Across the Fedora Project, the overwhelming focus is the imminent release of Fedora Linux 45, scheduled for November 3, 2026. Teams including Quality, Release Engineering, Workstation, KDE, Server, Cloud, and ARM are intensely coordinating to perform final validation testing on Release Candidates RC-1.3 and RC-1.4 while successfully triaging last-minute blocker bugs. Simultaneously, a major collaborative effort is underway among the Council, Atomic, CoreOS, Hummingbird, and IoT groups to finalize the "Atomic Fusion" Bootable Image Unification initiative. Their primary technical priority is establishing a bootable seed image for CI testing, though development has temporarily shifted to GitHub to bypass ongoing integration friction between Konflux and Forgejo. Finally, looking beyond the upcoming release, teams are managing sweeping security updates—such as addressing the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise across the Rust ecosystem and backporting roughly 300 CVE fixes for WebKitGTK in EPEL 10—while FESCo prepares the community for Fedora 46 and 47 by reviewing change proposals for Python 3.16 and PHP 8.6.

Announcements

Following a successful Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora Linux 45 Final is officially approved and shipping live on November 3, 2026. This milestone release brings significant user experience improvements, including modernizing the virtual console by switching to the userspace utility kmscon instead of the legacy fbcon driver, and introducing a Stratis storage configuration option in the Anaconda installer to simplify local storage management.

Looking ahead, several change proposals have been announced for future releases, offering key opportunities for community feedback and testing. For Fedora 46, proposed upgrades include rewriting the usermode package's userhelper and consolehelper in Rust to enhance memory safety, transitioning tzdata to a more efficient 'slim' data format to mitigate data bloat and 2038 bugs, and updating the PHP stack to version 8.6. Additionally, planning is already underway for Fedora 47 with a proposal to upgrade the system stack to Python 3.16. Contributors are encouraged to review these proposals and assist with early compatibility testing.

Council

The Council focused on the "Atomic Fusion" bootable image unification effort and wrapping up the Fedora Atomic Initiative. Discussions centered around seed image creation, overcoming integration friction between Konflux and Forgejo, and transitioning development environments. The Atomic Initiative is officially winding down with the Fedora 45 release, and a retrospective has been opened to collect community feedback.

Decisions

• Start the seed image proof of concept from existing bootc base images (minimal or minimal-plus) to avoid reinventing the wheel (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 28 October 2026).
• Temporarily build the seed image in GitHub on a Konflux tenant for a week while addressing service account needs and infrastructure blockers upstream (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 28 October 2026).
• Require testing to use a fully built QCOW2 disk image booted in a VM rather than direct kernel booting to properly catch bootloader issues (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 28 October 2026).
• Close base image migration issue #75 as the relevant tests and repositories have been successfully relocated to Forgejo (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 22 October 2026).
• Allow old tenants (such as bootc and CoreOS) to naturally expire by the end of life for Fedora 44 rather than merging them into new tenants (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 22 October 2026).
• Maintain original commit histories during GitHub repository migrations for seed work (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 22 October 2026).
• Conduct the Fedora Atomic Initiative retrospective asynchronously via a public discussion thread instead of a live meeting (Bootable Image Unification Meeting - 22 October 2026).

Contribution opportunities

• Share learnings, successes, and advice in the Fedora Atomic Initiative Retro thread as the project winds down.
• Help compile and document a list of feature gaps and integration deficiencies between Forgejo and Konflux for upstream development (Ref).
• Submit pull requests for the starting base image package set for review prior to the next unification meeting (Ref).
• Provide feedback via Matrix on whether to adopt UTC scheduling for meetings to avoid daylight saving time confusion (Ref).

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

FESCo announced four new Change Proposals on the forums this week: Python 3.16, Usermode2, PHP 8.6, and TzdataZicSlimFormat. The committee noted that active discussion for these proposals is now intended to take place strictly on the devel mailing list.

In ticket tracking, FESCo evaluated several pending system-wide changes, including the proposed removal of the DNF4 stack and modularity, the transition to the RPM v6 package format, and the LMDB 1.0 transition. Extensive discussions also continued regarding performance requirements and potential SLAs for alternative architectures in Koji (Ticket 3688) and the ongoing evaluation of Forgejo as a potential Bugzilla replacement (Ticket 3664).

Decisions

• Transferred ownership of the python-authlib package to chihlee under the non-responsive maintainer policy. (URL)
• Decided to publish a Fedora Magazine article to warn users about the removal of NetworkManager-{vpnc,fortisslvpn} in F43 and F44 instead of relying on easily-missed RPM scriptlet warnings. (URL)
• Technically rejected the Thin LTO Build Flag change proposal due to a lack of FESCo votes within the required timeframe, though the author is welcome to file a new change request. (URL)
• Completed the onboarding process and closed the setup ticket for new FESCo member maxamillion. (URL)

Contribution opportunities

• Members of the Quality team, Python maintainers, and other high-volume packaging SIGs are encouraged to evaluate the global search features and workflows on the Forgejo testing instance and provide feedback on whether it meets their needs as a Bugzilla replacement. (URL)

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

During the week of October 26 to November 1, 2026, the Packaging Committee met and closed multiple tickets focused on standardizing versioning and clarifying cryptographic policies. The primary theme of the week was resolving confusion around snapshot packaging and ensuring that cryptographic policies strictly follow FESCo directives without unintended restrictions. Additionally, new guidelines for Emacs package packaging were proposed and remain under discussion.

Decisions

• The committee officially simplified the snapshot versioning guidelines to prevent ongoing confusion and upgrade path breakages, which was recently highlighted by the bluez package issue. Moving forward, the only allowed snapshot format is <base_version>^<number>.<revision> (Issue #1578, Issue #1570).
• The wording for the aws-lc crypto policy exception was updated to explicitly allow the use of aws-lc for low-level cryptography while preventing the use of its SSL / TLS functionality. This aligns with FESCo's original intent and avoids inadvertently restricting rustls (Issue #1580, superseding Issue #1579).

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

Mindshare handled several forum topics and tickets this week, focusing heavily on event preparation and budgeting for late 2026 and 2027. The committee reviewed the 2027 travel budget, allocating funds across major Q1 events like FOSDEM and FOSSAsia, and processed multiple swag and event funding requests. Additionally, Community Operations announced a shift to asynchronous team meetings, and the Mindshare Committee is considering restructuring its team representative seats, with CommOps officially resigning its seat.

Decisions

• Approved a 30-day artwork provision policy prior to events to guarantee event badges are uploaded and available (URL).
• The Community Operations (CommOps) Team will sunset its recurring general meetings in favor of asynchronous coordination via Matrix and Forgejo (URL).
• The Community Operations Team officially resigned its seat on the Mindshare Committee (URL).
• Closed ticket #90 regarding annual budget projections, deciding to focus on retroactive records instead (URL).
• Approved a $150 swag budget for the Hack Club Haven Spokane event (URL).

Contribution opportunities

• The Fedora Design team needs volunteers to design event badges. Kyle Reynolds Conway has stepped up for the FOSDEM 2027 badge, but more help is welcomed to rebuild a badge artwork team (URL).
• Mindshare members are requested to provide feedback on the documentation update pull request submitted by @rmcbryde (URL).
• Contributors are encouraged to list their names on the FOSSASIA 2027 Wiki if they are interested in representing Fedora in person, and to submit talk proposals soon (URL).
• Event organizers in underrepresented regions (like Kenya) are encouraged to propose medium local events for Fedora support (URL).

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Fedora Join

Andrew Heath introduced himself to the Fedora Join community this week. As a Senior Platform Engineer at Red Hat IT with over a decade of enterprise Linux experience, he is looking to transition from a downstream consumer to an active upstream contributor.

He outlined his primary areas of interest for contributing, which include becoming a package maintainer, working with image building and composes (specifically osbuild), assisting with QA release validation testing, and contributing to Fedora Infrastructure automation.

Contribution opportunities

• A new contributor is seeking a sponsor to become a package maintainer and is offering to co-maintain or pick up orphaned packages in the automation and sysadmin tooling space.
• He is also requesting pointers on good first tasks and is offering his help to teams needing assistance with Image Builder/osbuild, QA testing, or infrastructure automation.

Learn more about the Fedora Join team.

Ambassadors

The Ambassadors group is actively coordinating the Fedora Project's in-person presence for the upcoming FOSSASIA 2027 summit. Community members have begun introducing themselves on the forum, expressing their eagerness to represent Fedora, detailing their current contributions, and confirming they have submitted talk proposals and updated the planning Wiki.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors interested in representing the Fedora Project at FOSSASIA 2027 are encouraged to add their names to the FOSSASIA 2027 Fedora Project Wiki document.
• Active contributors seeking sponsorship for the event can submit their requests in the Budgeting section of the Wiki document for consideration by Fedora Mindshare.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation/GNOME group focused on preparations for the Fedora 45 release, including the availability of Fedora 45 Release Candidates (RC-1.3 and RC-1.4) and their respective validation testing. Discussions also covered a drafted Fedora Magazine article for the upcoming release, a requested GNOME patch for input sources, and the need for human review in automated LLM weekly reports. Additionally, the group addressed ongoing bugs, such as ensuring unprivileged LDAP users can install updates via gnome-software following the dnf5 transition, and finalized the removal of the PyCharm COPR repository from previous Fedora releases.

Decisions

• Removed the PyCharm COPR repository from Fedora 43 and Fedora 44, matching its removal in Fedora 45+ (Ticket #519).
• Mandated human review for the LLM-generated weekly reports to prevent the sharing of irrelevant or personal details (Ticket #527).

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested for validation testing of Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.3 and RC-1.4. Testers should focus on KDE, encrypted stratis installs, and secrets management in GNOME.
• Review and feedback are needed for the drafted "What's New in Fedora Workstation" Fedora Magazine article before it undergoes editorial review.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group focused on validation testing for the upcoming Fedora 45 release, with Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.3 and RC-1.4 both provided for final testing. Key updates in these candidates include KDE 6.8.1, stratisd encryption fixes, and oo7 updates. Additionally, a new Fedora user provided feedback about system slowdowns caused by file indexing, and was advised to share this feedback directly with upstream KDE developers.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to complete validation testing for Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.4, specifically verifying bug fixes for KDE 6.8.1, encrypted stratis installs, and secrets management in GNOME.
• Contributors are invited to test release candidate images, report results on the Summary pages, and vote on blocker bugs via the blockerbugs app to streamline review meetings.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server working group focused heavily on validating Fedora 45 Release Candidates 1.3 and 1.4 this week. Extensive testing across various installation methods—including remote/local, BIOS/UEFI, ARM SBC, and KVM environments—confirmed that Fedora 45 is ready for release from the Server perspective. Minor issues regarding LVM partition types and device tables on KVM and ARM images remain but can easily be bypassed during post-installation. Additionally, the group made significant progress on the Ansible support project, successfully publishing the first ansible-collection-fedoraserver-general package to a Fedora Copr repository. Work is ongoing to improve the out-of-the-box Ansible experience and implement system backup documentation utilizing Borg and ReAR.

Decisions

• The group confirmed that Fedora 45 RC 1.3 and 1.4 have successfully passed all installation tests and are ready for final release.
• It was agreed to merge PR 228 to incorporate a work-in-progress article on LVM snapshots into the documentation, enabling extensive community testing.
• The working group decided to formally rename their Ansible collection to ansible-collection-fedoraserver-general and closed ticket #237 and ticket #238.
• Brett Weir was assigned to work on the out-of-the-box experience and CI/CD testing strategy for the Ansible collection.
• The action items regarding the Beginners Guide to Fedora Server were put on hold as the primary contributor is currently unavailable.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to thoroughly test the newly merged documentation on LVM snapshots and DNF transaction hooks (PR 228) and provide feedback.
• Community members can help draft new documentation on Setting up Fedora Server Ansible support, outlining the basic control node scenarios.
• The QA team is calling for validation testing of Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.4 to ensure no regressions were introduced.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team addressed several critical issues this week, including a heavy scraper attack on Bodhi that caused database load spikes and timeouts. To mitigate this, the search endpoint was temporarily blocked and specific user-agents were banned. The team also resolved a storage capacity issue on the download-ib01 mirror by removing the fedora-archive module, which was communicated to mirror admins. In other news, the team prepared for the upcoming Fedora Linux 45 final release, successfully deployed Forgejo v15.0.11 to production, and progressed on configuring Zabbix monitoring for the new staging autosign service. Persistent and sporadic 'bad credentials' errors affecting logins to accounts.fedoraproject.org remain under active investigation with upstream FreeIPA.

Decisions

• Removed the fedora-archive and fedora-buffet modules from the download-ib01 mirror due to storage exhaustion (Ticket 13642 and Mailing List).
• Decided to close the container registry pruning request as the upcoming migration to Quay.io will automatically handle these concerns (Ticket 11512).
• Decided to close the request to move cloud-image-uploader to the cloud organization, keeping it in apps per the maintainer's preference (Ticket 13370).

Contribution opportunities

• Need help investigating and resolving the intermittent 'Unauthorized: bad credentials' and IPA errors when logging into accounts.fedoraproject.org.
• Help is requested for Zabbix monitoring configuration, specifically adding metrics for the new staging autosign service in Ticket 13646.
• Review and test the proposed PR for removing the deprecated 'become: false' variable in ansible configurations in Ticket 13643.
• Newcomers interested in system administration can get involved by following the Infrastructure Join Guide.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

Release Engineering focused heavily on finalizing Fedora 45 Release Candidates (up to RC 1.4) and performing stable pushes in preparation for the final release. The group coordinated extensively across Bodhi updates, resolved gating CI test failures, and addressed mirror syncing and torrent seeding issues. The F45 Blocker Review meeting successfully triaged several bugs, ensuring critical issues were flagged or handled via freeze exceptions. In addition to release tasks, the team investigated build breakages—including a memory exhaustion issue for chromium on x86_64 and broken EPEL9 repos—and handled Pagure/Bugzilla assignee updates. The package unretirement tool is now fully rolled out, streamlining the process for package maintainers.

Decisions

• [CVE-2026-111497 (brotli) was accepted as a Final blocker], while Plasma 6.8.1/Gear 26.08.2, a Stratis encryption bug, and an Evolution keyring issue were accepted as Freeze Exceptions.
• [The new package unretirement tool is fully operational], and package maintainer documentation will be updated to point users to it instead of requiring manual Releng tickets.
• [Releng 'Change' tickets will now be managed using a set of specific triage labels] (e.g., change-review, change-review-ack) rather than moving them into a separate project board.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and provide feedback on the F46 Change proposal: Remove DNF4, libdnf, libmodulemd.
• Help investigate and resolve the chromium build error on x86_64 where the build process is being killed by an out-of-memory issue.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Fedora Quality team focused heavily on validating the upcoming Fedora 45 release this week. During the F45 Final Go/No-Go Meeting, the team officially declared Fedora 45 Final as a "GO" for release on November 3, 2026, using release candidate RC-1.4. Aside from release candidate validation, the QE team worked on expediting security fixes, expanding openQA test capabilities for SAS and Arabic, deploying a hotfix for Issuebot, and wrapping up preparations for the Kernel 7.3 test week starting November 1st.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 Final was officially declared a "GO" and is scheduled for release on November 3, 2026, using the RC-1.4 candidate.
• Accepted bug 2560274 (brotli out-of-bounds write CVE-2026-111497) as a Final Blocker bug due to its potential security impact in the GNOME dependency chain.
• Accepted a Freeze Exception to include a major KDE Plasma 6.8.1 and Gear 26.08.2 update in the final release.
• Accepted Freeze Exceptions for bug 2552449 (encrypted Stratis root emergency mode drop) and bug 2560362 (Evolution keyring password issues).
• Rejected bug 2560255 (SELinux policy breaking SSH port forwarding) and bug 2558595 (SSH passphrase unlock issue) as Final Blockers, opting to resolve them via future updates.

