPA to host an organization on the Fedora Forge due to its foundational role in Fedora Infrastructure.

Decisions

• Agreed to advance the Fedora Forge usage policy by mandating a "tickets" repository for all organizations to facilitate communication, dropping the previous proposal for automatic repository archiving.
• Approved an exception to allow FreeIPA to create an organization on the Fedora Forge, recognizing it as a foundational ecosystem tool.
• Rejected a suspicious Forge organization request for a Software Engineering SIG because it was submitted by a brand-new account and failed to follow the documented SIG creation process.
• Agreed to revise the draft Conflict of Interest Policy to apply strictly to governance groups, protect GDPR privacy rights by not requiring detailed conflict explanations, and allow standard voting practices (like voting on one's own proposals) to continue with simple disclosure.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

FESCo had a highly active week reviewing numerous Fedora 45 Change Proposals and discussing project policies. Major technical discussions included the Forgejo dist-git migration planning, a proposal to restrict Change Proposal discussions to the devel mailing list to prevent "split-brain" conversations, and a fast-track proposal to gate all stable release updates on rmdepcheck. The Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 proposal was deferred pending a clarified mitigation plan for affected software like Rust, Python extensions, and NVIDIA drivers.

On the security and contributor front, FESCo is officially requiring two-factor authentication (2FA) for all provenpackager group members, with a three-month grace period for existing members before their access is temporarily downgraded. A broader proposal to require 2FA for all packagers is also currently in the works. Additionally, the FESCo election policy was adjusted so that replacements for members stepping down mid-term will serve a full year if only one person drops out.

Decisions

• Change: RelocateRpmRepoConfigsToUsr was recategorized from a Self-Contained Change to a System Wide Change.
• For Change: libxml215, FESCo asked the Change Owner to update the wiki page to ensure critical path packages are fixed before the change is merged and to update for no releng-provided mass rebuild.
• Request to remove inactive software KVM projects: The barrier and input-leap packages will be retired without Provides being added.
• (Slightly) incompatible update request (one-off) for rust-routinator was approved.
• Adjust election policy regarding mid-term vacated seats was approved.
• Change: MariaDB 12.3 was approved.
• Change: MySQL 9.7 was approved.
• Change: Stratis Storage in Anaconda was approved.
• Change: Ruby on Rails 8.1 was approved.
• Change: Bash Color Prompt 1.0 was approved.
• Change: oo7 Secrets Service Provider was approved.
• Change: Fontconfig 2.18 was approved.
• Change: Disable Vendor Change by Default was approved.
• Change: LibreOffice Dictionaries was approved.
• Change: LibreOffice html help was approved.
• Change: Native Butane Config Support in Ignition was approved.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

During their 2026-07-23 meeting, the Packaging Committee addressed broken links in the DefaultServices guidelines (FPC#1556), agreeing that linking directly to the fedora-release source tree is too fragile and difficult to maintain. They also reviewed a draft update for NPM packaging guidelines (FPC PR#1553). Contributors noted concerns with the draft's example spec file—specifically regarding how bundled libraries are handled as separate source tarballs and the disabling of automatic requirements. The committee will wait for the Node.js SIG to finalize the draft and address these concerns before conducting a deeper review.

Additionally, the committee discussed the need for clearer versioning guidelines for pre-release snapshots. A pull request is currently being drafted to explicitly define the use of the ~^ syntax, ensuring that untagged snapshots sort correctly before tagged pre-releases (e.g., beta1). This clarification will be proposed for gradual adoption to avoid disrupting existing packages and to help maintainers avoid sorting errors.

Decisions

• The committee agreed to remove the fragile source tree links in the DefaultServices guidelines and replace them with a general text instruction directing packagers to check the fedora-release package directly.
• Formal review of the new NPM packaging guidelines is paused until the Node.js SIG removes the work-in-progress status and addresses initial feedback.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

In their July 23 meeting, the Mindshare committee discussed shifting their social media strategy to rely on "Digital Ambassadors" rather than a dedicated Marketing team, proposing the use of Buffer to securely manage account access. This new direction will be tracked in a fresh ticket, replacing the outdated issue #26. The team also addressed regional support by reviewing a swag request for the French community (issue #126) and noted the need to update the Meetbot documentation to reflect Matrix-native commands.

On the contributor engagement front, the CommOps team is actively seeking new members and a committee representative, prompting the reopening of CommOps issue #145. Highlighting this opportunity, a new contributor with a communications background recently introduced themselves on the forum to join CommOps. Meanwhile, the committee continues to seek asynchronous votes to finalize the Mindshare representative for the Fedora Council.

Decisions

• Approved approximately $500 in swag for the French community to cover a year of local and regional distribution.
• Decided to close the three-year-old social media access ticket and open a new one focused on testing Buffer for Digital Ambassadors.
• Reopened the ticket for the vacant CommOps representative seat to encourage volunteer engagement.
• Extended the vote for the Mindshare Council representative by one week to allow for asynchronous participation due to a lack of meeting quorum.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Workstation / GNOME

The f45-backgrounds package is now available in Rawhide, introducing wide-gamut color support for the default Fedora 45 wallpaper. To provide a cleaner Appearance menu, the "Time of Day" animated wallpapers have been separated into optional, dedicated sub-packages for GNOME and MATE. Shortly after the release, testers reported that the default wallpaper was rendering as solid grey in KDE due to memory allocation limits being exceeded by the massive 12800x12800 .jxl image file (mailing list thread). The design team will shrink the image to 8K in the next update to resolve this.

On the networking side, a forum discussion highlighted an issue with Fedora's IPv6 behavior on networks with non-persistent prefixes. When a router reboots and fails to invalidate old prefixes, Fedora attempts to route through older IPv6 addresses instead of defaulting to the newest one, causing connectivity drops until the old lease expires. Contributors are looking into a proper NetworkManager or kernel-level fix, but in the meantime, users can employ NetworkManager dispatcher scripts listening for dhcp6-change events as a temporary workaround.

Decisions

• The "Time of Day" animated wallpapers have been split out of the main background packages into dedicated sub-packages (f45-backgrounds-gnome-time-of-day and f45-backgrounds-mate-time-of-day).
• The default Fedora 45 wallpaper resolution will be reduced to 8K to fix memory allocation failures in KDE Plasma.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group discussed a multi-monitor window management behavior where connecting an HDMI display automatically moves all open windows to the external screen, even if the laptop screen remains the primary display. Participants identified that KDE remembers window layouts and specific monitor hardware identities from previous sessions, which is likely a side-effect of the desktop environment's new "session restore" feature. While some users appreciate this persistent layout, others find it disruptive, particularly when applications do not open on the currently active desktop.