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are encouraged to participate in the Kernel 7.3 test week running from November 1 to November 7 to help test the new kernel rebase on bare metal and VMs.
• Testers are still needed to perform validation on the Fedora 45 release candidates, especially in areas with recent changes such as KDE, encrypted Stratis installs, and GNOME secrets management.
• Help is requested to perform interactive Fedora installation testing on real hardware using Beaker machines, and to help verify remote access to Anaconda (Issue #949).

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

This week, the team evaluated the potential impact of the Node2Shell vulnerability on the Fedora Project website in the Fedora Websites chat. They confirmed the site is safe since it uses Nuxt to statically generate HTML rather than running a dynamic Node.js server. Following this, the team successfully updated the site's Node modules. The update process hit a minor prerender error caused by a malformed German translation string on the COSMIC page, which was resolved by fixing a typo in the English source to automatically invalidate the faulty translation. Additionally, Swedish translations for the COSMIC website were updated, and a ticket for upgrading node modules was successfully completed. On the forum, a contributor reported UX confusion regarding the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA) while trying to edit the wiki. This sparked a discussion on how to handle broken wiki links, leading to guidance on proper migration and link maintenance practices.

Decisions

• It was affirmed in a forum discussion that fixing broken wiki links is always appropriate. If a page can be migrated off-wiki to Docs, its content should be replaced with {{#fedoradocs: $FULL_DFO_URL}} to act as a direct redirect rather than deleting the page and causing a 404 error.

Contribution opportunities

• Upgrading and testing Node.js modules for the website repositories was identified as a great low-hanging fruit opportunity for new contributors or interns.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

This week, the Design team successfully closed several key issues. The visual assets and promotional graphics for the F45 Virtual Release Party were completed ahead of the October 30th event. Additionally, the team wrapped up the sketches and rough drafts for the F46 wallpaper and fulfilled a request for a higher resolution Fedora logo.

Decisions

• Approved and finalized the visual assets for the F45 Virtual Release Party.
• Completed the initial design phase for the F46 Wallpaper: Sketches & Rough Drafts.
• Resolved the need for a higher resolution Fedora logo.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Docs team focused heavily on infrastructure modernization and tooling improvements this week. Key structural changes include transitioning the main site builder repository to a standard main branch workflow, retiring the old stg branches, and officially renaming the builder repository to site-builder. The team also made a significant architectural decision to consolidate all Antora documentation modules under a single ROOT component, which will allow content from various Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to be seamlessly mixed and matched into unified guides.

In addition to structural work, progress was made on migrating the UI bundle from GitLab to Fedora Forge. The team is also experimenting with a newly deployed CryptPad instance in CommuniShift to facilitate real-time collaborative writing. Content-wise, several release notes for upcoming Fedora changes were drafted and merged, including updates for the Crystal programming language, LibreOffice HTML help, and LibreOffice dictionaries.

Decisions

• The repository formerly known as docs-fp-o has been renamed to site-builder to better reflect its purpose (URL).
• The prod branch was renamed to main and set as the default branch, while the old main and stg branches were deleted. A CC BY-SA 4.0 license was applied to the new main branch (URL).
• To allow module inclusion across different repositories, all docs will be brought under a single ROOT Antora component, which will also drop the component name from the URL (URL).
• The UI bundle repository will be migrated from GitLab to Fedora Forge, keeping the ui-bundle name and using Forgejo Actions to build and publish the bundle to the package registry (URL).
• The team will remove NPM configuration files from the builder repository, standardizing on a Podman container workflow for local site previews while keeping docsbuilder.sh as a wrapper (URL).

Contribution opportunities

• Writers are needed to draft release notes for several Fedora changes, including Libical4, IBus 1.5.35, and Fontconfig 2.18.
• Contributors are invited to test the newly deployed CryptPad CommuniShift instance for collaborative drafting and provide feedback on its functionality.
• Help is requested to update the Documentation Translation Workflow instructions, specifically moving away from the deprecated Pagure steps to the new Forgejo repository creation process.
• Feedback is requested on the HTML reports generated by bruce, a new broken-link crawler proposed for CI integration.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Legal

A community member inquired if the trained model weights and vocabulary for a Japanese input method (fcitx5-slm-ime) could be packaged in Fedora as content under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. The Legal team confirmed that the described contents fit the 'content' category and that CC-BY-SA-4.0 is an allowed-content license under Fedora legal policy. For more details, see the original thread.

Decisions

• Confirmed that the slm-ime-model trained weights fit the 'content' category and can be legally packaged under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 allowed-content license. Source: Original Thread

Learn more about the Legal team.

COPR

This week, the ongoing migration of COPR build results to Pulp caused some users to experience unexpectedly long pending build times. The team expects the migration of all projects to conclude before the end of November. In addition, an unrelated infrastructure issue caused temporary slowness in Pulp, which was resolved after the Pulp team intervened to clear stuck workers. Community members also discussed the legality of hosting FLOSS software with codecs unapproved by Fedora in COPR. Since COPR is subject to the same US-centric legal concerns as Fedora, it is considered unsuitable, prompting documentation updates to clarify the policy.

Decisions

• Software containing codecs not approved in Fedora is subject to the same legal restrictions as Fedora itself and should not be built in COPR; a pull request (PR 4590) was opened to clarify the documentation.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and provide feedback on PR 4590, which aims to clarify the rules regarding unapproved codecs and legal limitations in the COPR documentation.

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

The EPEL community is preparing for the upcoming retirement of EPEL 10.2, which will take effect once RHEL 10.3 is released in November. Packagers are urged to push any outstanding updates to stable, as pending updates and side tags will be removed during the transition.

In other news, WebKitGTK has received a major security update in EPEL 10 that backports fixes for approximately 300 CVEs. Meanwhile, maintainers have proposed retiring pipx from EPEL 9 because the latest security releases require Python 3.12, which cannot be practically satisfied by EPEL 9's Python 3.9 baseline.

Decisions

• The community determined that EPEL 10.2 will be retired once RHEL 10.3 is released, redirecting RHEL 10 users to the EPEL 10.3 repository.
• A proposal was initiated to retire pipx from EPEL 9 because 23 high-severity security issues cannot be backported to Python 3.9.
• The Steering Committee decided to cancel their upcoming November 4th meeting due to members attending Texas Linux Fest.

Contribution opportunities

• Please help test the WebKitGTK security updates for EPEL 10.4 and 10.3 to ensure backwards compatibility after a massive backport fixing ~300 CVEs.
• Packagers with outstanding EPEL 10.2 updates must submit them to stable soon before the EPEL 10.2 retirement, as unpushed updates will be marked obsolete.
• Community members are invited to RSVP and attend the Fedora 45 Release Party this Friday.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

Atomic

The Atomic group heavily focused on concluding the Bootable Image Unification ("Atomic Fusion") initiative, primarily centering on the definition and creation of a new "seed image" for CI test harnesses. Because of ongoing integration limitations between Forgejo and Konflux—specifically missing service accounts and SSH push support—the group decided to temporarily host the initial seed image work on GitHub. The initiative itself is wrapping up by the end of October with plans to transition ownership of the long-term artifacts to the CoreOS Working Group.

In the forums, members clarified the synchronization discrepancies between rpm-ostree commits and Bodhi stable pushes, which temporarily exposes testing packages in stable trees. Additionally, a new proposal was introduced to implement a desktop-aware health check that would automatically roll back deployments on Silverblue and Kinoite if a graphical Wayland session fails to initialize.

Decisions

• The Bootable Image Unification initiative will be officially closed out by October 31st with an asynchronous retrospective. (Bootable Image Unification Meeting Agenda - 22 October 2026)
• The new atomic "seed image" will be explicitly bootable by default—containing a kernel and architecture-specific bootloaders (like GRUB or zipl)—so that it is immediately usable for CI testing. (EPIC: Create seed image)
• Due to current Forgejo and Konflux integration bottlenecks, initial development for the seed image will take place in a temporary GitHub repository rather than on Fedora's Forge. (Bootable Image Unification Meeting Agenda - 28 October 2026)
• Permissions for the Atomic organization on Forgejo were updated to give the Members team "Write access to everything except Packages," aligning with the Atomic Desktop organization. (forge-atomic-members permissions)

Contribution opportunities

• Provide community feedback on the proposal for a graphical boot health check that would trigger rpm-ostree rollbacks if a Wayland session fails to start in Silverblue and Kinoite.
• Share feedback, learnings, and next steps in the upcoming asynchronous public retrospective for the CoreOS/Atomic unification initiative.
• Contribute alternative bootloader configurations (such as aboot or systemd-boot) to the new seed image once the default GRUB/zipl base is established.
• Assist in resolving configuration conflicts regarding ca-certificates, crypto-policies, and the ostree 3-way merge to prevent local user configurations from retaining old bugs during system updates.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS group focused heavily on preparing for the upcoming Fedora 45 release and resolving critical system and kernel issues. In preparation for F45, team members coordinated pull requests to migrate the testing-devel stream and discussed the go/no-go final target date. A significant public service announcement was also distributed regarding a required manual intervention (update-ca-trust) for users with customized CA trust stores to properly incorporate new certificate changes, such as the eMudhra certificate distrust.

The group also made progress on the Bootable Image Unification ("Atomic Fusion") initiative, choosing to temporarily coordinate seed image work on GitHub while ironing out Konflux integration challenges. On the technical side, an upstream selinux-policy fix was merged to resolve podman-remote socket connection denials, and extensive debugging successfully identified an ext4 writeback bug causing corrupted kernel files in the /boot partition during upgrades, with a temporary workaround identified while waiting for a kernel patch.

Decisions

• A decision was made to send a communication to users advising them to manually run update-ca-trust if they have customized their system CA trust store, as OS updates do not automatically regenerate it (Meeting log).
• The group decided to enable bootc install to create disk images for the next stream first, followed by testing, but only after the Fedora 45 release is complete (Meeting log).
• For the bootable image unification project, the team decided to temporarily start work on the seed repository in GitHub using a Konflux tenant due to current permissions and service account friction with Konflux (Forum post).
• The group decided to conduct the retrospective for the Atomic Fusion initiative asynchronously via a public discussion thread rather than a live meeting (Forum post).

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are asked for help to thoroughly test a nodioread_nolock mount option workaround for an ext4 corruption issue on /boot during upgrades (Issue #2234).
• The Bootable Image Unification team is preparing a video presentation for the Fedora release party that will feature a call for new contributors (Forum post).

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The IoT Working Group met to review the testing status for Fedora 44, 45, and 46, noting that all are in good shape with Fedora 45 finalizing for its upcoming release. The team also planned a new greenboot-rs release and provided support for running Fedora IoT on NVIDIA Jetson Orin devices.

In forum discussions, the Bootable Image Unification ("Atomic Fusion") initiative met to plan their seed image creation, deciding to temporarily use GitHub to avoid service account friction in Forgejo and Konflux. The Fedora Robotics SIG also held a meeting to track packaging blockers for Fedora 44, including missing dependencies like libyuv in EPEL10.

Decisions

• Proceed with the Fedora-IoT-45-20261028.0 compose for Fedora 45 final validation ahead of the Go/No-Go meeting (Meeting Log).
• Publish a new greenboot-rs release to roll out recent bug fixes (Meeting Log).
• Temporarily use GitHub for Bootable Image Unification seed image work while upstream Konflux and Fedora Forge service account integrations are finalized (Forum Post).
• Close out the current Bootable Image Unification initiative phase by October 31st with an asynchronous, public retrospective thread (Forum Post).

Contribution opportunities

• The Bootable Image Unification initiative is putting out a call for new contributors, which will be highlighted in their upcoming Fedora release party video presentation.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

This week, the ARM group's activities were centered around the upcoming release of Fedora 45. Adam Williamson announced the availability of Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.4 for final validation testing. He emphasized that this candidate must pass all required test cases to meet the Final Release Criteria. Additionally, a Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting was scheduled to assess current Blocker and Freeze Exception bugs.

Contribution opportunities

• Assist with validation testing for Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.4.
• Submit testing results on the Summary page.
• Provide test coverage for specific deliverables, including Installation, Base, Server, Cloud, Desktop, and the Security Lab.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Cloud

Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.4 is now available for validation testing. This release candidate must be thoroughly tested to determine if it meets the criteria for the official Fedora 45 release.

Contribution opportunities

• Help complete the validation testing for the Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.4 Cloud image.
• Enter test results on the Summary page.

Learn more about the Cloud team.

Hummingbird

The Hummingbird group held discussions centering on the "Atomic Fusion" Bootable Image Unification initiative, closing out the current phase by October 31st with an upcoming public retrospective. The team has been working on a proof-of-concept seed image, focusing on integration between Konflux and Forgejo. Due to current infrastructure limitations, specifically regarding service accounts and SSH key support, they are temporarily utilizing GitHub for the seed repository work while compiling a list of deficiencies to hand upstream.

A major focus was deciding on the technical direction for the seed image, with the group agreeing to start from existing bootc base images that resemble Fedora minimal with a bootloader. Testing methodology was also heavily debated, culminating in an agreement to pursue full boot and secure boot testing via a disk image (like QCOW2), which is essential for Fedora QA processes. A live demonstration of the seed image proof of concept is planned for the upcoming week.

Decisions

• The group will temporarily use a GitHub repository to coordinate seed image work due to current integration friction between Konflux and Fedora Forgejo.
• The proof of concept for the seed image will start from existing bootc base images, utilizing a package set close to Fedora minimal with a bootloader.
• Testing must utilize full boot and secure boot testing via a disk image (such as QCOW2) to ensure bootloader issues are caught and to support Fedora QA requirements.
• The migration of base image work from GitLab to Forgejo (issue #75) is considered complete and closed, with new work starting in new pipelines.
• The current unification initiative will be closed out by October 31st, with a public discussion thread planned for the retrospective.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and provide feedback on the upcoming Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) for the monorepo and seed image decisions.
• Help compile a list of feature gaps and integration deficiencies between Forgejo and Konflux to hand off to upstream developers.
• Contribute to the public retrospective discussion thread to share learnings and discuss next steps for the Atomic Fusion initiative.
• Prepare or contribute to the video presentation for the upcoming Fedora release party to showcase the initiative's progress and call for new contributors.

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

AI

The Fedora AI/ML SIG focused heavily on the Fedora 45 Release Party this week, delivering a live presentation covering the group's recent progress, including the Agent Skills Library, AI/ML packaging, and ROCm updates. A video recording and presentation slides are now available for the community to review.

In addition to the release party, technical work continued with the wiring of a new COPR for agent-skills, updating the ROCm installation wiki, and refreshing Colibri to version 2.0. Ongoing discussions also covered package dependency troubleshooting, integrating executorch for NPU workloads, and successfully landing gufo into Rawhide.

Decisions

• The group decided to present a live session at the F45 Release Party to update the broader Fedora community on the SIG's latest developments (F45 Release Party Presentation Invitation).
• The ROCm install wiki was updated to point users to Rawhide source builds for Fedora releases, addressing older F44/F45 packages (Latest ROCm on Fedora and EPEL).

Contribution opportunities

• Reviewers are needed for a new documentation pull request explaining how to use OpenShell on Fedora (PR #10).
• Package review swaps are requested for 7 pending reviews to help get podman-desktop into Rawhide (Fedora Discussion).
• A package review is needed for sqlfluff, a new Python-based SQL linter being integrated with pi-coding-agent (Bugzilla #2564611).
• New contributors are encouraged to try out the pi-coding-agent local AI tool and help build out missing pieces or suggest additional linters.

Learn more about the AI team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group focused heavily on finalizing Fedora 45 and ramping up the Fedora 46 rebuilds this week. The Fedora 45 final images are ready and have been successfully tested on various hardware including Jupiter, P550, K3, and Titan using the Omni kernel. Concurrently, efforts to bootstrap Fedora ELN on riscv64 are advancing well, with Koji fully configured for ELN and the LLVM toolchain modified for the new RVA23 baseline.

The team is also actively investigating a difficult-to-debug GCC build failure on K3 hardware, testing various kernel patches and memory configurations to mitigate the issue. In community news, the RISC-V devroom has been accepted for FOSDEM 2027, and the CFP announcement has been distributed. Additional details from the brief weekly sync can be found in the RISC-V meeting log.

Decisions

• Transition the issue tracker's primary focus to Fedora 46 as Fedora 45 reaches General Availability.
• Execute a staged transition for the RVA23 baseline switch, allowing packages to be replaced incrementally without requiring a full system re-bootstrap.
• Refrain from re-spinning Fedora 45 release images right before GA unless absolutely necessary for critical security fixes, to preserve the validity of recent testing.

Contribution opportunities

• Test the Fedora 45 final images (Server, Cloud, Container) on available RISC-V hardware and report results.
• Assist with debugging the GCC build failures on K3 hardware.
• Help bootstrap Rust and finalize RVA23 baseline patches for GCC and Golang to support the Fedora ELN riscv64 bootstrap.
• Submit talk proposals for the FOSDEM 2027 RISC-V devroom following the CFP announcement.
• Assist with rebasing the qt6-qtwebengine package for the ongoing Qt 6.12 update.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

NeuroFedora

In the NeuroFedora Matrix room, a contributor triaged four CVEs reported against dcm2niix related to an old vendored cJSON, ruling them out but noting potential future vulnerabilities. As a result, an upstream issue was opened to address the vendored dependency. A new build of the latest dcm2niix release is being prepared exclusively for Rawhide due to documented behavior changes.

Decisions

• The latest dcm2niix release will be built exclusively for Rawhide due to documented behavior changes.

Learn more about the NeuroFedora team.

Gaming

This week, the Gaming group's discussions centered on the Steam 64-bit beta multi-lib requirements. A community member highlighted a GitHub issue showing that despite the 64-bit Steam RT3 update, Steam's reaper binary remains a 32-bit executable, which still forces distributions to maintain 32-bit GL libraries on the host. An unofficial workaround was shared, detailing how to compile a 64-bit replacement for the reaper binary and start Steam with the -noverifyfiles flag to bypass the 32-bit dependency requirement.

Learn more about the Gaming team.

Haskell

Jens-Ulrik Petersen shared a new tool called fh-unbundling to identify technical debt in Fedora Haskell caused by bundled libraries. By analyzing dependent packages, the tool highlights bundled libraries that are used by multiple dependent chains, emphasizing the need to unbundle the most impactful offenders to streamline package maintenance.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to address technical debt by submitting package reviews for the identified bundled libraries, or by helping to review those submissions.

Learn more about the Haskell team.

Perl

This week, Yaakov Selkowitz bumped a pull request against perl-File-ShareDir to disable optional dependencies on RHEL by pinging a reviewer.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

This week, the Python group discussed standardizing intersphinx mappings for Python package documentation. While it was acknowledged as technically feasible to upload and reference these mappings locally, concerns were raised regarding maintenance overhead. Some members noted a broader trend of Fedora packages dropping Sphinx documentation entirely due to bundling complexities. Additionally, a new community member introduced themselves and offered to help with Python backlog items and automation scripts.

Contribution opportunities

• A Senior Platform Engineer is looking for opportunities to contribute to Python backlog items, automation scripts, tooling updates, or smaller features.

Learn more about the Python team.

Ruby

During the testing of the newly started Ruby 4.1 development, community members have been fixing packages that fail to build due to C API changes, such as the deprecation of the Data_Wrap_Struct macro. In the Ruby 4.1 development started thread, Vít Ondruch thanked contributors for their fixes and noted that some older packages should likely be orphaned or retired instead of being patched.

Contribution opportunities

• Help identify old Ruby packages that should be orphaned or retired rather than patched for Ruby 4.1 compatibility, as discussed in the Ruby 4.1 development started thread.

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Rust

This week, the Rust group focused heavily on cascading security updates across the ecosystem following the end of the F45 Final Freeze. Extensive work was done to rebuild applications affected by the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise (RUSTSEC-2026-0381) and to update dependencies for rustls, lru, and faster-hex to address multiple security advisories. The team encountered significant friction updating the zip crate to version 9 due to unannounced upstream breaking API changes, leading to the realization that a rust-zip8 compatibility package will be required.

Additionally, a mailing list discussion clarified that packaging pre-releases of Rust crates is fully supported in Fedora; maintainers simply need to explicitly specify the pre-release version using rust2rpm (e.g., rust2rpm pcap-file@3.0.0-rc.3), though parallel major versions may still be necessary to satisfy dependent packages.

Decisions

• Packagers can explicitly package crate pre-releases by specifying the version with rust2rpm (e.g., @3.0.0-rc.3), as confirmed in a mailing list discussion.
• Due to undocumented breaking API changes in the zip crate version 9, the group decided to introduce a rust-zip8 compatibility package rather than attempting to patch all ecosystem consumers immediately (Ticket #47).
• To handle required security rebuilds for packages lacking @rust-sig as a co-maintainer, the team will combine requesting co-maintainership and utilizing automated scripts to file bugs, rather than relying on provenpackager interventions (Ticket #43).
• Packages dependent on rustls-webpki but not containing affected certificates will be treated as low-priority rebuilds (Ticket #46).

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed to make the latest routinator (v0.15.3) work, as it introduces new security fixes but switches its crypto implementation to aws-lc-rs via rpki 0.20, which is non-trivial to patch out (Ticket #46).
• Maintainers of Rust applications without @rust-sig as a co-maintainer are encouraged to add the group to facilitate automated security rebuilds (Ticket #43).
• Contributors can assist with the upcoming, complex compatibility packages and updates for the zstd, zstd-safe, and zstd-sys crates needed to support the zip v9 transition (Ticket #47).

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• Some Fedora Badges were not awarded: Users reported that some badges were not being awarded, leading to clarification that syncing may take a day or fixes might be needed in the new badge app.
• Suggested F46 Change Proposal: Split TLS certificates in jurisdiction-specific packages: A proposal was made to split TLS Certificate Authorities into different RPM packages to allow administrators to easily exclude untrusted CAs.
• Optional CJK input method support for Fedora's kmscon console: A user proposed adding a kmscon-uim package to easily configure Traditional Chinese and other CJK input methods for the virtual console, which maintainers supported.
• Security SIG Meeting on 29th October 2026 CANCELLED: The Security SIG cancelled their October 29 meeting to avoid time zone confusion, rescheduling for November 5.
• Fedora's interest in On-Device LLM: A researcher inquired about Fedora's ongoing projects related to On-Device LLMs to explore PIM support for mobile devices.
• ERMERG PUSH REQUEST: PHP 8.4.27-1 not in stable!: A discussion erupted over the handling of critical CVEs when an update for a PHP vulnerability was not immediately pushed to stable, highlighting differing views on balancing urgent security fixes with the standard testing process.
• Packaging proposal: whatsapp-desktop: An upstream author sought a review and a sponsor to package an independent Electron-based WhatsApp desktop client, leading to discussions about the feasibility of maintaining Electron releases.
• Call for testing - Firefox in HDR mode: Martin Stransky invited users to test Firefox's experimental HDR mode, noting that issues with black direct rendering maps were fixed in recent builds.
• Can we retire packages better?: A discussion on improving the retirement of leaf packages suggested automating the process when dependencies are orphaned, and surfacing upstream warnings on the Packager Dashboard.
• Leaves dropping: A philosophical discussion weighed the value of maintaining language-ecosystem leaf packages in Fedora versus relying on upstream package managers, debating supply chain security and maintenance burdens.
• Other discussions included updates on s390x infrastructure improvements, the upcoming EPEL 10.2 retirement, a heads-up on Sequoia openpgpverify migration PRs, the proposal of an Unprivileged eBPF RBAC Daemon, requests for podman-desktop review swaps, adding a RISC-V shim package, pinging non-responsive maintainers for googleapis and grpc, and tracking an abandoned SFML package.

Orphaning packages

• Miro Hrončok announced the orphaning of the dead upstream slic3r and its leaf dependencies (also mentioned on the 3dprinting list).
• Vít Ondruch orphaned rubygem-bson as it is no longer utilized.
• Ding-Yi Chen orphaned hexchat-autoaway because the main hexchat package is unmaintained.

Package updates

• Jerry James announced an upcoming pari soname bump, but delayed the update after Dima Pasechnik flagged the 2.19.0 release as unusually buggy.
• Cristian Le successfully pushed a mass rebuild for the Mpich 5.0.2 update to Rawhide.
• Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski is updating live555 to accommodate a live555 soname change, and will build its consumer vlc in a side tag.

New contributor introductions

• Dawid Wrobel introduced himself as a longtime Linux user looking for sponsorship to maintain GNOME extensions and Betterbird.
• Alexey Savchkov introduced himself as a DevOps engineer seeking sponsorship to adopt the orphaned ptl and usbsniff packages.

All contribution opportunities

Quality assurance and testing remain some of the most accessible ways for anyone to support the project. The Quality and Release teams urgently request validation testing for the Fedora 45 Candidate RC-1.3 and RC-1.4 releases. Testers are needed across ARM, Cloud, Server, and Workstation environments, with a specific focus on verifying KDE 6.8.1 bug fixes, encrypted Stratis installs, and GNOME secrets management. Additional testing opportunities include evaluating the new global search on the Forgejo testing instance, participating in the Kernel 7.3 test week, verifying WebKitGTK security updates for EPEL, or trying out the CryptPad CommuniShift instance and the pi-coding-agent local AI tool.

Contributors with strong writing, design, and communication skills can jump into several documentation and feedback initiatives. The Docs team is looking for writers to draft release notes for Libical4, IBus 1.5.35, and Fontconfig 2.18, while the Server team needs help drafting Ansible support guidelines. Reviewers can provide valuable feedback on the drafted "What's New in Fedora Workstation" Magazine article, the OpenShell usage guide, and the COPR documentation updates regarding unapproved codecs. Community members are also encouraged to participate in the Atomic Fusion retrospective, add their names to the FOSSASIA 2027 representation list, or help the Design team rebuild by creating event badges.

For those familiar with Fedora packaging standards, there is a high demand for package reviews, maintenance, and mentorship. Active contributors can guide newcomers—such as a new member seeking a sponsor for sysadmin tooling—or participate in package review swaps to help push items like podman-desktop into Rawhide (Ref) alongside the new AI linter sqlfluff. Maintainers can support the broader ecosystem by identifying old Ruby packages for retirement, submitting outstanding updates before the EPEL 10.2 retirement, reviewing the proposed removal of DNF4, or submitting PRs for the starting base image package set.

Contributors with coding, debugging, or system administration skills have several critical engineering challenges to tackle. Newcomers can get involved by upgrading Node.js modules for the website repositories or by following the Infrastructure Join Guide. More experienced engineers are needed to resolve intermittent IPA credential errors on Fedora accounts, add metrics to Zabbix monitoring, debug the Chromium out-of-memory build error, or assist the CoreOS team in testing an ext4 corruption workaround. Rust developers are specifically sought to patch complex cryptography dependencies for routinator and to navigate the impending zstd crate transition.

Across the Fedora ecosystem, the primary focus this week was the final preparation for the Fedora 45 release, which saw a NO-GO decision push its target launch to November 3 due to critical blocker bugs involving eMudhra certificates and Stratis encrypted pools. Simultaneously, a major cross-team effort is driving the "Atomic Fusion" Bootable Image Unification initiative, with groups like Atomic, CoreOS, IoT, and Hummingbird actively drafting Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) and migrating workflows to the new Forgejo platform. Security and maintenance also dominated the technical SIGs, particularly within the Rust, EPEL, and CoreOS teams, who rushed to patch vulnerabilities related to the eMudhra CA compromise. Finally, community and leadership groups are already looking ahead to the project's broader future, laying the groundwork for FOSDEM 2027 planning and drafting unified themes for the upcoming Flock 2027 Call for Proposals.

Announcements

Fedora 45's release is slightly delayed, as outstanding blocker bugs resulted in a NO-GO decision during the October 22 Go/No-Go meeting, pushing the target release date to November 3. When it does arrive, Fedora 45 will introduce a major technical shift by modernizing the virtual console with kmscon, moving away from the legacy kernel fbcon driver to a userspace utility for better font and keyboard layout management. Behind the scenes, package maintainers will be pleased to hear that s390x build infrastructure is receiving much-needed performance improvements, thanks to memory and CPU adjustments made in collaboration with IBM. Once the dust settles on the final release, the global community is invited to celebrate at the Fedora Linux 45 Virtual Release Party scheduled for October 30.

The latest Fedora Podcast (Episode 062) dives into the technical details of Fedora Hummingbird Linux—a bootable container image built on an RPM channel—and the engineering team is actively soliciting real-world use cases from listeners. This request for engagement comes on the heels of the highly positive Q3 2026 Fedora Podcast Report, which highlights sustained evergreen growth, over 14,000 YouTube subscribers, and a strong audience preference for technical, contributor-focused content.

Council

The Fedora Council met this week to discuss themes for the Flock 2027 Call for Proposals (CfP) and evaluate a request to extend the Docs initiative. For Flock 2027, the Council is drafting themes structured around the "Four Foundations" to encourage interactive discussions, panels, and collaborative sessions. Regarding the Docs team, while the formal initiative framework has been stood down, the Council acknowledged the critical need to deeply integrate Docs into Fedora's standard processes and pledged to explore alternative ways to provide support and visibility.

On the forums, discussions continued regarding the "Atomic Fusion" Bootable Image Unification efforts. Agendas were published to address Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), Konflux integration, tenant setup, and the migration of base image work to Forgejo. Reminders were also shared for the Fedora 45 Final go/no-go meeting and the upcoming F45 release party.

Decisions

• The Council agreed to draft Flock 2027 Call for Proposals themes based on recent ticket feedback, aiming for an initial draft by the end of October to share with Mindshare and FESCo for input.
• The Council agreed to move the discussion about supporting the Fedora Docs team to the relevant ticket, exploring how to help them integrate with project processes outside of the deprecated initiative framework.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are encouraged to review and provide suggestions on the proposed Flock 2027 CfP themes via the relevant ticket (#578).
• The Docs team is seeking community and SIG engagement to deeply embed documentation into Fedora's ecosystem. SIGs are encouraged to participate in the "docs captains" program by designating a person to work with the Docs team to create and maintain relevant guides, as well as ensure release notes are completed during the change process.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held a meeting and processed multiple tickets, primarily focusing on system-wide changes, Bugzilla replacements, and infrastructure performance. The committee officially approved system-wide changes for the Crystal programming language and Libical4, and granted a FastTrack update exception for gedit 51.0 in Fedora 45.