Contributors noted that this is an upstream KDE matter rather than a Fedora-specific bug. The behavior has been reported to the KDE bug tracker, and users clarified that it persists even when virtual desktops are configured to switch independently for each screen. Developers and contributors interested in refining session restore logic, multi-monitor window placement, or adding options to clear saved monitor layouts are encouraged to engage with the upstream KDE community to help improve this functionality.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

During the weekly Server WG meeting, contributors advanced the Fedora home server spin-off by outlining a minimal KIWI development environment using libvirt, which will be documented in the home-server repository README. The group also discussed standardizing documentation styling, with a strong preference emerging for using backticks for CLI commands and file paths; a formal proposal will be added to the open pull request. In community news, voting to officially add Brett and Ro as working group members remains open until July 31, and contributors are encouraged to participate in manual installation testing for the upcoming Fedora 45 release.

In a forum discussion about Fedora's handling of non-persistent IPv6 prefixes, a community member provided a workaround for routers that fail to invalidate old prefixes after a reboot. Users experiencing connectivity drops can use NetworkManager's dispatcher.d to run a cleanup script on dhcp6-change, as there is currently no native kernel or NetworkManager option to force the system to exclusively use the newest IPv6 address.

Decisions

• For Fedora 45 release testing, the links in the tracking tickets will be updated to point to the newest test build, and the tickets will be left in their current status columns to restart the manual testing cycle.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team made significant progress on the RHEL10 migration, successfully transitioning the batcave Ansible control host and IPA (FAS) systems, which caused some expected temporary monitoring alerts. Preparations for the Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild are also underway, including the removal of the F45 autosign config to prevent unnecessary re-signing by robosignatory, aligning with the recent F45 self-contained change deadline. On the Forgejo front, the team packaged Forgejo 15.0.5, deployed a new CI runner for the Marketing team, and began prototyping ForgeFiler—a Flask web application designed to securely handle sensitive reports like Code of Conduct violations and GDPR requests in private repositories.

There are several excellent opportunities for contributor engagement this week. The team is actively looking for help investigating broken image links on older MediaWiki pages, resolving grokmirror missing repository issues, and improving Zabbix monitoring by investigating SLA structures to reduce alert fatigue. Additionally, work continues on a Grafana proof-of-concept for the Fedora Data Working Group and the deployment of the new siguldry signing bridge in the staging environment.

Decisions

• The team decided to set up a staging instance of public-inbox for SCM commits, utilizing yearly archives and placing it behind Anubis to evaluate its performance and manageability before a potential production rollout.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild has successfully concluded, utilizing new retry logic scripts and updated, beginner-friendly documentation. Following the rebuild, Release Engineering ran the mass tagging script and filed FTBFS bugs for failing packages. To stabilize the buildroot and unblock Rawhide composes, several problematic builds—including desktop-backgrounds, jsoncpp, and openssl-pkcs11—were untagged. In other release news, F47 keys have been added to fedora-repos and are now available in updates-testing, and the f45-perl side tag was successfully merged to Rawhide.

Infrastructure migrations are progressing, with toddlers changes prepared for moving scm-requests from Pagure to Forgejo; a coordinated "flag day" will be scheduled once fedpkg updates land. For contributors looking to get involved, there are active efforts to consolidate mass rebuild script configurations and fix false positives in the need_rebuild.py tracker. Finally, maintainers are reminded to use the fedpkg request-unretirement command for automatic package unretirements rather than opening manual Releng tickets.

Decisions

• The process to re-sign F44 content with the F45 key will be separated into its own Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) document to improve the mass branching workflow.
• The legacy Pagure fedora-scm-requests repository will be archived only after the new Forgejo repository and related fedpkg changes are fully deployed and verified to prevent synchronization issues.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Fedora 45 mass rebuild is now complete, with the next major milestone—the branch point and first change completion deadline—scheduled for August 11th. During their weekly meeting, the Quality team reviewed upcoming F45 Changes to plan community Test Days, highlighting features like RPM 6.1, Podman 6, and DrmPanicFrontend. In news relevant to the broader Linux ecosystem, the team investigated unexpected font changes caused by freetype 2.18 that may also impact CentOS and RHEL. Additionally, it was noted that the mcelog package is currently unmaintained, prompting discussions about finding a new maintainer or replacing it with rasdaemon by default.

For contributors looking to get involved, nightly composes for Fedora 45 Rawhide are actively seeking release validation testing. Testers can also evaluate the new f45-backgrounds package, which separates the "Time of Day" animated wallpapers into optional sub-packages, though an update is pending to fix a bug where the massive 12K image size breaks KDE Plasma. The team also made a major revision to the Fedora CI documentation, added new KDE start/stop tests to openQA, and welcomed a new young contributor looking for a QA sponsor.

Decisions

• The team decided to group several major Fedora 45 Changes into dedicated test day tickets and initiated coordination with the respective package maintainers to organize these events.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

The Fedora 45 backgrounds are now available in Rawhide, introducing wide-gamut color support and splitting the "Time of Day" animated wallpapers into dedicated sub-packages. Following reports that the initial 12800x12800 resolution caused memory crashes in KDE and GIMP, the wallpapers are being scaled down to 8K. Looking ahead, the Fedora 46 wallpaper inspiration poll is live until July 31st, asking the community to choose between four STEM figures whose names start with "U". In infrastructure updates, the team successfully migrated the upstream fedora-logos repository from Pagure to the Design team's Forgejo space, alongside updates to the fedora-remix-logos package.

For contributors looking to get involved, new UX and web design opportunities are available. The Fedora Websites and Apps team is seeking a design for a new credits page to showcase project contributors. Additionally, Project Resistor, a Fedora Remix, needs UX assistance to improve its Jekyll-based website. The team also finalized the YouTube thumbnails for Flock 2026 and continues iterating on a community onboarding flyer and an onboarding video series.

Decisions

• The upstream fedora-logos and fedora-remix-logos repositories have been officially adopted by the Design team and migrated to Forgejo.
• The F45 default wallpapers will be resized to 8K to resolve memory allocation issues.
• The "Time of Day" animated wallpapers for F45 have been separated into dedicated GNOME and MATE sub-packages for a cleaner appearance settings experience.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Docs team's primary theme this week was platform migration and content consolidation. A major focus remains the Forgejo migration tracker, driven by the strict July 31, 2026, deadline to move all active documentation repositories off Pagure.io. While the majority of Pagure repositories have been successfully migrated, contributors are finalizing the last few pending moves, including the Defensive Coding Guide and the i3 SIG docs. To further streamline information, the team also opened a new ticket to coordinate with Commops to resolve duplicate Special Interest Group (SIG) documentation that is currently split between the legacy Fedora Wiki and the official docs site.

Contributors looking to get involved can assist with the next phase of the Forgejo migration. With the Pagure deadline approaching, the team needs help opening separate planning tickets for remaining GitLab repositories (which involve more complex CI pipeline migrations) and reaching out directly to the owners of various GitLab and GitHub repositories to coordinate their moves.