Discussions continued around the future of Fedora's issue tracking system and the potential transition away from Red Hat Bugzilla, with planning meetings rescheduled for November. FESCo also reviewed Koji architecture performance metrics for non-x86 builds, discussing potential thresholds to prevent bottlenecking the build system.

Decisions

• Approved the Change: Crystal Language proposal.
• Approved the Change: Libical4 proposal.
• Approved the Incompatible update exception for gedit and libgedit-* 51 for F45 as a FastTrack exception.
• Resolved the Non-responsive maintainer: lkundrak ticket by granting co-maintainerships and orphaning the remaining packages.
• Closed Would the 2FA for provenpackagers change be a good session for F45 release party? as the topic was deemed too invisible to the general audience.
• Rescheduled the FRCL Bugzilla Replacement meeting to November 11th, with a possible follow-up on November 18th.

Contribution opportunities

• Fedora packagers are invited to help with the Stage 1 Package Reviews for the new Crystal Language toolchain and tooling (crystal-rpm-macros, cr2rpm, vim-crystal, crystal-lang, and shards). The requester is open to doing review swaps.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee focused on establishing packaging guidelines for the Crystal programming language and updating system CryptoPolicies. Following FESCo's approval of the System-Wide Change for Crystal in Fedora 46, contributors have readied the draft packaging guidelines for final committee review, supported by successful Copr test builds and several submitted Stage 1 package reviews.

Additionally, a pull request was submitted to align the aws-lc CryptoPolicies exception with a recent FESCo decision. The proposed change clarifies the guideline text to ensure that using aws-lc-rs and aws-lc-sys for low-level cryptography and enabling TLS functionality via Rustls is explicitly permitted.

Decisions

• FESCo formally approved the System-Wide Change Proposal for integrating the Crystal programming language in Fedora 46 (FESCo Ticket #3690).
• FESCo approved an exception allowing the use of aws-lc-sys and aws-lc-rs for low-level cryptography and TLS functionality via Rustls, which the committee is currently documenting in the guidelines (FESCo Ticket #3679).

Contribution opportunities

• The committee is requested to perform a final review and merge of the Crystal Packaging Guidelines PR #1568.
• Contributors are invited to review and provide corrections on the proposed text alignment for the aws-lc CryptoPolicies exception.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

Mindshare finalized expense reimbursements and event reports for several recent gatherings, including Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026, IndiaFOSS 2026, and LinuxDays 2026 in Prague. Governance restructuring is also a major focus this week, as the committee assesses which community subprojects should fill newly vacant representative seats.

In broader community news, contributors engaged in a detailed forum discussion regarding the ethical, legal, and operational trade-offs of integrating generative AI models into Fedora workflows. The conversation highlighted the tension between hardware-efficient open-weight models (like Nemotron) and strict adherence to Free Software principles (like Olmo), alongside potential EU AI Act liabilities if the project provides centralized inference services.

Decisions

• The CommOps team has officially resigned their charter seat on the Mindshare Committee due to an inability to find a successor. The committee is formally accepting this resignation and looking to reallocate the seat to other active groups (Ticket #154).
• A new US event box was ordered and will be deployed at the upcoming Texas Linux Fest, with the older, heavier box being donated to the event's organizers (Ticket #155).

Contribution opportunities

• Subprojects without dedicated representation—such as the Documentation, AI, or Moderation teams—have an open opportunity to step up and claim the newly vacant representative seats on the Mindshare Committee (Ticket #154).
• European ambassadors who are familiar with the EU event box (typically handled at FOSDEM) are asked to provide information on its current contents and suggest potential uses for the retiring case (Ticket #155).
• Mindshare committee members are urgently requested to review and curate a $150 swag request for the Hack Club Haven Spokane high school game jam before its mid-November deadline (Ticket #157).

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Fedora Join

This week, the Fedora Join group focused on refining their onboarding processes and finalizing their platform migration. The team successfully merged a rewritten onboarding issue template (issue #348) and updated it to automatically tag team members on new welcome tickets (issue #353). Ongoing efforts include identifying missing components for the Forgejo migration and coordinating the "Beginners Guide" brochure update.

Additionally, the group welcomed a new contributor, Blu3 (Usman), who is studying computer engineering and building a PipeWire-based audio daemon. They are interested in contributing to Workstation Quality Assurance, packaging, and IoT.

Decisions

• A new issue label (S: User contributes upstream) was created to accurately track newcomers who ultimately decide to contribute directly to upstream projects instead of Fedora, acknowledging this as a positive outcome for the broader open-source community (issue #350).
• The Welcome to Fedora issue template was updated to automatically tag @join/Members and @join/Owners to ensure the team is immediately notified of new contributor tickets (issue #353).
• The team reviewed and merged a rewrite of the new contributor welcome text to ensure an authentic, human-reviewed onboarding experience, closing out the task (issue #348).

Contribution opportunities

• Matrix Bot Assistance: The team needs help locating the implementation of the old !welcome Zodbot command to finalize their migration to Forgejo. Anyone familiar with Fedora's matrix-bot playbooks or repositories is encouraged to help on issue #319.
• Brochure Redesign: There is an ongoing effort to update "A Beginners Guide to Joining Fedora" (last revised in 2018). Contributors interested in revising the content or assisting with the design can join the discussion in issue #316.
• Welcome a Newcomer: A new community member, Blu3 (Usman), introduced themselves on the mailing list and is looking for pointers to get started with Quality (Workstation testing), packaging, and IoT.

Learn more about the Fedora Join team.

Ambassadors

Planning for FOSDEM 2027 is officially moving forward, with a formal call for participation now open to the community. Applications for a Fedora stand and the Distributions DevRoom have been successfully submitted for the January event in Brussels, co-owned by Justin Wheeler and Daniel Mellado.

Additionally, a shared hotel block for Fedora and CentOS contributors is being organized at the DoubleTree by Hilton Brussels City. Community members interested in attending are encouraged to review the available assistance and stay connected for updates on the FOSDEM 2027 Wiki.

Contribution opportunities

The Ambassadors are looking for contributors to help support Fedora's presence at FOSDEM 2027. You can get involved by replying on the mailing list or the Fedora Discussion topic. Opportunities include:

• Speaking at CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, or a DevRoom.
• Volunteering at the Fedora stand.
• Volunteering in the Distributions DevRoom to help manage speakers, cameras, and room access.
• Applying for travel and hotel assistance, or joining the negotiated contributor hotel block.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation/GNOME group focused on preparations for the Fedora 45 release and potential desktop feature improvements. The Working Group published the agenda for their October 20 meeting, highlighting topics such as Fedora 45 blockers, AppStream data automation, DNF 5 updating without wheel privileges, and the inclusion of AI tools like Newelle. Additionally, Fedora QA announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting to evaluate remaining issues before the final release.

In broader desktop news, a community member shared a proposed modern implementation for restoring Google Drive integration in GNOME. Instructions are available for Fedora 43 and 44, and user feedback is highly requested to help get the feature upstreamed.

Contribution opportunities

• Test the new Google Drive integration: A proposed implementation to restore Google Drive integration in GNOME is available for testing via Copr on Fedora 44 or by building from source on Fedora 43. The developer is actively seeking community feedback (even just "it works great") to assist with upstreaming the changes.
• Vote on Fedora 45 Blocker Bugs: Community members are encouraged to review and vote on proposed blocker and freeze exception bugs ahead of the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting using the blockerbugs app.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group focused heavily on preparing for Fedora 45 and the upcoming Plasma 6.8 release. Significant packaging work is underway, including rebuilding several packages due to a libplasma soname bump, addressing FTBFS (fails to build from source) issues, and drafting the Fedora 45 release magazine article. Additionally, a major milestone was reached as the group announced the complete retirement of Plasma X11, removing associated packages for Plasma 6.8.

Meanwhile, users were warned about a severe compatibility bug with KeepassXC on Wayland, and QA preparations for the Fedora 45 final release are actively calling for community participation in blocker bug reviews.

Decisions

• The complete retirement of Plasma X11 has been enacted for Plasma 6.8, resulting in the removal of packages such as kwin-x11 and plasma-workspace-x11 (Ticket #733).
• KDE Plasma users are strongly advised to avoid using the Wayland auto-type feature in KeepassXC 2.8.0, as it currently breaks keyboard input due to an ongoing KDE bug (Forum Discussion).
• The kcm_wacomtablet and kgamma packages will no longer receive updates starting in Plasma 6.8 (Ticket #727).
• The upcoming Fedora 45 Magazine article for KDE will primarily highlight Plasma 6.7 features, alongside a brief mention of Plasma 6.8 (Ticket #725).

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are asked to review the current draft of the "What's New in Fedora KDE" magazine article and suggest any Fedora-specific updates that should be included alongside the Plasma feature list (Ticket #725).
• QA testers and community members are encouraged to vote on proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the blockerbugs app to help streamline the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting (Mailing List Thread).

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server Working Group reviewed Fedora 45 Release Candidate (RC) testing, confirming that the longstanding KVM image issue is resolved in RC 1.2. The group also addressed the growing size of distribution images and continued coordinating the setup of test environments for the Ansible support project.

On the mailing list, the agenda for the October 21 meeting was circulated, and Adam Williamson announced the F45 Blocker Review meeting scheduled for October 26. Members were also reminded of a temporary one-hour meeting time shift due to daylight saving time differences.

Decisions

• The working group accepted bumping the size limit of the aarch64 netinstall image from 1.4G to 1.5G following upstream recommendations.
• Confirmed that the KVM image / initial-setup issue is resolved in Fedora 45 RC 1.2.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and vote on proposed Fedora 45 blockers and freeze exceptions ahead of the F45 Blocker Review Meeting.
• Participate in idempotency testing for the Server Ansible support project. A Fedora 45 VM is currently being set up for test environments. (Meeting log)

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Fedora Infrastructure team managed several intermittent service disruptions, including FAS/IPA login issues where users received "bad credentials" errors but were able to log in after multiple attempts. The team also mitigated DDOS attacks affecting fedorapeople.org and Koji s390x builders, deployed two new NA proxies to handle high connection loads, and quickly addressed spam waves on the mailing lists. Additionally, the staging instance of Fedora Docs was successfully transitioned to build from the new docs/site-builder repository on the staging Forge.

In other news, a community member is developing a link-checking tool for Fedora Docs, which sparked discussions about prioritizing the triage of legacy Wiki content rather than attempting to maintain it. The team is also evaluating solutions for a captive portal detection issue affecting KDE Plasma users, caused by the fedoraproject.org domain being on the HSTS preload list. Finally, a new Digital Still Photography Device SIG requested infrastructure resources.

Decisions

• The mirrors.wcupa.edu EPEL mirror was temporarily removed from the mirror list until its incomplete TLS chain issue is resolved. (Issue #13632)
• The staging instance of Fedora Docs is now configured to build from the new docs/site-builder repository on the staging Forge. (Issue #13624)
• A new FAS group, nightdrive, was created to own a Copr group project. (Issue #13630)

Contribution opportunities

• The team is looking for a volunteer to chair the Infrastructure meeting on November 5th. (Meeting log)
• Upstream pull requests are encouraged to improve the verbosity and output format of ai-code-review used for LLM code reviews on Forgejo. (Forum post)
• Contributors are needed to create an Ansible playbook to automate the creation of tracking groups. (Issue #13622)
• New contributors interested in joining the Infrastructure team can get started by reading the join guide and apprentice documentation.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, the Release Engineering team focused heavily on preparing for the upcoming release, successfully generating the first Fedora 45 Release Candidates (including RC2) after executing necessary stable pushes. Several blocker review meetings were held to evaluate critical bugs, including those affecting desktop environments and installation processes. In addition to routine maintenance tasks like processing package unretirement requests and resolving stuck Koji builders, the team completed stable pushes for Fedora 43 and 44 to deliver important updates for PHP and ca-certificates.

The community also engaged in forward-looking infrastructure discussions. Notably, there was a proposal to test and potentially integrate a highly optimized, Rust-based alternative to createrepo_c called kiritan. Furthermore, preparations have begun for implementing Post-Quantum Cryptography OpenPGP Signatures for Fedora 48, with tickets opened to coordinate staging and deployment.

Decisions

• Accepted Bug 2480694 (Plasma Discover installing outdated native RPM packages) as a Fedora 45 Final Blocker (Review Meeting).
• Accepted Bug 2544626 (aarch Server DVD image install failing on RPi4 without network) and Bug 2537105 (initial-setup occasionally missing on serial console) as Fedora 45 Final Blockers (Review Meeting).
• Accepted Fedora 45 Final Freeze Exceptions for multiple packages, including gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel upgrades, flare-im CVE mitigation, and mkvtoolnix buffer overflow mitigation.
• Rejected Bug 2501223 (Workstation Live images occasionally booting to GDM instead of the desktop) as a blocker, but accepted it as a Freeze Exception to improve the user experience.
• Approved the creation of Fedora 45 Final Release Candidates (RC1 and RC2) after untagging prior builds and fulfilling requisite stable pushes (Ticket 13557).
• Processed and approved package unretirements for Rawhide and Fedora 45, including python3-blessings, urdfdom, fcl, python-yaspin, retext, python-markups, and bup.

Contribution opportunities

• The author of subatomic and kiritan (a faster, memory-efficient, Rust-based alternative to createrepo_c) is seeking feedback and invites collaboration with Fedora to test and potentially integrate these tools into Fedora's infrastructure (Join the discussion).
• Feedback and review are requested for the Fedora 48 Change Proposal: Post-Quantum Cryptography OpenPGP Signatures, particularly regarding its impact on release engineering and testing in the stage environment before the planned key generation in early 2027.
• Community members are invited to participate and vote in the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meetings to help evaluate remaining bugs against release criteria.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team focused heavily on evaluating Fedora 45 Release Candidate 1.2 for the Final release. During the F45 Final Go/No-Go meeting, the team declared the release a NO-GO due to outstanding blockers, particularly related to eMudhra certificates and Stratis encrypted pools. Consequently, the F45 Final release date has been pushed to target date #2 (November 3, 2026).

In addition to release management and blocker review meetings, QE worked on release validation and expanded openQA testing with Turkish and Arabic webUI install tests. The community also coordinated ongoing and upcoming Test Days, including testing for GRUB EFI for confidential computing, Podman Conmon-v3, and the upcoming Kernel 7.3 release.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 Final was declared NO-GO and delayed to November 3, 2026, pending the resolution of outstanding blockers.
• Bug 2556376 regarding eMudhra certificates was considered not sufficiently addressed in RC2, requiring an RC3 release.
• Bug 2543511 (Stratis encrypted pool fails to boot) was accepted as a Final Blocker.
• Bug 2545809 (no network interface via ip= on s390x) and Bug 2552449 (Stratis root drops to emergency mode after unanswered prompt) were rejected as blockers.
• Bug 2480694 (Plasma Discover installs outdated native packages) was accepted as a Final Blocker during the Blocker Review Meeting.
• Freeze exception Bug 2534994 (gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel-74) was accepted to ensure smooth system upgrades.

Contribution opportunities

• Help test the proposed restoration of Google Drive integration in GNOME by enabling the Copr repository and providing feedback on Discourse.
• Participate in the upcoming Kernel 7.3 Test Week scheduled for November 1–7 to test the kernel rebase on existing systems or via USB images.
• Share your thoughts on whether CI scratch-builds should be skipped if there is no NVR bump.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

This week, the Websites and Apps team resolved a caching issue on the Fedora CoreOS download page. By implementing stricter cache-control headers, the team ensured that new releases are displayed correctly to users without delay, which was discussed in the Fedora Websites Matrix room. The team also discussed a community suggestion to add an announcements section to the main Fedora homepage, prompting conversations about better visibility for the Fedora Start page and potential collaborations with the Design team. Additionally, an inquiry was raised about the Nuxt-based website's potential vulnerability to the Node2Shell exploit (CVE-2026-111497).

On the forums, contributors discussed the current status of the Fedora Wiki, clarifying that while it is no longer used for actively maintained documentation, it remains crucial for change proposals, event organization (such as FOSDEM 2027), and historical reference. In a separate thread, feedback regarding the verbosity of LLM code reviews on Forgejo was addressed by pointing contributors to the upstream ai-code-review tool.

Decisions

• Implemented a strict Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate header to fix caching issues on the Fedora CoreOS download page, ensuring users always see the latest release data (Matrix Chat).

Contribution opportunities

• Website Footer Updates: Help is requested to add a link to the fedoraproject.org/start page under the "Connections -> News & Publications" section of the website footer. (Matrix Chat)
• Homepage Redesign Collaboration: Community members interested in adding an announcements section to the main Fedora website are encouraged to coordinate with the Design team to pitch and implement the layout changes. (Matrix Chat)
• Improve LLM Code Review Output: Contributors annoyed by the verbosity of Forgejo's AI code reviews can submit pull requests to the upstream ai-code-review tool to modify the default output format or add configuration options. (Forum Thread)

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Fedora Design team canceled their weekly meeting due to a scheduling conflict with "We Are Red Hat Week." Meanwhile, a developer from the Anaconda project requested co-maintainer access to the design packages repository to help manage branding CSS updates for the new WebUI. They also submitted a pull request adding a Makefile target for tarball creation and plan to tag the main branch for the 46.0.0 release. The team plans to meet to discuss repository maintainership topics moving forward.

Decisions

• The weekly design team meeting was canceled for the week.
• Team members agreed to schedule a meeting to discuss co-maintainership of the design packages repository.

Contribution opportunities

• The Call for Papers for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2027 is open for those interested in submitting a proposal.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Docs team had an active week focused on consolidating and standardizing their documentation pipeline, discussing site architecture improvements, and preparing for the upcoming Fedora 45 release. Major technical themes included plans to unify preview and production builds into a single container image to streamline local authoring, standardizing on Podman for local builds, and exploring Arm64 architecture support to aid contributors using Apple Silicon or other AArch64 hardware. Discussions also progressed on adopting new CI tooling to identify broken anchor links across the documentation site.

Administratively, the team discussed their representation on the Mindshare Committee and reviewed their ticketing strategy, ultimately deciding that compartmentalizing issues into repository-specific trackers is preferable to a monolithic ticket queue. Several Fedora 45 release notes were merged, including documentation for new LibreOffice dictionaries and Emacs 31, while team members noted that the Fedora 45 release date has slipped to at least October 27, though the Release Party date remains firm.

Decisions

• The team agreed to transition the repository branch structure by renaming the prod branch to main across repositories, and confirmed that documentation content will be licensed under CC BY-SA-4.0 (Issue #19).
• The production build repository will be renamed to site-builder to better communicate its scope and purpose to contributors (Issue #20).
• To prevent contributor burnout and "ticket hell," the team decided to keep issue tracking distributed across specific repository issue trackers rather than routing all tasks into a single ticket queue (Meeting).
• The "This Week in Fedora" (TWIF) bot will generate summaries for the broader community by monitoring the docs organization's issue trackers, rather than tracking the team's Matrix chat channel directly (Issue #63).

Contribution opportunities

• Mindshare Committee Seat: The Mindshare Committee is considering dynamically allocating team seats. The Docs team is asking members to comment with any clarifying questions regarding this potential role (Meeting, Issue #154).
• Update "Contributing to Quick Docs": First-time contributors are invited to help refactor the Quick Docs contribution guide to prioritize local authoring setups. Mentorship is available from @jflory7, @pboy, or @pbokoc (Issue #13).
• Write Release Notes: Writers are needed to draft release notes for upcoming Fedora 45 changes, such as IBus 1.5.35 and Fontconfig 2.18.
• Provide CI Tooling Feedback: The team is requesting feedback on adopting bruce, a newly developed tool that crawls documentation for broken links and anchors, into the CI pipeline for nightly reports (Issue #69).

Learn more about the Docs team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL team focused heavily on package maintenance and addressing critical security vulnerabilities. Notably, important updates for uv (0.13.x) and ruff (0.17.x) have been sent to testing for the EPEL10 leading branch to address several Rust security advisories and the eMudhra intermediate CA compromise. Additionally, contributors are evaluating a potential upgrade of ffmpeg to resolve a high-severity Heap-buffer-overflow vulnerability and opened pull requests to patch djvulibre (CVE-2025-53367) across multiple EPEL branches.

The team is also tracking efforts to bring incus 7.0.0 and mailman3 to EPEL10, along with preparing for the EPEL 10.2 retirement process. Furthermore, new documentation regarding EPEL build tagging was officially completed and published.

Decisions

• Updates for uv and ruff will be pushed to stable in the EPEL10 leading branch after at least one week in testing, bringing security fixes and minor breaking changes.
• To address CVE-2025-59734, the team decided to first create a test case for ffmpeg to confirm if version 7.1.5 is genuinely vulnerable before undertaking an incompatible rebase to version 9.0.
• The committee unanimously agreed to cancel the November 4th EPEL meeting due to members traveling for a CentOS Board meeting.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to maintain mailman3 packages in EPEL10 to ease the Release Engineering workload as Mailman is migrated to RHEL10 infrastructure.
• Contributors can assist in bringing the incus package (version 7.0.0 LTS) into EPEL 10; tracking bugs for dependencies raft and cowsql have already been opened.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG held a meeting to discuss the status of RISC-V integration and boot.iso image building. For RISC-V, riscv-koji is now configured for ELN with the RVA23 baseline defined. However, a glibc build failure occurred because valgrind does not support RVA23, which requires addressing %valgrind_arches before proceeding further. Additionally, work is ongoing to resolve technicalities with creating a boot.iso using image-builder.

Due to upcoming contributor absences, the group evaluated their meeting schedule and chose to skip the following week, reconvening in early November.

Decisions

• The October 27th meeting is cancelled; the next meeting is scheduled for November 3rd at 12:00 EST.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group made significant progress on the Bootable Image Unification initiative, successfully closing out their migration from GitLab to the new Fedora Forgejo under the "Atomic" organization. Discussions heavily focused on setting up new build pipelines, finalizing Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) for tier systems, and establishing a bootable seed image to serve as a foundational testing layer across different architectures.

Additionally, community members raised technical questions regarding rpm-ostree stable commits temporarily bundling packages from updates-testing before they hit stable repositories. A separate packaging request for crun-krun resulted in the recommendation to utilize system extensions (sysexts) to maintain the current policy of keeping virtualization software out of the core system.

Decisions

• The new default seed image will be bootable (including both kernel and bootloader) and will initially feature Fedora default bootloaders across various architectures (x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x).
• The group decided to timebox an attempt to build the seed image without rpm-ostree; if unsuccessful, they will document the shortcomings and address them later.
• Alternative seed images for other bootloaders will be created and tested only once community members are ready to use and layer on top of them.
• Virtualization software such as crun-krun will be kept out of the core system for now, with system extensions (sysexts) established as the preferred delivery method.
• The initiative has officially completed its repository migration to Forgejo.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors interested in alternative bootloaders (like aboot or systemd-boot) are needed to help drive the creation and testing of alternative seed images.
• Community members are encouraged to review and participate in the ongoing Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) regarding the unified base image architecture.
• Developers interested in adding crun-krun for container management isolation are invited to contribute to creating a Fedora system extension (sysext).

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS group held a community meeting to review the Fedora 45 Release Schedule, verifying readiness for the final target date. They also prepared agendas for the Bootable Image Unification ("Atomic Fusion") meetings and published the weekly newsletter to highlight recent community contributions.

On the development side, several significant updates were processed on the tracker. The team enabled aarch64 support for kubevirt image builds and addressed an upstream LVFS CDN outage affecting CI. Furthermore, they made progress investigating a kernel file corruption issue on ext4 upgrades, released fixes for a ppc64le NETLINK_AUDIT rootless container bug, and updated Konflux to handle override lockfiles directly.

Decisions

• Cut fast-tracked ad-hoc releases across all streams to update ca-certificates in response to the eMudhra intermediate certificate compromise (also discussed in the meeting).
• Enable and publish aarch64 kubevirt image builds moving forward, allowing users building or consuming aarch64 images to get kubevirt artifacts matching existing x86_64 coverage.
• Limit automated LLM report data collection to official meeting logs and GitHub repositories due to privacy and accuracy concerns, avoiding raw chat conversations.
• Switch Konflux-driven streams to a Jenkins poll-based import model to simplify change management and mirror the architecture of the RHCOS pipeline.

Contribution opportunities

• A developer has requested testing for a temporary mount option workaround (nodioread_nolock) to prevent ext4 kernel file corruption during FCOS upgrades.
• The Fedora CoreOS newsletter project has been moved to a new repository under the CoreOS organization, and contributors are invited to submit pull requests to help improve it.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

This week, the Fedora IoT group focused heavily on the ongoing Bootable Image Unification ("Atomic Fusion") efforts and final release preparations. Contributors discussed the agendas for the bootable image unification meetings and subsequent follow-ups, prioritizing Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), migrating base image work from GitLab to Forgejo, and configuring Konflux integrations. The group is actively exploring how a tiered image system will function, generally leaning toward utilizing lower-tier images as base layers in subsequent builds.

On the engineering front, the Fedora 45 IoT Final candidate compose was successfully created and published for testing. Additionally, contributors are engaged in a technical evaluation regarding device-specific Fedora ARM images. There is an active debate on the trade-offs of shipping pre-built, device-specific images for popular hardware like the Raspberry Pi or AI SOM devices at the build stage, versus maintaining the current user-side arm-image-installer workflow to avoid the overhead of maintaining hundreds of unique image variants.

Decisions

• The Fedora 45 IoT Final candidate compose (Fedora-IoT-45-20261019.1) has been officially generated and published, pulling in all approved blockers and freeze exceptions for the upcoming release.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and provide feedback on the proposed Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) and tenant configurations for the Bootable Image Unification (Atomic Fusion) initiative.
• Share your hardware use cases and insights in the ongoing evaluation of device-specific Fedora ARM images to help the team balance between user-side deployment scripts and pre-built images for popular edge devices.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

Adam Williamson announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, scheduled for October 26, 2026, at 16:00 UTC on Matrix. The team will be evaluating one proposed blocker and two proposed freeze exceptions for the Final release to determine if they violate any release criteria.

Contribution opportunities

• Review proposed and accepted blockers for Fedora 45 ahead of time using the blockerbugs app.
• Help reduce meeting times by voting asynchronously on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions on Pagure.
• Attend the Blocker Review meeting on Matrix using your FAS account.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Hummingbird

The Hummingbird group continued discussions regarding the bootable image unification effort (also known as "Atomic Fusion"). During the October 22 meeting, the agenda focused on Architectural Decision Record (ADR) updates, the ongoing migration of base image work from GitLab to Forgejo, seed work proposals, and setting up Konflux integration for service accounts.

Additionally, in a follow-up to the October 8 meeting, participants clarified the proposed image tiering system. While the exact mechanisms are still being formalized in ADRs, it was noted that lower-tier images will likely be used as the base container (FROM) for subsequent builds by next-tier owners.

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are invited to propose additional discussion topics and contribute to Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) for the ongoing Bootable Image Unification meetings.

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

Kernel

The Kernel group saw activity across two main mailing-list discussions this week. Justin Forbes announced the regular rebase of the kernel-ark os-build branch, a process that aligns with every upstream release to ensure carried patches remain up to date, though it requires outstanding merge requests to be rebased.

Additionally, Michel Lind provided an update on the RFC to split perf out of the kernel packaging. Lind noted that while the split might not drastically affect Rawhide, it would allow stable releases to receive perf updates faster and prevent perf dependencies from polluting the kernel build. Lind plans to follow up with the CentOS/RHEL teams to ensure packaging does not diverge.

Decisions

• The kernel-ark os-build branch has been rebased to align with the latest upstream release, which invalidates outstanding merge requests and requires contributors to rebase them.

Learn more about the Kernel team.

AI

The AI group had a productive week centered on infrastructure expansion, preparing for the Fedora 45 release, and debating the integration of AI models in the distribution. Community CI hardware arrived and is currently being installed. Meanwhile, packaging and integration efforts advanced with the addition of agentic AI tools like openclaw and pi-coding-agent into Fedora, tying into existing ollama or llama-cpp packages. Additionally, ROCm was updated to version 7.2 in preparation for future releases, and a fix for ROCm's __noinline__ problem was backported to F44.

The SIG also engaged in a broader philosophical and technical discussion regarding which LLM models align best with Fedora's Free Software foundations. Members weighed the performance of open-weight models against licensing transparency, environmental impact, and potential regulatory liabilities (like the EU AI Act) when providing centralized inference infrastructure. The group is exploring model-agnostic harnesses to allow shared infrastructure experimentation without locking the community into a specific, potentially non-compliant model. Finally, the AI-ML SIG was successfully added to the Fedora Engineering Teams documentation page.

Decisions

• The AI-ML SIG was added to the Engineering Teams documentation page to improve discoverability for the broader community.
• The SIG will present a session at the Fedora 45 Release Party on October 30th to showcase recent work, including the Fedora Agent Skills Library, new agentic AI tools, and ROCm 7.2 updates.

Contribution opportunities

• Help define the 'Definition of Done' for the new AI Community CI system. Community members who have written tests for CI or who manage the testing farm are encouraged to contribute requirements.
• Test the new F44 and F45 AI/ML builds on the ROCm packagers COPR and provide feedback in the Matrix room. Feedback is especially welcome for use cases involving agentic AI development on AMD GPUs using Rawhide.

Learn more about the AI team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group successfully generated and is actively testing the Fedora 45 final images, including custom "Omni" kernel builds (v7.3) that support newer hardware like the Milk-V Titan and K3. Concurrently, progress continues on the Fedora ELN bootstrap and Fedora 46 image generation. In community news, the RISC-V devroom has been accepted for FOSDEM 2027 as a half-day track.

Additionally, the team is heavily focused on debugging hardware-specific build issues that impact broader Linux ecosystems. This includes cross-distribution collaboration with Debian developers to troubleshoot a GCC build failure on K3 caused by vector register state corruption, as well as investigating glibc crashes on Titan that reliably trigger on certain packages.

Decisions

• Drop the StarFive VisionFive 2 (VF2) PCIe patch from the kernel due to unresolved NVMe I/O timeouts under heavy load.
• Disable Valgrind for Fedora ELN builds, as the current implementation does not yet support the RVA23 instruction set profile.
• Ship the Fedora 45 final images using the 7.3 kernel, including 'Omni' variants containing necessary workarounds for newer RISC-V boards.