Decisions

• The team operationally resolved to formally trigger Commops to complete the SIG wiki page migration to eliminate duplicate content.
• Remaining GitLab repository migrations will be handled via separate, dedicated planning tickets rather than the main tracker.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

During the Internationalization meeting, the team reviewed upcoming Fedora 45 changes, noting that proposals for fontconfig (System Wide Change) and LibreOffice Dictionaries (Self Contained Change) are currently moving through the approval process. The F45 mass rebuild has also finished with under 1,000 failures, and package maintainers are urged to check the failure logs for their packages. Specific rebuild failures with ibus-table and ibus-typing-booster were noted and are actively being investigated.

To help prepare for upcoming releases, contributors are encouraged to assist with Fedora 43 bug triaging by fixing outstanding issues or deferring them to a later release. The team also reviewed the upcoming schedule, highlighting the July 21 deadline for Self Contained Change proposals and the August 11 deadline for both branching Fedora Linux 45 from Rawhide and the testable completion checkpoint.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

EPEL

This week, EPEL focused on infrastructure improvements and package maintenance, prominently featuring a proposal for EPEL 11's minor version design that was also discussed in the weekly meeting. To prevent private mirroring errors, the proposal suggests keying URLs off the CentOS $stream variable rather than the RHEL $releasever_minor variable, though this first requires RHEL derivatives to stop improperly defining $stream. In package news, an accidental soname change in ImageMagick broke dependencies in EPEL-8 and EPEL-9, but patched builds have been published and are awaiting testing karma. Additionally, a slightly incompatible update replacing p7zip with 7zip is pending further discussion in upcoming meetings.

For contributors, feedback is requested on a planned migration to libgit2 v1.9 for EPEL 9 and 10 to resolve multiple CVEs; the maintainer plans to submit pull requests to affected packages soon. Other notable updates include CVE fixes for ntfs-3g and a contributed fix to fedpkg that enables feature branch workflows directly from EPEL minor version branches.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

During the July 21st meeting, the SIG announced that image-builder is now successfully building ELN qcow2 images, with hyperscaler images up next. The ELN mass rebuild is currently in progress following the F45 mass rebuild, presenting an engagement opportunity for contributors to help fix over 40 packages currently failing to build (F45FTBFS). Another contribution opportunity involves providing a ppc64le VM to the upstream retsnoop developer to fix architecture-specific bugs. In broader news, LXQt has been added to Extras in preparation for EPEL 10, python-wheel was dropped from ELN proper, and progress continues on bootc with a Konflux tenant merged and plans to explore composefs native images in the future.

Decisions

• To prevent disruptive surprises, future image change requests (such as altering default partition layouts or dropping firmware) will be filed in the ELN bug tracker and discussed during meetings.
• boot.iso images will now only be created for BaseOS to match CentOS Stream and RHEL, which saves disk space and speeds up composes by over 30 minutes.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group saw a brief but helpful update regarding system recovery. In a forum discussion on how to reset the root password in Silverblue, a community member highlighted that official documentation is now available for resetting passwords via rescue mode on Atomic Desktops. This provides a standardized and reliable resource for the broader Linux community when troubleshooting locked atomic systems.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

During the CoreOS meeting on 2026-07-22, the team highlighted that the proposal to merge Butane into Ignition has officially entered the FESCo voting phase. As part of this transition, Butane will undergo a procedural freeze to shift active development directly into the Ignition repository, a move expected to greatly improve configuration composability for users. Additionally, the group reviewed the Fedora 45 release schedule, noting that the proposal submission deadline for Self-Contained Changes has passed, with the next checkpoint for retiring orphaned packages scheduled for August 4th.

A significant portion of the meeting focused on a potentially disruptive proposal to increase the default /boot partition size for new installs. Developers raised concerns that older nodes retaining the smaller partition might eventually lose the ability to upgrade, forcing users to reprovision. To prevent users from accidentally clobbering custom data partitions during this process, an action item was created to form a small working group. This group will brainstorm failure scenarios and design safeguards against inadvertent data destruction, presenting an excellent opportunity for contributors to get involved in shaping safe upgrade paths and documentation.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

AI & ML

This week, the AI & ML SIG focused on team roster management and establishing infrastructure for AI agent skills development. A notable change in membership occurred as a contributor requested to step down from the SIG due to time constraints and LLM-related burnout (Issue #36). On a broader scale, the group is actively working on standardizing AI capabilities using the Agent Skills specification, which allows guided, agent-neutral skill definitions to be shared, improved, and used by any model.

To support this growing initiative, the SIG successfully established a new "Skills Reviewers" sub-team to create, review, and curate shared AI skills in the skills-library repository (Issue #31). The necessary infrastructure, including a new FAS group and a linked Forgejo team, has been fully deployed and seeded with initial volunteers. For contributors looking to get involved, there is an immediate opportunity to provide feedback on the initial draft of the human reviewer guidelines, which has just been submitted as a pull request.

Decisions

• Establishment of the Skills Reviewers Team: The SIG officially created the skills-reviewers sub-team in FAS and Forgejo, granting them write access to the ai-ml/skills-library repository. A lightweight review process was instituted, requiring at least one reviewer approval before merging skill PRs (Issue #31).
• Membership Update: Proceeded with the removal of salimma from all AI/ML SIG access control lists (FAS, Forgejo, and Discourse) per their request to step away from the group (Issue #36).

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The Fedora 45 mass rebuild is actively underway, with core components like binutils and annobin completed, and GCC 16 and Python 3.14 currently in progress. The team is managing build times across 19 RISC-V builders, noting intermittent build failures on RVA23 hardware and system hangs on P550 boards during Rust builds—though a recent SiFive firmware update resolves the latter. To improve build infrastructure, new high-RAM Titan boards from Arace are arriving, and contributors can help optimize Koji builder profiles to automatically route heavy packages to these faster nodes. Meanwhile, the transition from the K3 vendor kernel to Fedora RISC-V "omni" kernels continues, supported by updated documentation for K3 bootstrap and Milk-V Jupiter.

In broader ecosystem news discussed during the July 21 SIG meeting, PR 778 was merged into upstream rhboot/shim, paving the way for proper signed shim packaging in future releases. Additionally, the team is conducting virtualization testing on remote K3 hardware (including OVMF firmware tests) and engaging in technical discussions with Qualcomm engineers regarding a hardware-probing syscall to detect RISC-V extensions.