Contribution opportunities

• Test the newly generated Fedora 45 final images (Server, Cloud, and Container variants) on physical RISC-V hardware and report boot or usability issues.
• Assist in debugging glibc pthread_mutex_cond_lock crashes on Titan hardware, which are consistently causing build failures for packages like opam and python-astropy.
• Help test upstream kernel patches (such as vector register state RMW fixes) or configuration workarounds to resolve the GCC build failures on K3.
• Investigate and patch older FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) packages that are currently blocking the Fedora 46 repoclosure.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Go

The Go SIG met this week to troubleshoot a build failure on ppc64le architectures caused by a PIE issue involving the golang-x-sys package. The issue has caused cascading failures in downstream projects, including rootlesskit, chezmoi, and any package relying on fatih/color. A repository query revealed that approximately 231 packages bundling golang-x-sys on ppc64le could be impacted.

During the meeting, participants discussed a failed pull request and a COPR build SIGSEGV error. The group concluded that fixing the root cause directly within the golang-x-sys package should safely resolve the downstream breaks.

Decisions

• It was decided that @alexsaezm will fix the x/sys package for ppc64le to address the downstream breaks and notify the SIG once resolved (see meeting logs).

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused entirely on routine maintenance and package updates, generating 17 mailing-list posts. Contributors Jitka Plesnikova and Michal Josef Špaček submitted and successfully merged a series of pull requests to keep the ecosystem secure and up to date.

Notable activities included creating an EPEL10 version for cpanspec and updating several core Perl packages. The bumps included version updates for perl-DBI, perl-URI, perl-DBD-MySQL, perl-Mozilla-CA, perl-Dist-Zilla, and perl-XML-Twig.

Decisions

• Created and merged the EPEL10 version of the cpanspec package.
• Merged the 20261020 version bump for perl-Mozilla-CA, ensuring root certificates are up to date.
• Merged version 1.656 for perl-DBI, resolving bug rhbz#2554771.
• Merged version 5.40 updates for perl-URI.
• Merged version 5.014 updates for perl-DBD-MySQL.
• Merged version 6.040 updates for perl-Dist-Zilla.
• Merged version 3.55 updates for perl-XML-Twig.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Ruby

The Ruby group is actively testing the newly started Ruby 4.1 development. Initial ecosystem rebuilds against the C API have uncovered a few issues, including a test failure in rubygem-ffi linked to an upstream Ruby bug, and build failures in older packages due to the Data_Wrap_Struct macro deprecation.

Additionally, standard libraries net/pop and net/ftp have been removed from Ruby 4.1's bundled gems. This change breaks dependencies for several major packages, including Ruby on Rails (via rubygem-mail), notmuch, and Vagrant-related packages, necessitating the creation of new standalone packages for these gems to restore ecosystem functionality (discussion).

Contribution opportunities

• A maintainer is needed to package rubygem-net-pop as a standalone gem, which is required to fix failing dependencies for Ruby on Rails and notmuch (discussion).
• Assistance is needed to package net/ftp to resolve dependency issues for Vagrant-related packages.
• Contributors can help migrate older packages that depend on the Ruby C API away from the deprecated Data_Wrap_Struct macro to the newer TypedData_Wrap_Struct (as was recently done for rubygem-eventmachine).

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Rust

A major focus this week was addressing numerous security advisories across various Rust crates, particularly concerning outdated TLS and cryptographic libraries. Contributors have been actively rebuilding and patching packages to mitigate vulnerabilities in rustls (updating to v0.23.46), webpki-roots (addressing the eMudhra CA compromise), ruzstd, zip, and faster-hex.

In conjunction with these security updates, a mailing list proposal was introduced to completely drop older, vulnerable versions of reqwest (\<0.12) and rustls (\<0.23) from the repository. This cleanup aims to remove CA bundles that are known to be broken and TLS libraries that are no longer receiving patches, which will require porting or dropping several dependent applications.

Decisions

• Updates to the zip crate to address high and critical security flaws will be deferred until the rustls and webpki package updates have stabilized to avoid conflict and capacity issues (Issue #47).
• Affected packages were rebuilt with webpki-roots 1.0.11 to mitigate the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise (Issue #46).
• Multiple packages, including rust-onefetch, helix, and stgit, were rebuilt with faster-hex v0.10.1 to address a security advisory (Issue #45).

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed to port or drop applications currently depending on outdated versions of reqwest (\<0.12) and rustls (\<0.23) to eliminate unresolved security issues (Mailing list thread).
• Contributors can assist in porting applications dependent on rustls v0.22 or v0.21 to newer, secure versions (Issue #43).
• Packages depending on basic-toml and toml v0.5 need to be updated or cleaned up, as basic-toml is now officially marked unmaintained (Issue #19).
• The mdsh package has been offered up to be orphaned or retired due to its obsolete structopt dependencies, providing an opportunity for a new maintainer to step up or for the package to be formally retired (Issue #22).
• Rebuilds will be required for applications bundled or built against outdated versions of the zip crate to address multiple security advisories once earlier updates stabilize (Issue #47).

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• Kevin Degeling suggested a change proposal to split TLS Certificate Authorities into jurisdiction-specific packages, allowing system administrators to more easily exclude untrusted CAs.
• Matt Blank shared a custom application that enables connecting to a web-authenticated Windows device from Linux via RDP.
• Gordon Messmer proposed adding upstream-release branches in Fedora dist-git to allow developers to build applications and dependencies decoupled from the distribution release, triggering a discussion about parallel-installable packages and building isolated environments.
• Panu Matilainen shared a proposed Fedora 46 change to switch the default output format of RPM from the legacy v4 to the native v6 format, detailing compatibility requirements and reassuring maintainers that most tooling will be unaffected.
• Abdallah Shehawey followed up on a packaging proposal for whatsapp-desktop, an independent desktop client, and is still seeking a package reviewer and sponsor for the source-only application.
• Bojan Smojver reported repeated compose failures caused by "too many files" limits, which were temporarily resolved after Kevin Fenzi restarted the process.
• Miroslav Suchý announced a new feature in the Packager Dashboard that alerts maintainers if their package is missing from release-monitoring.org (Anitya), prompting a quick bug fix by Sheikh Limon to handle rate limit errors during project creation.
• Christoph Junghans sought advice on unbundling test-only dependencies for stdexec (required for hpx-2.0), with Cristian Le suggesting that patching CMake to use find_package and packaging rapids-cmake would be the best approach.
• Jakub Jelen warned maintainers about upcoming automated pull requests that replace the %gpgverify macro with %openpgpverify for the Fedora 45 Sequoia transition, advising maintainers to update expired upstream keys and refresh keyrings.
• Richard W.M. Jones announced a new shim-unsigned-riscv64 package for Fedora RISC-V, seeking package review and offering to sponsor its creator.
• Other discussions included a request for a review swap of Crystal Language Stage 1 packages, feedback on splitting perf out of kernel packaging, packaging advice for a module structure change in PyMuPDF 2.0, a license change in perl-Test-Simple-1.302226, audit logging plans for an Unprivileged eBPF RBAC Daemon change proposal, an upcoming F45 Blocker Review Meeting, outcomes from the Fedora Council Bi-Weekly Agenda, and updates across the Fedora Docs Matrix chat.

Orphaning packages

• Miro Hrončok initiated a discussion on the 3dprinting mailing list about retiring slic3r since it is upstream dead, proposing to package SuperSlicer or OrcaSlicer instead.
• Benson Muite announced they have orphaned libfyaml because they no longer use it.

Package updates

• Marius Schwarz urgently requested a manual push for PHP 8.4.27-1 to fix a critical vulnerability, prompting a debate with Adam Williamson and others about prioritizing security updates versus following the standard Bodhi karma process.
• Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek warned that grpc is severely outdated, causing package conflicts and blocking F45 upgrades, which led to a broader discussion about unresponsive maintainers and failing rebuild attempts in COPR.
• Ben Beasley announced updates for uv (0.13.x) and ruff (0.17.x) across F43-F45 and EPEL10, noting that these versions fix a recent CA compromise issue and have updates policy exceptions.
• Steve Cossette informed the community that KDE Plasma 6.8 will obsolete and remove unsupported X11 components entirely, advising users to run dnf offline-upgrade to prevent system breakages.
• Jan Drögehoff gave a heads-up on the ddcutil update to 3.0.2, noting a backward-compatible soname bump that did not break dependent packages like fastfetch and powerdevil.
• Antonio Trande announced the release of python-reportlab 5.1.0 for F44+ and EPEL10, asking maintainers to verify compatibility with dependent packages.

New contributor introductions

• Dawid Wrobel introduced themselves as a KMyMoney developer looking to adopt outdated GNOME extensions and package Betterbird.

All contribution opportunities

Community members are highly encouraged to help test upcoming software and architectural changes, a crucial skill that requires no prior group membership. Testers are needed to validate the proposed restoration of Google Drive integration in GNOME and to participate in the Kernel 7.3 Test Week. You can also provide critical feedback on system-level components by evaluating alternative bootloaders for Atomic images, testing Fedora 45 final images on RISC-V hardware, and verifying ROCm AI/ML builds on AMD GPUs. Furthermore, anyone can evaluate release criteria by testing and voting on proposed Fedora 45 blocker bugs and freeze exceptions across editions like Workstation, KDE, Server, and ARM.

Developers and software packagers can jump into several active initiatives across various ecosystems. Reviewers are actively sought for the Stage 1 package reviews of the new Crystal Language toolchain—with review swaps offered—and the whatsapp-desktop application. The Rust SIG needs assistance updating dependencies like reqwest and rustls or adopting orphaned packages like mdsh, while the Ruby community is seeking maintainers for rubygem-net-pop. If you prefer coding for infrastructure and automation, pull requests are welcome to improve the output formatting of the AI code review tool on Forgejo, help is needed to fix a Matrix bot playbook migration, and volunteers are sought to write an Ansible playbook for tracking groups.

Contributors with technical writing and design skills have multiple avenues to leave their mark. The Documentation team invites first-time contributors to refactor the Quick Docs contribution guide to prioritize local authoring setups, and needs writers for upcoming Fedora 45 release notes. You can also review the current draft of the "What's New in Fedora KDE" magazine article, submit pull requests to the new CoreOS newsletter repository, or collaborate on updating the beginner's joining brochure. On the web side, the Websites and Apps team is coordinating a homepage redesign to add an announcements section and needs help updating the global site footer.

Finally, you can help shape Fedora's strategic direction and global presence through community organizing and providing architectural feedback. The Council is looking for comments on the Flock 2027 Call for Papers themes, and community members are invited to evaluate Bootable Image Unification architectural records. If you are passionate about community representation, there are open seats on the Mindshare Committee for underrepresented subprojects like AI or Moderation. Event enthusiasts can volunteer to support Fedora at FOSDEM 2027 by speaking, running the distributions devroom, or staffing the Fedora booth.

Across the Fedora ecosystem, the primary immediate focus is managing the final stages of the Fedora 45 release, which is currently in a "NO-GO" status targeting October 27, prompting groups like Release Engineering, Quality, Workstation, and Server to rapidly evaluate late-stage blocker bugs and freeze exceptions. Simultaneously, a massive structural shift is underway as the Bootable Image Unification effort concludes the Atomic Initiative, transferring ownership to the CoreOS Working Group and establishing a highly minimal atomic-seed image as the foundation for future immutable builds. In tandem with these initiatives, infrastructure modernization is a shared priority, with multiple teams actively migrating workloads from GitLab to the new Fedora Forgejo instance, adopting Konflux for continuous integration, and restructuring documentation under a unified root component. Finally, looking beyond the current final freeze, steering committees and Special Interest Groups are actively laying the groundwork for Fedora 46—including major system-wide proposals like the transition to RPM v6 and the removal of the legacy DNF4 stack—while advancing cross-architecture support for RISC-V and deploying vital language stack updates.

Announcements

Fedora 45's final release is currently a NO-GO with the next target date set for October 27, though the community is still invited to celebrate at the virtual release party scheduled for October 30. In community news, the latest Fedora Podcast breaks down the differences between Fedora Hummingbird Linux and standard container images, asking users to share their specific real-world use cases.

To avoid disruptive surprises, contributors are explicitly reminded of the scope of provenpackager privileges, with warnings against modifying packages (such as converting to %autorelease) without maintainer consent. On the technical front, Fedora 45 will modernize the virtual console by replacing fbcon with kmscon. Looking ahead, a massive wave of Fedora 46 Change Proposals has been announced: major system-wide updates include transitioning to the RPM v6 package format, the complete removal of the legacy DNF4 stack and modularity, and introducing a daemon for unprivileged eBPF access. Additional F46 proposals cover an LMDB 1.0 transition, migrating the libvirt network filter to NFTables, updating to libchewing 0.14, and standardizing Emacs package packaging with new RPM macros and dependency generators.

Council

The Council held a meeting regarding the Bootable Image Unification (Atomic Fusion) effort. Key discussions focused on Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) involving monorepos, debates over migrating legacy builds from GitLab to Forgejo, and organizing the atomic tracker backlog into structural tiers.

A major outcome of the meeting was defining the architecture for new bootable images, which will begin with an extremely minimal "seed" image meant for internal team use and as a foundation for layered products. Additionally, it was announced that the Atomic Initiative will officially shut down on October 31st, 2026, marking the successful transfer of ownership to the broader group.

Decisions

• The Atomic Initiative will officially end after Fedora 45 and will shut down on October 31st, 2026, at which point @nimbinatus will step down from the Council since ownership has been successfully transferred. (Source)
• A new atomic-seed repository was created on Forgejo (under the MIT license) to build a foundational seed image containing only a strict minimal package set: the kernel, systemd, SELinux policy, Podman, and bootc. (Source)
• The seed image will initially omit a bootloader to reduce complexity for specific automotive variants and will be tested using QEMU for direct kernel booting. Because it lacks a bootloader, it will not be exposed to general users on Fedora download pages. (Source)
• The team categorized the Atomic tracker backlog items into three new structural tiers (level one, level two, and level three). (Source)

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to review and comment on ADR-0003, which proposes using a monorepo for all configurations, continuous integration, and testing code to streamline atomic image building. (Source)

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held one meeting and handled an exceptionally high volume of system-wide and self-contained Change Proposals on the forums for Fedora 45, 46, and 47. Major topics of discussion included the retirement of DNF4 and Modularity, transitioning to the RPM v6 package format, moving the SELinux policy store to /etc/selinux, and updating various language stacks and tools.

In their meeting and ticket discussions, the committee addressed several administrative and policy items. They finalized a membership change, approved and published a policy reminder regarding the boundaries of provenpackager access, and processed the final status of incomplete changes for the upcoming Fedora 45 release. Additionally, they began determining how to safely phase out highly vulnerable NetworkManager VPN plugins without severely disrupting existing users.

Decisions

• Approved and sent a policy reminder to the community reaffirming that provenpackagers must not apply mass changes (such as converting to %autorelease or %autochangelog) without prior maintainer consent (Ticket #3687, Meeting).
• Agreed to address the removal of vulnerable NetworkManager-{vpnc,fortisslvpn} plugins by first publishing a Fedora Magazine article to warn users on how to migrate, before eventually pulling the packages from the base layer of atomic installs (Ticket #3693, Meeting).
• Processed the F45 Incomplete Changes report, officially retargeting several incomplete changes—such as "Disable Vendor Change by Default" and "Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64"—to Fedora 46 (Ticket #3682).
• Completed the non-responsive maintainer process for lkundrak, transferring heavily utilized packages (like NetworkManager and wpa_supplicant) to new volunteers and orphaning the remainder (Ticket #3681).
• Approved offboarding duffy from FESCo and onboarding maxamillion to serve the remainder of the vacant seat's term (Ticket #3689, Ticket #3695).

Contribution opportunities

• FESCo is looking for a volunteer to help write a Fedora Magazine article explaining the removal of the vulnerable NetworkManager-{vpnc,fortisslvpn} plugins and guiding users on how to migrate. (Meeting)
• Help is needed to clear out the remaining F45 Final Blocker bugs as the release approaches: F45 blocker bug list. (Meeting)
• The Fedora Council is currently brainstorming themes for Flock 2027 and is looking for community ideas and feedback: Flock to Fedora 2027 CfP Themes Brainstorming. (Meeting)

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

The Packaging Committee held a meeting this week but didn't reach a quorum, meaning no official decisions could be finalized. The primary topic of discussion centered around procedural rules for ticket votes and quorum requirements, particularly in relation to the pending "snapshot ticket."

Members debated whether ticket votes should eventually pass by majority after a certain timeframe or if they must always be resolved during a live meeting when blocking negative votes exist. The snapshot ticket remains deferred due to the lack of quorum and an ongoing disagreement over the best way to indicate a snapshot within a string. The committee will attempt to resolve the issue at their next meeting in two weeks.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare group focused heavily on event planning, governance, and infrastructure adjustments. A major priority was organizing the upcoming Fedora Linux 45 Release Party, scheduled for October 30, 2026. The committee also reviewed several event sponsorship requests, including IndiaFOSS, LinuxDays Prague, and a high school game jam in Spokane, alongside discussions about revamping the large event funding process and acquiring new physical event boxes.

Additionally, the group tackled operational bottlenecks and community representation. With the Fedora Design team at capacity, Mindshare established new policies for event badges, requiring proposers to supply their own designs with a 30-day lead time. Governance discussions centered on reallocating the vacant CommOps representative seat on the Mindshare Committee to other active SIGs, and the team initiated tests using Buffer to decentralize and expand community access to Fedora's social media channels. High-level philosophical discussions also took place regarding the alignment of LLM-gen-AI models with Fedora's open-source foundations.

Decisions

• The Fedora Linux 45 Release Party is scheduled for October 30, 2026, from 13:00 to 16:00 UTC.
• Due to capacity limits within the Design team, event organizers requesting Fedora Badges must now provide a 30-day advance notice and supply their own badge artwork designs.
• The Community Ops team will revoke its representative seat on the Mindshare Committee, allowing the committee to reallocate the position to other active groups (such as Documentation or AI SIGs) as per Ticket #154.
• The proposal to establish an annual formal open call for CY2027 Large Event Funding Proposals was rejected in favor of maintaining a flexible, quarterly capacity planning approach based on previous years' events.
• Mindshare will test using Buffer for social media management with Mastodon and LinkedIn to lower the barrier for social media contributions and offer access to more people in the short term.

Contribution opportunities

• Volunteers are needed for drafting social media content for Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube using graphics provided by the Design Team for the F45 Release Party.
• Future volunteers are requested to assist with video editing and post-production for YouTube content related to the F45 Release Party.
• The Design Team is no longer able to accept Fedora Badges artwork requests; Mindshare is putting out a call to recruit a new team of volunteer designers to focus exclusively on creating badges.
• Contributors interested in representing the Fedora Project at FOSSASIA 2027 are encouraged to list their names on the event's Wiki document to apply for travel sponsorship.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Magazine

This week, the Fedora Magazine team welcomed a new prospective contributor who brings technical writing experience and an eagerness to explore and write about open-source software. In their welcome messages, existing community members shared onboarding documentation and emphasized that the Magazine is actively looking for more writers.

Learn more about the Magazine team.

Fedora Join

This week, the Fedora Join group focused on improving onboarding processes and updating community navigational resources. A community member made significant progress analyzing the outdated apps.fedoraproject.org portal, successfully running the environment locally on Fedora 43. Key issues were identified for resolution, including broken icons, 404 errors on legacy SOP links, and stale application references that require updates in the infrastructure's Ansible repository.

Additionally, the team discussed ways to improve ticket visibility by updating the "Welcome to Fedora" issue templates. The goal is to automatically tag team members and owners to ensure reliable notifications for new onboarding tickets, though further testing is needed to confirm if tagging functions correctly within the templates.

Decisions

• Decided to defer the update of the frontend libraries for apps.fedoraproject.org to a separate future task, as the current stack successfully runs on Fedora 43 without immediate modernization.

Contribution opportunities

• Representatives of various Fedora application and infrastructure teams (including Zabbix, Ask Fedora, Elections, FedoCal, and Ipsilon) can expect to be contacted on Matrix to verify active services and provide updated links for the apps.fedoraproject.org modernization effort.
• Contributors familiar with Forgejo are encouraged to test and confirm whether group tags (such as @join/Members) function correctly when embedded inside issue templates.

Learn more about the Fedora Join team.

Ambassadors

The Ambassadors group has initiated planning for the Fedora Project's in-person presence at the FOSSASIA 2027 Summit. FOSSASIA is a major open-source technology conference in the Asia Pacific region, and the group is actively calling on contributors to help organize and represent Fedora at the upcoming event.

Decisions

• Fedora Mindshare will prioritize FOSSASIA 2027 event sponsorships for individuals who actively contribute to organizing the Fedora Project's presence at the conference.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation/GNOME group's activities this week centered around preparations for the upcoming Fedora 45 release, including identifying and addressing release blockers and freeze exceptions. Notable technical discussions focused on resolving a regression introduced in Fedora 44 where non-wheel users cannot install updates via GNOME Software due to a dnf5 limitation, as well as ongoing efforts to fully automate the generation of appstream-data metadata for software centers.

In community support, members clarified why certain KDE Frameworks (kf6-*) libraries are preinstalled on GNOME systems, tracing the requirement back to dependencies in background base packages. The Working Group also set their weekly agenda, touching on upcoming initiatives such as LLM-based summaries and Atomic Workstation discussions.

Decisions

• Established a product requirement that unprivileged local and LDAP users must be allowed to install updates by default, restoring functionality lost in Fedora 44. The issue is being pursued upstream in dnf5 (Ticket #531).
• Agreed that Fedora packages should transition away from using the deprecated appstream-util for AppStream metadata validation (Ticket #507).

Contribution opportunities

• Vote on proposed Fedora 45 blocker bugs and freeze exceptions via the blockerbugs app prior to the Blocker Review meetings to help streamline the QA review process.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

The KDE SIG has made KDE Plasma 6.8.0 and KDE Apps 26.08.2 available via a combined COPR to accommodate the Fedora 45 final freeze. Users testing this prerelease are advised that a soname bump in libplasma requires the temporary removal of certain apps (such as Merkuro, KWeather, KClock, and KAlgebra), and developers are actively tracking upstream fixes for bugs expected to be resolved in Plasma 6.8.1 or 6.8.2.

In other discussions, community members clarified why KDE Frameworks (kf6-*) packages are preinstalled on GNOME-based Fedora 45 beta systems, tracing the requirement back to background packages rather than direct Qt application dependencies. There is also an ongoing discussion to reintroduce the bup package to Fedora to fully support the kup backup features newly integrated into Plasma 6.8.

Contribution opportunities

• Volunteer to package and maintain bup in the Fedora repositories to enable versioned backups for the new Plasma 6.8 kup utility (Ticket #732).
• Help test the KDE Plasma 6.8.0 and KDE Apps 26.08.2 combined COPR release to ensure a smooth transition once the Fedora 45 freeze is lifted.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

This week, the Server Working Group focused heavily on Fedora 45 (F45) release testing and advancing its Ansible support initiatives. During F45 testing, a known release-blocking issue resurfaced involving the KVM image and initial-setup due to a Kiwi configuration conflicting with partition type specifications. Additionally, the F45 aarch64 netinst image exceeded its 1.4G size limit, prompting a proposal to increase the limit to 1.5G.

On the development front, the group made progress on Ansible integration, successfully merging idempotency pull requests and claiming the fedoraserver namespace on Copr for future packaging. Members also expressed enthusiasm for the Cockpit team's upcoming GUI for Ansible, which aligns perfectly with the server automation goals. Finally, the group initiated early explorations into system resilience and snapshot-based backups utilizing LVM2, with plans to support BTRFS via snapper integration.

Decisions

• Proposed bumping the Server aarch64 netinst image size limit from 1.4G to 1.5G to accommodate the growing F45 image size. (Source)
• Claimed the fedoraserver group alias on Copr to centralize the group's Ansible collection and utility RPM packaging efforts. (Source)
• Agreed to set up a dedicated test and demo server to trial and refine Ansible support for Server Services. (Source)

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are encouraged to review and vote on F45 blocker and freeze exception bugs ahead of the upcoming F45 Blocker Review meeting.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team operated under the Fedora 45 final infrastructure freeze, which culminated in a "no-go" decision during the F45 Final Go/No-Go Meeting. Major operational tasks included troubleshooting network reachability timeouts between Red Hat-hosted Fedora infrastructure and packages.redhat.com (which temporarily broke Copr builders), and replacing a failing Power9 hypervisor due to hardware controller issues.

On the development side, the Forgejo migration effort saw significant progress. The team tested and merged several backend features for private issues, updated the API, and began packaging Forgejo 15.0.10. Meanwhile, several staging environment adjustments were completed, including restoring API access for bots on discussion.stg and successfully transitioning docs.stg builds to pull directly from the new staging Forge repository.

Decisions

• The F45 Final Go/No-Go Meeting resulted in a "no-go" decision for the Fedora 45 release candidate.
• The Fedora Design Suite documentation will migrate directly to Forge to simplify maintenance, eliminating the need to set up OpenID Connect for the Fedora MediaWiki API.
• Hardware for the vmhost-p09-copr03 Copr builder was permanently swapped with a spare machine rather than being reinstalled again, due to a degrading disk controller.

Contribution opportunities

• F45 Release Party Speakers: The team is seeking volunteers to present a 10-15 minute session (either live or pre-recorded) about Fedora Forge at the F45 release party on October 30. Reach out in the Fedora Forge Matrix channel if interested.
• Mote Scripting Enhancements: There is a great introductory scripting task available to add error checking and database cleanup capabilities to the mote script, which sorts meeting minutes into teams (Ticket #12873).
• AI Code Review Formatting: Contributors bothered by the verbosity of Forgejo's LLM code reviews are encouraged to submit a pull request to the upstream ai-code-review tool to change the default output format or add configuration options, as discussed on the forum.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering team is currently navigating the Fedora 45 Final Freeze. A significant portion of the week was dedicated to evaluating blocker bugs, managing stable pushes, and generating Final Release Candidate (RC) composes. The most recent Fedora 45 Go/No-Go meeting resulted in a "No-Go" decision, so further RC composes and fixes are being integrated before the final release.

In addition to release preparation, the team managed several infrastructure and package updates. This included processing package unretirement requests, generating detached signatures for the ignition 2.28.0 release, and resolving build issues by adjusting Koji tags for packages like python-nanobind and rawhide-gcc-snapshot-build. Discussions are also ongoing on the forum regarding a potential transition to a new Rust-based repository generation tool.

Decisions

• Evaluated and accepted multiple Fedora 45 blocker bugs and freeze exceptions during the Oct 12 Blocker Review Meeting.
• Approved package unretirement requests and main admin transfers for various packages, including urdfdom, python-sphobjinv, wannier90, and picard.
• Untagged python-nanobind-3.1.0-1.fc46 from Rawhide to prevent build failures for dependent packages, as detailed in issue 13556.
• Updated the rawhide-gcc-snapshot-build Koji tag to inherit from f46-build/rawhide-build to ensure packages correctly target Rawhide, as detailed in issue 13554.
• Disabled updates-testing for Fedora 45 and prepared the final fedora-release and fedora-repos updates, documented in issue 13550 and Bugzilla 2547462.

Contribution opportunities

• A community contributor has invited collaboration to test and potentially adopt kiritan & subatomic, a highly performant, Rust-based alternative to createrepo_c that significantly reduces memory usage and execution time.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team focused on the impending Fedora 45 release, evaluating late-stage blockers and freeze exceptions. Due to the absence of a suitable Release Candidate, the team declared an automatic NO-GO for F45 Final, shifting the targeted release to October 27. Consequently, discussions opened regarding a proposal to bump the Server aarch64 netinst image size limit to 1.5G to handle the F45 image growth.

The team also conducted the Podman Conmon-v3 Test Day and finalized preparations for the upcoming GRUB EFI for Confidential Computing Test Day. A Cockpit Test Day planned for this cycle was pushed back to the next release. Additionally, after debates in the blocker review meeting, a new initiative was launched to formulate a clear strategy for handling CVE-related freeze exception requests on packages absent from release media.

Decisions

• The Fedora 45 Final release was declared an automatic NO-GO due to the lack of a suitable Release Candidate, delaying the target date to October 27.
• During the F45 blocker review meeting, it was decided to temporarily accept non-media CVEs as Freeze Exceptions to prevent users from obtaining vulnerable packages while updates-testing is disabled. A new ticket was created to establish a long-term strategy for these scenarios.
• The regular QA meeting scheduled for October 12 was cancelled in observance of a Canadian public holiday.
• A proposal was submitted to bump the aarch64 Server netinst image size limit from 1.4G to 1.5G.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to test and investigate the oo7 keyring invalid content type bug to see if it breaks any pre-installed applications. The team needs this data to decide if it should block the F45 release.
• Community members are invited to participate in the GRUB EFI for Confidential Computing Test Day, which will run from October 19 to 25.
• Users running Podman are encouraged to test and leave feedback based on the Podman Conmon-v3 Test Day cases.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

The Websites and Apps team focused heavily on website maintenance and user experience improvements this week. A significant effort went into refining download pages: the team added macOS direct download links for the Fedora Media Writer to the workstation download page to bypass confusing GitHub repository links, successfully implementing API caching to avoid build rate limits. Additionally, they fixed a caching bug on the CoreOS download page that was displaying stale release data to end users, ensuring it now fetches live updates dynamically.

Other discussions revolved around infrastructure and translation tooling. The team removed the broken PeerTube video feed from the Fedora start page after persistent errors. On the community side, members discussed refining translation configurations to prevent translating names and terms of service in Weblate, clarified the expected behavior of Fedora Badges permission checks, and noted user reports regarding a confusing login loop and UI bug when accessing the Fedora Wiki.

Decisions

• Removed the PeerTube latest video feed block from start.fedoraproject.org until a suitable replacement is found, due to persistent "502 Bad Gateway" errors (Ticket #436).
• Updated the CoreOS download page to bypass its previous Nuxt caching configuration and fetch live release data directly, preventing stale versions from being displayed to users.
• Decided to prefix non-translatable YAML keys (such as people's names and phone numbers) with an underscore (_) to automatically exclude them from Weblate localization.

Contribution opportunities

• Investigate and fix a UI bug on the Fedora Wiki login redirect page that displays a button incorrectly labeled "0", which causes a login loop for users.
• Contribute to the upstream ai-code-review tool by submitting a pull request to make the LLM review output format less verbose and more configurable.
• Submit pull requests to the Fedora Websites repository to prefix non-translatable YAML keys (e.g., names and contact info on the Flock event pages) with an underscore (_) to correctly remove them from Weblate.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Design team is finalizing visual assets and promotional graphics for the F45 Virtual Release Party (design#86), having successfully tested a new SVG generation workflow utilizing Claude, which will be detailed in an upcoming blog post. Additionally, developers from the Anaconda project have submitted a pull request to add CSS branding for the new WebUI installer and are seeking co-maintainer access to the design/packages repository to efficiently manage ongoing updates.