Decisions

• The team will delay switching the mass rebuild tracker over to F45 until the GCC 16 rebuild is fully complete.
• Despite upstream progress on shim, the SIG will continue using the current standalone shim-unsigned-riscv64 package for the time being to ensure boot stability while the official Fedora packaging is sorted out.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

This week, the Security SIG focused heavily on aligning Fedora's security documentation with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) requirements (Ticket #14). During their weekly meeting, the team discussed creating a unified SECURITY.md file that designates Red Hat as the formal CRA steward while maintaining Fedora's community security processes. To improve visibility, contributors proposed surfacing these new policies and a standard security.txt file on Fedora's main marketing sites once completed (Ticket #16).

The group is also working on formalizing private vulnerability reporting channels and embargo processes. Ongoing discussions include setting up a secure Bugzilla component for incoming package and platform reports (Ticket #17), establishing Fedora representation on the private linux-distros mailing list alongside a pre-disclosure agreement (Ticket #13), and potentially creating a Fedora Badge to act as a "hall of fame" reward for external security researchers who submit valid reports (Ticket #18).

Decisions

• The SIG will use Ticket #14 to document the overarching CRA compliance plan and spin off individual Forgejo tickets for each of the six specific CRA guideline items to allow for parallel work.
• New security documentation will temporarily be hosted in the forge/security/docs repository to prevent bureaucratic delays while drafting the content.

Learn more about the Security team.

Go

This week, the Go packaging community discussed the introduction of docker-credential-helpers to Fedora. In a thread about packaging the application, contributors shared guidance on handling empty vendor archives and properly configuring CGO_CFLAGS and GO_LDFLAGS using macros to correctly build the pass and secretservice helpers. Additionally, an excellent contributor engagement opportunity has arisen: a call for reviewers and sponsors was made for a new contributor who has successfully recreated the SRPM to adopt the orphaned fx package and is currently awaiting a package review.

Decisions

• When packaging Go applications with empty vendor archives, spec files should retain the standard vendor macros to ensure consistency across Go packages and future-proof against new dependencies.
• An empty modules.txt warning from rpmlint (caused by a lack of vendored modules) is not considered a blocker for package approval.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

The major focus this week is the Perl 5.44 upgrade, which has been approved by FESCo. A dedicated f44-perl build-root has been created for the delicate process of bootstrapping core modules. To avoid disruptions, contributors are explicitly instructed not to build anything into this new build-root, though they may freely continue pushing upgrades to Rawhide in parallel. In other ecosystem news, a rebuild for MySQL 9.7 was initiated for perl-DBD-MySQL, and perl-Coro-Multicore was manually patched to resolve an atfork_child naming collision with Perl 5.43.2+. Several routine version bumps were also merged for packages like perl-HTTP-Message and perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker-CPANfile.

Decisions

• A pull request to build perl-HTTP-Daemon with Module::Build on RHEL was rejected and closed. Maintainers decided against carrying custom, untested patches in the repository, opting instead to strictly follow upstream development.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

Due to an incompatible ABI change in the Python 3.15.0b4 release, the team initiated a targeted rebuild of approximately 750 Python packages with extension modules in Rawhide. The rebuild took place in a dedicated side tag and experienced some delays due to slow s390x builders, culminating in a massive Bodhi update. The rebuild was officially completed on July 25, and normal Rawhide package builds have now resumed.

Maintainers of the roughly 30 packages that failed to rebuild during this process are asked to investigate and fix their builds in the side tag. The remaining failing packages are being tracked in a dedicated Bugzilla ticket (PYTHON3.15b4), presenting a clear opportunity for contributors to help get the remaining packages updated for the new Python 3.15 ABI.

Decisions

• Contributors were instructed to temporarily halt building Python packages with extension modules in Rawhide to avoid disrupting the side-tag rebuild and testing process.
• As of July 25, the side tag was successfully merged, and the temporary freeze on Rawhide builds for these packages was lifted.

Learn more about the Python team.

Other Discussions

• Hummingbird Community Meeting - 23 July 2026 discussed the agenda for their upcoming meeting. Topics included AI's impact on open source, maintainer overload, and utilizing "factory" patterns for automated PRs to ensure contributions meet project standards.
• In How the Fedora 45 Sausage is Made, Simon de Vlieger shared a blog post detailing the process of producing Fedora, from packages to final artifacts like ISOs and disk images.
• A Change Proposal to use Sequoia for OpenPGP verification sparked a debate. The proposal suggests introducing an %openpgpverify macro to replace GnuPG with Sequoia, but developers strongly argued for keeping the existing %gpgverify macro name to avoid massive ecosystem churn and API/ABI breakage.
• The Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 Change Proposal aims to enable hardware-enforced protection against ROP exploits. Discussions highlighted the need for i686 builds in testing repositories and clarified QEMU/libvirt support for the feature.
• A discussion on i686 removal - easy win set proposed adding ExcludeArch: %{ix86} to roughly 3,400 leaf packages to save build resources. While some suggested an opt-in approach for i686 instead, the consensus leaned towards moving forward with this opt-out approach via a formal Fedora 46 Change Proposal.
• The Disable in Kernel Crypto Userspace API (Phase 1) Change Proposal seeks to restrict the deprecated API to known users before upstream removes it entirely. Maintainers raised concerns about losing rootless access to LUKS containers for non-AES ciphers and VeraCrypt support, though the change is primarily about preparing users for the inevitable upstream removal.
• Adam Williamson announced a new feature for on-demand openQA testing of dist-git pull requests. Contributors can now comment /openqa test on a PR to trigger tests on the corresponding Packit scratch build, with results reported directly back to the PR.
• The RelocateRpmRepoConfigsToUsr Change Proposal intends to move RPM repository configurations from /etc to /usr. Adam Williamson raised concerns that this could disrupt existing workflows and scripts, suggesting it be escalated from a self-contained to a system-wide change.
• A Change Proposal for Web Based Remote Installation Support for Atomic Desktops aims to allow secure remote installations via the Anaconda WebUI. This opt-in tech preview will authenticate users with a PIN over HTTPS, bypassing the need for VNC/RDP clients.
• A targeted rebuild of Python packages with extension modules was announced for Rawhide due to an incompatible ABI change in Python 3.15.0b4. Maintainers were asked to hold off on building affected packages until the side-tag was successfully merged.
• Other discussions included a user trying to release a new version of a package, reminders for the F45 Self-Contained Change Proposal Submission deadline (and a duplicate reminder), complaints about slow s390x builds during the mass rebuild, a Change Proposal for LibreOffice Dictionaries, a review request for dupeguru, a fix for an outdated golang package on koji el8 build machines, questions about GCC plugins packaging for AFL++, inquiries if nextcloud-client is still maintained, a proposal to deprecate low-memory-monitor, an update for IBus 1.5.35, a proposal for Encapsule isolated devel containers, a proposal to switch to the Anaconda WebUI for Fedora Atomic, a proposal to hardcode nss-altfiles in Authselect profiles, a proposal to remove the Authselect NIS Profile, a proposal to enable systemd-oomd and zram swap for CoreOS, a patch submission for libndp, a clarification on why FTBFS bugs are no longer filed between mass rebuilds, a request of exemption for f45-backgrounds, and a request to add a CUDA backend to the Ollama package.

Orphaning packages

• Emanuele Petriglia inquired about the orphaned "fx" package, noting it was rewritten in Go, and successfully recreated the SRPM for review.
• Automated reports listed orphaned packages looking for new maintainers on June 21 and again on July 18.
• Efraim Kaov offered to step up for mcelog package maintenance and co-maintainership since it is outdated.
• The mysql8.0 package is retiring in Rawhide as it reached EOL upstream.
• Gabriel L. Somlo announced orphaning yosys/nextpnr & related packages due to a lack of time and unresponsive co-maintainers.
• A reminder was sent regarding the list of long term FTBFS packages to be retired in August.
• A request was made to unretire sugar packages (sugar and sugar-browse).

Package updates

• The f45-backgrounds package is available, but its initial 12800x12800 image broke KDE Plasma, prompting a resize to 8192x8192.
• An unannounced soname bump for nettle caused FTBFS for multiple packages, leading to a workaround using the nettle3.10-devel compat package.
• Similarly, an unannounced soname bump for openssl-pkcs11 broke rng-tools and the compose process, which was quickly fixed in a side tag.
• InsightTooklit 5.4.6 is coming to rawhide, requiring rebuilds for alizams and petpvc.
• A planned Flint soname bump was postponed because e-antic is not yet compatible.
• A shadow rebase and libsubid SONAME bump was announced, requesting rebuilds for apptainer, buildah, podman, and skopeo.
• The release of jimtcl 0.84 introduced a jimtcl soname bump affecting openocd.
• The Perl 5.44 upgrade has started in a dedicated build-root.

New contributor introductions

• Luca Albrecht

Across the various Fedora working groups, a primary shared focus is the execution of the Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild, which aligns with widespread efforts to modernize core toolchains, system defaults, and developer environments. Another major cross-team initiative is the ongoing infrastructure migration from Pagure to Forgejo, requiring coordination across FESCo, Release Engineering, Design, and Docs. Artificial intelligence and automation have also emerged as a prominent, dual-sided theme: while teams like AI & ML, Security, and Release Engineering are actively developing AI agents to automate nightly compose log analysis and vulnerability scanning, Infrastructure and Release Engineering are simultaneously deploying defensive measures—such as retaining the Anubis system and disabling web-based git blame—to mitigate aggressive AI web scrapers. Finally, there is a strong, unified push toward improving community governance and the contributor experience, evidenced by the drafting of new usage and conflict of interest policies, the creation of the Docs Captain pilot program, and the development of modernized onboarding materials.

Announcements

For Fedora contributors, the Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild has officially started, and maintainers are encouraged to track build failures on Koji. Related to package maintenance, a list of long-term FTBFS (fails to build from source) packages has been published; these packages have failed to build since Fedora 42 and will be retired in early August unless they are fixed or exempted. On a celebratory note, the latest Fedora Podcast (episode 056) highlights the 2026 Fedora Contributor Recognition Program winners, featuring a great conversation with Justin Forbes and Ankur Sinha about keeping the project running and welcoming.

Several new self-contained Change Proposals have also been announced for Fedora 45. The distribution's default databases are slated to be updated to the latest LTS releases, MySQL 9.7 and MariaDB 12.3. The ODBC stack is being modernized to replace static driver registrations with auto-generated configurations using per-driver drop-in snippets. LibreOffice will see two major packaging improvements: the introduction of upstream-sourced hunspell dictionaries for better version syncing, and a switch to HTML-based, noarch help files to significantly reduce repository space. Finally, to simplify Fedora CoreOS provisioning, a proposal aims to enable Ignition to natively accept Butane YAML configurations directly at first boot, removing the need for a separate transpilation step.

Council

During the bi-weekly meeting, the Council reviewed the draft Conflict of Interest Guidelines and agreed to publish the document on Discourse for a two-week public feedback period, offering a key opportunity for community engagement before the rules are formalized. The Council also discussed the upcoming Fedora Forge Usage Policy, focusing heavily on the proposed rules for archiving inactive repositories. To avoid disruptive surprises for existing contributors, the Council formally took ownership of the policy's publication but decided to delay its release until a consensus is reached on how to handle repository archiving. Additionally, members were reminded of an open ticket regarding the Fedora logo license, which will be closed as the license cannot be changed.

On the forums, the discussion surrounding the Fedora Innovation Lifecycle continued with a focus on re-imagining "Initiatives." Members proposed a lightweight, self-managed alternative to the Sandbox process that would allow contributors to showcase multi-release work without strict deadlines or approvals, relying instead on simple "heartbeat" checks to ensure the projects remain active.

Decisions

• The Council will publish the drafted Conflict of Interest Guidelines on Discourse for a two-week public feedback period before making any formal decisions.
• The Council formally took over the finalization and publication of the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, but will resolve the ongoing debate regarding the archiving of inactive repositories before publishing it under the Policy Change Policy framework.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo processed a massive wave of System-Wide Change proposals for Fedora 45, establishing a clear theme of modernizing core toolchains, system defaults, and developer environments. Significant proposals under review include switching the default Secrets Service to oo7, disabling DNF vendor changes by default, and updating major stacks like LLVM 23, Ruby on Rails 8.1, and MySQL 9.7. During their weekly meeting, the committee discussed the upcoming Forgejo distgit migration, agreeing to wait for a published roadmap to ensure proper community feedback on permissions, push rules, and CI integrations before proceeding.

FESCo also addressed late-arriving changes impacting the mass rebuild schedule. While the GNU Toolchain Update was approved to proceed, the Shadow Stack enablement was postponed due to unresolved concerns about breaking third-party applications and Rust-based packages. Other common work topics this week included infrastructure housekeeping (such as updating election policies and issue templates) and routine package maintenance, including handling non-responsive maintainers and retiring inactive software projects.

Decisions

• Approved the GNU Toolchain Update Change proposal.
• Approved the Grub EFI For Confidential Computing Change proposal.
• Approved the Lazarus with multiple widgetsets Change proposal.
• Approved the LLVM 23 Change proposal.
• Approved a one-off incompatible update request for rust-routinator.
• Approved adding new co-maintainers to the ledger package following the non-responsive maintainer process.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Workstation / GNOME

In a brief follow-up to the Fedora Workstation Working Group meeting minutes, it was confirmed that the group will be taking a short break from their regular meeting schedule. Due to members traveling to the GUADEC conference and other scheduling conflicts, all meetings for the remainder of July have been called off.

Decisions

• All Fedora Workstation Working Group meetings for July are canceled. The next meeting is scheduled to take place on August 4, 2026.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

Server

The Server Working Group held a weekly meeting (with the agenda and summary posted to the mailing list) focusing on release testing, documentation, and the Fedora home server spin-off. To make F45 release testing more accessible for contributors, the team introduced a new project board and ticket system, which will eventually be automated. For the home server spin-off, a contributor volunteered to set up and document a local Kiwi development environment so others can easily join the effort. The group also discussed updating the contributor's guide to remove outdated Pagure links and welcomed upcoming documentation contributions regarding mDNS and Ansible usage on Fedora.

Decisions

• The working group agreed to begin F45 release testing using the newly created ticket system, adapting the tickets as necessary throughout the testing process.
• A server-specific documentation style guide will be drafted to track styling and phrasing decisions that deviate from or add to the main Fedora Docs Style Guide.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Fedora Infrastructure team kicked off the F45 mass rebuild on July 15th, ensuring autosigning was enabled for the f45-rebuild tag. A significant portion of the week's effort was dedicated to migrating various infrastructure hosts and virthosts to RHEL10, which involved careful timing to minimize builder outages. On the mailing list, the team discussed the effectiveness of the Anubis anti-scraper system. Contributors concluded that Anubis remains absolutely critical for preventing infrastructure outages and managing CPU load, even if some modern AI agents can bypass its proof-of-work challenges.

Operational troubleshooting addressed several immediate issues, including a stalled Bodhi consumer pod that halted Rawhide and ELN updates, PR merge failures on node-exporter, and misrouted EPEL mirrors. The team is also actively improving monitoring by adjusting Zabbix checks and advancing the Forgejo deployment with new metrics templates and foundational work on private issues. Contributors looking to engage can assist with AWS IAM role configurations for projects like Testing Farm and Logdetective, or help refine Apache LoadBalancer timeouts to handle external proxy delays more gracefully.

Decisions

• Anubis will be retained across the infrastructure as a critical defense against web scrapers and bots.
• Autosigning was officially enabled for the f45-rebuild tag to support the ongoing mass rebuild.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Fedora 45 Mass Rebuild was a central focus this week, with the tracker ticket coordinating readiness across toolchain updates and a meeting discussion clarifying the standard operating procedure for verifying driving changes before commencing. To improve future rebuilds, contributors are exploring ways to update the mass rebuild scripts so they automatically check Bodhi and skip packages that recently failed gating. In community tooling news, an experimental AI Agent was introduced to autonomously analyze Rawhide nightly compose logs and identify root causes of failures, offering a new way for contributors to help triage issues. Meanwhile, the migration to Forgejo continues, with the kiwi-description repository successfully moved and plans forming to replace Pagure AMQP messages with Forgejo webhooks.

Routine release engineering tasks included resolving git repository unpacker errors, setting up Koji tags for ELN image-builder, and processing side tags for the Perl 5.44 update.

Decisions

• The Robotics Spin has been officially dropped from Fedora Linux 45 and removed from the build configuration.
• The web-based git blame feature in Fedora Package Sources has been deliberately disabled to mitigate massive abuse from AI web crawlers; contributors must now clone repositories and use git blame locally.
• The .composeinfo format was updated to include a release_type field, enabling downstream Beaker automation to distinguish between Beta and Final releases.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The most significant development this week is the launch of on-demand openQA testing for dist-git pull requests. Contributors can now trigger automated tests by simply commenting /openqa test on a PR, with success or failure states reporting directly back to the interface. In other tooling updates, a compose critical package generation script was merged (with Bodhi integration ongoing), openQA test coverage was extended for KDE and Workstation applications, and UI/UX improvements were applied to the testdays-web platform to clarify when events are ready for result submissions. The "Heroes of Fedora Quality Q2" report was also published to celebrate community contributions.

For ongoing contributor engagement, the QA team is calling for community validation on several new nightly composes. Testers with available time are encouraged to review and submit results for Fedora 45 Rawhide 20260718.n.0, Fedora 45 Rawhide 20260715.n.0, and Fedora-IoT 45 RC 20260713.0.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

The Design team is actively preparing for upcoming releases and events, including initial planning for the Fedora 46 wallpaper with community polls focusing on "U"-themed inspirational figures. Emma Kidney published a blog post detailing the new collaborative design workflow used for Flock 2026 branding. In other project updates, the team finalized the LoLa AI Package Manager mascot, resolved data issues to generate Flock 2026 YouTube thumbnails, and is working on migrating the fedora-logos repository from Pagure to the Design team's Forgejo space to streamline package updates.

For contributors looking to get involved, there are ongoing efforts to create a Contributor Onboarding Video Series, where the team is currently crowdsourcing opinions on background music. There are also open opportunities to design avatars for Fedora's Matrix bots, including Zodbot, Meetbot, Nonbot, and the new Moderation bot. Furthermore, the team is heavily refining a community onboarding poster to ensure it serves as excellent "rookie reading material" while remaining visually cohesive, accessible, and cost-effective for community members to print.

Decisions

• Community Poster Redesign: During the July 13th meeting, the team decided to remove solid color banners from the community onboarding poster layout. This decision prioritizes core alignment and spacing, improves visual cohesion, and significantly reduces ink consumption for community members printing the materials at their own expense.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Fedora Docs team is finalizing its migration away from Pagure.io ahead of the platform's July 31 shutdown, urging maintainers to move remaining repositories to Forgejo (Issue #35). Infrastructure and workflow improvements are a major focus this week, with ongoing work to refactor the local docsbuilder.sh preview script to use updated, secure containers (Issue #19) and efforts to implement automated Forgejo Actions CI monitoring to catch silent production site build failures (Issue #53). Additionally, the team is exploring a massive UI/UX overhaul to better support knowledgebase-style content in the Antora theme, and community brainstorming is highly encouraged even for those not ready to write code (Issue #51).

To decentralize documentation maintenance, the team is launching the "Fedora Docs Captain" pilot program (Issue #50). This initiative pairs subject-matter experts with experienced technical writers to revamp documentation for the Kernel, Multimedia, and AI/ML SIGs. Volunteers are actively needed to serve as sponsors or team leads for these pods. In a related effort, a community initiative is underway to consolidate scattered multimedia, hardware driver, and third-party codec documentation into a single authoritative source to improve the new user experience (Issue #58).

Decisions

• Repository settings across all docs/* repositories will soon be updated to enforce new contribution guidelines, requiring contributors to submit pull requests via forks rather than pushing directly to repository branches (Issue #46).
• The "Fedora Docs Captain" pilot program will be timeboxed and evaluated at the Fedora 45 release to determine whether to scale the initiative to other Special Interest Groups or conclude the experiment (Issue #50).

Learn more about the Docs team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL team focused on package updates, security retirements, and early planning for EPEL 11. Notably, syncthing has been retired from EPEL 8 and 9 due to unfixable security vulnerabilities and SQLite incompatibilities; users are advised to upgrade to RHEL 10 to continue using it. Concurrently, updates for syncthing v2 were pushed to stable for EPEL 10.2 and 10.3. During the weekly meeting, the steering committee also approved incompatible updates for rust-routinator and ffmpeg, with the ffmpeg update planned to land in epel9-next first to allow maintainers time for necessary adjustments.

Looking ahead, early planning discussions for EPEL 11 have begun. A key topic of discussion is addressing feedback from enterprise users who mirror repositories directly by URL (such as with Satellite or Foreman) and were disrupted by recent changes to metalinks and baseurls. A proposal is currently being drafted to remediate this URL structure in EPEL 11—and potentially implement it smoothly in EPEL 10 as well—to ensure a more predictable experience for users.

Decisions

• Approved the incompatible update request for rust-routinator (Issue #369).
• Approved the incompatible update for ffmpeg 5 to 7, which will be introduced in epel9-next first (Issue #370).

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

In the ELN meeting, the primary discussion focused on the delayed enablement of bootc images for Fedora ELN. Progress has been slow due to review bottlenecks on the Konflux side, prompting suggestions to move all ELN container builds into Konflux. By standardizing the pipeline and removing bootc as a special case, the group hopes to resolve structural build issues and improve the overall RHEL-on-Konflux experience.

The team also clarified the roadmap for future bootc images, noting that the Fedora ELN bootc image (to be hosted at quay.io/fedora/eln-bootc) will serve as a precursor to upcoming CentOS Stream 11 builds. Because CentOS Stream 11 is still in early bootstrap, contributors agreed to schedule a dedicated conference call to coordinate the integration of Konflux, pungi, and bootc configurations across both the Fedora and CentOS Stream ecosystems.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

During the Fedora Atomic Initiative meeting, progress was shared regarding Enterprise Linux Next (ELN) base images. Contributors are currently waiting on reviews for Konflux tenant configuration merge requests that will switch the setup from minimal-plus to standard, which is required to complete the ELN base image builds. Once merged, the team will need to determine the process for pushing the resulting base image to the correct namespace, presenting an area where contributors familiar with Konflux might be able to assist.

In broader news relevant to the Linux community and bootc users, an initiative is underway to split Ignition into a standalone RPM, allowing it to be included in more workflows such as bootc container image builds. Additionally, a Fedora 45 change proposal was highlighted that aims to provide native Butane configuration support directly in Ignition. If implemented, this will eliminate the need for the intermediate Butane-to-Ignition conversion step, allowing users to use Butane directly for their instances.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

During the CoreOS meeting, the team reviewed the Fedora 45 Release Schedule and warned that the ongoing Mass Rebuild may cause temporary turbulence and CI breakages in the rawhide stream. The change proposal to enable systemd-oomd and swap on Zram by default was finalized and moved forward in the release process. In other community news, contributors are seeking reviews on an Afterburn pull request designed to make logic less Azure-specific, and members discussed strategies for better surfacing bugs caught in the next stream before they reach stable releases.

A significant portion of the meeting focused on the ongoing need to increase the /boot partition size for new installs, an issue recently highlighted by failing tests on aarch64 rawhide. Acknowledging the complexity of this migration, several contributors volunteered to form a dedicated working group to address it, offering an excellent engagement opportunity for those interested in helping architect a solution for core system storage limits.

Decisions

• The team approved the systemd-oomd and swap on Zram change proposal and officially marked it ready for the Fedora Change Wrangler.
• A dedicated working group was formed to tackle the /boot partition size limits, with an initial action item to draft a comprehensive list of requirements for the migration effort.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

Kernel

This week, a user reported an issue with the Rawhide nodebug kernels setup process. The repository configuration file required to set up the repo on new systems is currently missing from the server, causing the standard wiki instructions to fail.

While the .repo file is missing, the actual repositories are still present and intact on the server. This presents a quick engagement opportunity for infrastructure or kernel contributors to restore the missing file and fix the setup process for the broader community relying on these nodebug kernels.

Learn more about the Kernel team.

AI & ML

The AI & ML SIG is making strides in integrating AI into Fedora workflows, highlighted by a new proof-of-concept AI agent analyzing Rawhide nightly composes to identify failure root causes. To support these efforts, the SIG is formalizing an AI skills library and has established a new "Skills Reviewers" sub-team to curate shared, agent-neutral AI skills. On the hardware front, the SIG is addressing the growing interest in shared GPU infrastructure by initiating a draft for an Acceptable Use Policy to define trust models and access controls for Fedora's GPU hardware.

There are several immediate opportunities for contributors to get involved. The SIG is actively seeking maintainers for new llama.cpp backends (with a priority on Vulkan) and testers for the newly introduced pi-coding-agent in Rawhide, particularly on non-x86 architectures like aarch64. Additionally, developers interested in LLMs are encouraged to help expand the AI Skills Library or integrate other local LLMs into the existing coding agents.

Decisions

• Skills Reviewers Team: The SIG officially approved the creation of a skills-reviewers sub-team on Forgejo. Seeded with six initial members, the team will manage the ai-ml/skills-library repository and implement a lightweight review process requiring at least one approval before merging new Agent Skills. (Ticket #31)
• GPU Infrastructure Access: It was agreed that existing GPU infrastructure (gpu01) will be strictly earmarked for CI purposes during the F45 release cycle. General access requests will be temporarily closed as wontfix while the hardware remains in a "transitionary/exploration" phase and the formal Acceptable Use Policy is drafted. (Ticket #34)

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The Fedora 45 rebuild for RISC-V is currently about 25% complete, and the team continues to make steady progress resolving remaining issues on the Fedora RISC-V tracker. Hardware capacity has expanded, with four RVA23 units—including community-contributed hardware—now active in the Fedora RISC-V Koji. Furthermore, technical discussions are actively underway with hardware vendor SpacemiT's Linux team to improve virtualization support and resolve known issues.

For those looking to get involved with the group, requirements for a potential RISC-V intern have been drafted and published, offering a new engagement opportunity for prospective contributors.

Decisions

• The team decided to optimize the F45 rebuild by importing approximately 50% of "noarch" packages directly from the primary Koji into the RISC-V Koji, which will save significant time and compute resources.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security SIG held a meeting this week primarily focusing on secure development practices and how end-users can verify Fedora's security posture. The group highlighted existing safeguards like the package review process and mandatory hardening compiler flags, while also discussing the integration of automated vulnerability management tools. Notably, the conversation covered the new ProdSec scanner (Trustshell) and Hummingbird, a tool that uses AI to scan for CVEs and automatically generate pull requests for Rawhide packages. The team also explored the potential of mapping Fedora's practices against the OpenSSF baseline checklist.

Contributors looking to get involved can review the meeting agenda and logs on the forum. Several topics were deferred due to time constraints, providing an excellent opportunity for asynchronous engagement on the SIG's issue tracker, particularly regarding the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) requirements and Linux-distros mailing list policies.

Decisions

• The discussion on aligning Fedora's security documents with the "Vulnerability and Incident Policy" CRA requirement (Ticket #14) was postponed to next week's meeting.
• The Linux-distros discussion (Ticket #13) was deferred to be handled asynchronously on the issue tracker.

Learn more about the Security team.

Gaming

David Campbell announced the release of Hnefatafl Copenhagen 6.1.1, a strategic board game with historical roots similar to Chess or Go. Linux gamers interested in trying it out can install the game by enabling the dcampbell24/hnefatafl-copenhagen Copr repository. Once installed, it can be launched directly from the application menu or by running hnefatafl-client in the terminal.

Learn more about the Gaming team.

Go

In a recent discussion, Tadej Janež sought advice on packaging docker-credential-helpers for Fedora. Because the upstream project includes macOS and Windows-specific helpers (osxkeychain and wincred), the conversation focused on excluding these unnecessary modules and their dependencies from the vendor tarball using go2rpm. Mikel Olasagasti provided a solution to remove the directories prior to archiving, which successfully cleared out the unneeded dependencies.

This process resulted in an essentially empty vendor archive, prompting Tadej to ask follow-up questions about handling SPEC file macros that operate on empty vendor sources and resolving an rpmlint error caused by a zero-length modules.txt file. Contributors with Go packaging experience are encouraged to join the thread to help resolve these final packaging hurdles.

Decisions

• The package will use pre_commands and exclude_directories in the go-vendor-tools.toml configuration to explicitly remove the OS X and Windows credential helpers (osxkeychain/ and wincred/) from the vendor archive and licensing checks.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused heavily on routine package maintenance and version updates. Michal Josef Špaček successfully merged multiple version bumps, updating perl-Test-Inter to 1.13 across PR #9, PR #10, and PR #11, as well as updating perl-HTTP-Date to 6.08 in PR #5, PR #6, and PR #7. In broader Linux community news, Michal Schorm submitted a patch to fix a Failure to Build From Source (FTBFS) in perl-SDL caused by underlying code behavior changes, which was subsequently merged by Hans de Goede. Additionally, contributors looking to engage with RHEL compatibility can review Yaakov Selkowitz's newly opened pull request for perl-HTTP-Daemon to build the package using Module::Build on RHEL.

Decisions

The group approved and merged the FTBFS fix for perl-SDL. They also officially accepted the version bumps for perl-Test-Inter (1.13) and perl-HTTP-Date (6.08) across their respective repository branches.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Other Discussions

• Hummingbird Community Meeting - 23 July 2026: Laura Santamaria announced the next Hummingbird community meeting and gathered agenda items, including a demo of Project Bluefin's factory, Red Hat Hardened Images, and agentic frameworks like Hive.
• If you're on the kernel mailing list (LKML), aren't you concerned about AI?: A user raised concerns about the surge of AI-generated code in the Linux kernel and the potential for plagiarism or training data injections, prompting a reference to Linus Torvalds' stance on the matter.
• Fedora AI/ML SIG Meeting (2026-07-16): The AI/ML SIG discussed recruiting maintainers for the llama.cpp backend, testing pi-coding-agent, establishing a Skills Reviewers sub-team, and navigating the governance of GPU hardware access for CI purposes.
• F45 Change Proposal: Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 (system-wide): A proposal to enable hardware-enforced Shadow Stack protection by default for C, C++, and Rust applications on supported x86_64 machines in Fedora 45 sparked discussions about backward compatibility, hardware support, and implementation details.
• F45 Change Proposal: Disable Vendor Change by Default (system-wide): A proposal aims to configure DNF5 to prevent automatic package vendor changes during transactions by default, ensuring system stability while allowing explicit vendor transitions via configuration rules or command-line flags.
• Looking for zig co-maintainer for Fedora and EPEL: The maintainer of the Zig package requested help, especially during release cycles and for EPEL, and received an offer of assistance for ARM64 bootstrapping and fixes.
• Help needed with matrix-synapse: A maintainer asked for help building the latest version of matrix-synapse on Fedora 44 and older, noting that an ongoing package review is currently blocking progress.
• F45 Change Proposal: LibreOffice html help (self-contained): A proposal to switch LibreOffice's embedded help system to HTML files distributed as noarch packages aims to save repository space, prompting brief discussions on how to handle systems without a web browser installed.
• Non-responsive packager check for @sham1: A non-responsive maintainer process was initiated for the ledger package, but the maintainer quickly replied, apologizing for their absence and promising to catch up on their packages.
• Non-responsive maintainer: crosa: A user initiated the non-responsive maintainer process for Cleber Rosa regarding Avocado-VT related packages, which are currently blocking Python 3.14 compatibility in Fedora 43.
• Other discussions included a list of long term FTBFS packages to be retired, an RFC on Prometheus exporters naming and configuration, an F45 proposal for LibreOffice Dictionaries, a strategy for i686 removal of leaf packages, a request to unretire sugar packages, and the announcement of on-demand openQA testing of dist-git PRs.

Orphaning packages

• Orphaning xset and xrdb: Peter Hutterer announced the orphaning of the xset and xrdb packages, inviting anyone who still has a use for them to take over maintenance.

Package updates

• Orphaned package wavemon updated to 0.9.7: A user provided an updated COPR build for the orphaned wavemon package (version 0.9.7) for Fedora 44, offering occasional future builds without committing to long-term maintenance.
• z3 soname bump: Jerry James announced an upcoming soname bump for z3 version 5.0, which will require rebuilding opam and prusa-slicer.
• Node.js rolling stream: upgrade path for current nodejs22: A discussion was started regarding the upgrade path for users currently on the nodejs22 stream in F44/Rawhide as the project transitions to a metapackage approach.
• Flint soname bump: Jerry James announced an update to flint version 3.6.0, which includes a soname bump requiring rebuilds for several dependent packages like Singular and polymake.
• libupnp soname bump: Gwyn Ciesla announced an upcoming upgrade for libupnp to 22.0.3 in Rawhide, confirming that dependent rebuilds will be handled.

New contributor introductions

• Mohab Soliman, a mechatronics engineer from Egypt with experience in 3D printers and FreeCAD, introduced themselves to the 3D printing SIG and asked for guidance on contributing.
• Jesus De Los Reyes Larraga, a QA/platform engineer, introduced themselves, offering their expertise in infrastructure, automated testing, and various programming languages to contribute to the ecosystem.
• Philip Czarnik, a software developer from Germany with experience in Angular, Java, Python, and C/C++, introduced themselves and expressed interest in volunteering 2-4 hours to start contributing.