Internally, the team is actively restructuring their workflow by setting up automated ticket due dates in a sandbox environment and implementing a new labeling system to separate feature improvements from operational tasks. They are also clearing out stale backlog tickets and expanding documentation, including a newly submitted guideline for JPEG XL and an updated documentation repository for the Design Suite.

Decisions

• The team established a standard procedure for handling stale backlog tickets: they will tag the original reporter to check for activity, direct them to brand book resources, and close the ticket if no response is received. (Meeting Log)
• The team agreed to establish a separate queue or classification using a feature/improvements label to categorize strategic suggestions, preventing the standard ticket queue from becoming an unverified idea repository. (Meeting Log)
• The team decided to replace the fountain pen with a paintbrush in mockup 1C of the CDUX logo to offer better visual dynamics and incorporate a Fedora blue color. (Meeting Log)

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are encouraged to test the newly updated design-suite-docs repository using either local HTTP or Podman before its integration with Fedora Docs.
• A repository owner is needed to grant co-maintainer permissions to Anaconda developers on the design/packages repository so they can manage CSS branding for the new WebUI installer. (Matrix Chat)
• Reviews are requested for the pull request adding CSS for the new WebUI installer frontend.
• The new guideline for JPEG XL has addressed feedback and is ready for final review or merging.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Docs team focused heavily on documentation infrastructure architecture and preparing release notes for Fedora Linux 45. A major structural shift is underway to consolidate various documentation repositories under a single root component. This long-term change will significantly improve content discoverability by allowing documentation modules from different Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to be displayed together seamlessly, while allowing each team to maintain their own source repositories.

Concurrently, the team finalized important user-facing release notes, prominently featuring the transition to native LibreOffice spell-check dictionaries. On the maintenance front, preparations are in motion to modernize branch naming conventions—specifically transitioning from prod to main—and to establish more robust continuous integration testing for staging environments.

Decisions

• Decided to unify all documentation repositories under a single ROOT component; this will allow the inclusion of modules across different repositories while automatically dropping the component name from the generated URLs to prevent link breakage. (Issue #66)
• Approved renaming the core site-building prod branch to main and moving the stg environment to a dedicated builder repository on the staging Forge to facilitate better pre-merge testing. (Issue #61)
• Merged an update to the site-building script to support configurable repository branch names via DOCS_REPO_BRANCH, ensuring OpenShift jobs do not break during the upcoming branch renaming transition. (Issue #64)
• Finalized the Fedora 45 release note for the LibreOffice Dictionaries change; users installing the new libreoffice-dict-<lang> packages will need to use --allowerasing, which will explicitly remove legacy hunspell-<lang> and libreoffice-langpack-<lang> packages. (Issue #434)

Contribution opportunities

• Feedback Requested: Documentation contributors are invited to review and suggest important commands for a newly drafted Git cheat sheet for writers, designed to simplify Git workflows for non-developers.
• Testing and Review: Reviewers are needed to help structure, approve, and test the integration of the Fedora Design Suite documentation as a new component on the Fedora Docs staging instance.
• Workflow Coordination: Contributors who maintain documentation repositories or custom automation should stay alert for the upcoming branch renaming from prod to main to ensure continuous compatibility with their workflows.

Learn more about the Docs team.

COPR

This week, the COPR community reported a couple of service-related issues on the mailing list. Jean-Marc LIGER observed that several builds have been stuck in a "pending" state for multiple days, noting a curious pattern where affected accounts start with the letter 'L' and pointing out a stalled Pulp migration. Additionally, Ian Pilcher reported that builds were failing due to curl timeout errors when attempting to reach packages.redhat.com.

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

The EPEL team has been actively managing package updates and refining documentation this week. A major update to qt6 (from 6.6.2 to 6.10.3) in EPEL 9 is currently underway, which required rebuilds for several dependent packages like obs-studio, qcoro, and qt-creator. Additionally, version updates for uv (to 0.13.x) and ruff (to 0.17.x) are planned for the EPEL 10 leading branch and newer Fedora releases following the Fedora 45 Final Freeze.

On the procedural side, community members have proposed new documentation for build-tagging to clarify processes introduced with EPEL 10. Routine maintenance also saw updates to Noctalia, contributions to packaging guidelines, and investigations into the impact of retiring Bugzilla.

Decisions

• Following community feedback, the planned updates for uv (0.13.x) and ruff (0.17.x) will not be shipped to Fedora 43 because the release is nearing End-of-Life and the updates contain minor breaking changes. The updates will still proceed for F44, F45, and the EPEL 10 leading branch.

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are asked to test the qt6 update in EPEL 9 (which includes packages like obs-studio, obs-studio-plugin-vkcapture, qcoro, and qt-creator) to ensure no breakages or missing dependencies went unnoticed.
• Feedback is requested on a proposed documentation pull request regarding build-tagging to improve clarity for contributors.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

During their October 13 meeting, the ELN SIG discussed preparations for building boot.iso with image-builder (tracked in this pull request) and assigned ownership to investigate a bug where KDE Discover is failing in ELN (issue #633). The team also noted that recent ELN Extras pull requests have been merged, leaving the Extras repository in better shape.

In broader Linux news, the group is making significant progress on introducing ELN to the RISC-V architecture. The team is preparing to begin bootstrapping soon and plans to target RVA23 as a baseline. To prevent any disruptive surprises for existing contributors, the group clarified that these new RISC-V builds will take place on the Fedora RISC-V alternate Koji, keeping them separate from the main Fedora Koji.

Decisions

• ELN builds for the RISC-V architecture will be hosted on the Fedora RISC-V alternate Koji rather than the main Fedora Koji.
• The RISC-V effort for ELN is officially planning to target RVA23 as a baseline architecture.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The Atomic group is undergoing a major transition as the Fedora bootc initiative officially concludes on October 31, 2026, at which point ownership will transfer to the CoreOS Working Group. During the October 15 unification meeting, the team laid the groundwork for merging Fedora CoreOS and Atomic efforts, including the proposal of a new foundational "seed image" architecture to serve as a baseline for user consumption and derivative products.

Significant infrastructure shifts are also underway as the group transitions away from GitLab. The team is actively migrating base image workloads to the new Fedora Forgejo and pushing to establish Konflux as the group's production-level CI/CD tool. Ongoing debates include whether to adopt a monorepo approach for atomic images to streamline future builds and how to best provide standardized "bootimages" for users exploring Image Mode.

Decisions

• The bootc initiative will officially shut down on October 31, 2026, with ownership of the base images and workflows transferring to the CoreOS Working Group (Meeting Notes, Issue #92, Issue #137).
• The team will migrate base image work and related repositories from GitLab to the new Fedora Forge (Forgejo) to ease maintenance and prevent monitoring neglect (Issue #75, Meeting Notes).
• A new atomic-seed repository was created on Forgejo under an MIT license to build the foundational seed image, starting with a minimal five-package set (kernel, systemd, Podman, selinux-policy, bootc) before deciding on further additions like bootloaders (Epic #144, Meeting Notes).
• Permissions in the Atomic organization on Forgejo were updated so that the Members team has "Write access to everything except Packages" (Issue #143).

Contribution opportunities

• Konflux Permissions Fixes: Help is needed to resolve a permissions issue to grant all Fedora contributors read-only access to Konflux tenants (Issue #91).
• Konflux Governance: Contributors are needed to help define the contribution ladder and governance structure to automatically grant developers access to Konflux tenants (Issue #91).
• ADR Review: The team is seeking reviews and comments on Architectural Decision Record (ADR) 3, which proposes a monorepo for all configurations, continuous integration, and testing code (Meeting Notes).
• Bootimage Feedback: Community input is requested regarding the creation of standard "bootimages" for bootc to lower the barrier of entry for new users exploring Image Mode without building their own containers first (Issue #77).

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS team officially announced that the Atomic Initiative will conclude on October 31st (following the Fedora 45 release), having successfully transferred ownership to the group. The community also approved migrating the automated engineering newsletter tool into the official CoreOS GitHub organization. A major deprecation was announced for the Linux community: the legacy quay.io/coreos/fcct container registry is now deprecated and will no longer receive updates; users must migrate to quay.io/coreos/butane.

Technically, the team is actively investigating a corrupt kernel file issue on ext4 /boot partitions linked to large-folio writeback bugs during upgrades. Other key initiatives include proposing poll-based Jenkins imports for Konflux-driven streams, syncing firmware updates to other ESPs in RAID setups, and adopting chunkah to split container images for enhanced layer reuse.

Decisions

• The legacy quay.io/coreos/fcct container registry is now officially deprecated. Existing users must switch to quay.io/coreos/butane to receive future updates.
• The community voted during the weekly meeting to migrate the Newsletter repository into the CoreOS organization to serve as the official tool for tracking and sharing updates.
• The Atomic Fusion team decided to start building the seed image with a strict minimal package set (kernel, systemd, SELinux policy, Podman, and bootc) without a bootloader, testing it via QEMU for internal foundational work.

Contribution opportunities

• A community member is preparing a pull request to add unit tests to Ignition's Azure logic to optimize and document its behavior.
• Following the migration of the Newsletter generator, there is an opportunity to rewrite the Python PoC tool into Golang to better match the CoreOS tech stack.
• Help is needed to configure Slack credentials and channel IDs to finalize the integration for publishing Konflux pipeline results to Slack and Matrix.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

This week, the Fedora IoT Working Group reviewed the status of Fedora 44, 45, and Rawhide builds, noting a persistent greenboot issue across stable and freeze branches. A Go/No-Go meeting for Fedora 45 was anticipated to serve as a blocker review due to the lack of a release candidate. In parallel, the Bootable Image Unification ("Atomic Fusion") group discussed creating a monorepo for atomic images and shaping the architecture for a new baseline "seed" image to support layered products.

On the tracker, several older tickets were closed, notably confirming that the Fedora ROS2 testing repository is now available in the official ROS2 documentation, concluding collaborative work with the Robotics SIG. New spike tickets were also opened to evaluate device-specific ARM images and VM-based hardware testing, prompting active discussion about the necessity and implementation of these approaches compared to existing generic images and OpenQA tests.

Decisions

• The Bootable Image Unification initiative will officially conclude on October 31st, following the Fedora 45 release, with ownership transferring entirely to the working group (Bootable Image Unification Meeting Agenda).
• Base image work and continuous integration for Fedora 46 and onward will be migrated from GitLab to Forgejo to resolve long-standing workflow issues (Bootable Image Unification Meeting Agenda).
• A new atomic-seed repository was created on Forgejo to build a highly minimal image (containing only the kernel, systemd, SELinux policy, Podman, and bootc) without a bootloader, testing it directly via QEMU for internal foundational use (Bootable Image Unification Meeting Agenda).

Contribution opportunities

• The working group is requesting help to test the Fedora 45 nightlies and leave results on the wiki (Fedora IoT Working Group Meeting).
• Contributors are invited to share their feedback on the limitations of current generic ARM images to guide the evaluation of device-specific Fedora ARM images.
• Community members are asked to identify the value proposition and specific scenarios for VM-based hardware testing that are not already covered by central OpenQA VM testing.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

The ARM group was notified of the Fedora 45 Blocker and Freeze Exception Review meeting, scheduled for October 12, 2026, at 16:00 UTC on Matrix. The agenda included reviewing 4 proposed blockers and 7 proposed freeze exceptions for the Final release to determine if they violate the Fedora Release Criteria.

Community members were encouraged to review the proposed blockers and cast their votes asynchronously before the meeting to help expedite the review process.

Contribution opportunities

• Evaluate and vote on proposed Fedora 45 Final blocker and freeze exception bugs ahead of review meetings. This can be done via the blockerbugs app or on Pagure tickets, as detailed in the meeting announcement.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Hummingbird

The Hummingbird group held two key meetings this week. The Bootable Image Unification meeting focused on defining a new architectural baseline via a minimal "seed" image and migrating base image repositories from GitLab to Forgejo. The group also announced the official sunsetting of the Atomic Initiative on October 31, 2026, as ownership successfully transfers to the community.

In broader Linux news, the Hummingbird Community Meeting highlighted that Fedora Hummingbird Linux is now powering Project Bluefin's new "Utah" alpha release and the upstream bootc-operator. Community discussions also explored practical applications of hardened images, bound images for specific workloads (such as PostgreSQL appliances), and new soft reboot capabilities for bootc-based artifacts.

Decisions

• The Atomic Initiative will officially shut down on October 31, 2026, transferring complete ownership to the unified group (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).
• A heavily minimized "seed" image will be created as an architectural foundation, containing only the kernel, systemd, SELinux policy, Podman, and bootc. It will be kept for internal and foundational use rather than direct general user consumption (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).
• The seed image will be tested using QEMU for direct kernel booting to avoid introducing unnecessary bootloader complexities or variant explosions (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).
• The new atomic-seed repository was created on Forgejo under an MIT license, and the team will target bootc directly without utilizing an rpm-ostree tree in the process (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).

Contribution opportunities

• Review and provide feedback on Architectural Decision Record 3 (ADR-0003) regarding the proposed monorepo for atomic images and Konflux CI/CD (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).
• Help identify gaps in the contribution ladder, including establishing and reviewing roles for Owners, Members, Contributors, and Reviewers (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).
• Contribute to initial container configuration tasks, documentation, and the setup of Konflux pipelines for the new atomic-seed repository (Bootable Image Unification Meeting).

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

AI

This week, the AI/ML SIG reached a milestone by integrating ROCm 10.1 into Fedora Rawhide, closing gaps in older AMD GPU support and enabling better local AI testing. The infrastructure team successfully resolved network routing and SSL issues on the gpu01 hardware testing farm, ensuring CI pipelines for ROCm packaging remain functional. Additionally, contributors explored and packaged various local inference tools, including OpenClaw and Gufo, to optimize local model performance.

Strategically, the group participated in a cross-ecosystem leadership meeting to discuss AI model alignment with Fedora's open-source foundations. The consensus emphasized prioritizing model-agnostic tools and FOSS runtime engines over locking into specific models, while acknowledging the need for shared community inference infrastructure to ensure contributors with low-end hardware are not gated out of AI-augmented workflows. As a result of this strategy, proposals to exclusively deploy the fully-open but compute-heavy OLMo model were deferred until such shared infrastructure is realized.

Decisions

• The SIG decided to prioritize "tool freedom" by building model-agnostic, open-source contributor tooling (e.g., standard API endpoints and agent skills) rather than strictly mandating a specific LLM model for community infrastructure (Forum Discussion).
• Proposals to draft a broad Acceptable Use Policy for GPU hardware were closed as wontfix for now, as the current AMD hardware is reserved strictly for Continuous Integration (CI) workloads.
• The deployment of the OLMo LLM model on Fedora infrastructure was deferred due to its high compute overhead and lagging capabilities, pending the future deployment of shared contributor inference services.
• Automated bot alerts in Matrix have been moved out of the main SIG chat room to preserve human conversation readability. Notifications are now routed to a dedicated, opt-in #alerts-ai-ml:fedoraproject.org Matrix room (Ticket #42).

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed reviewing the Gufo package for Fedora, which significantly speeds up local inference on specific AMD processors.
• Contributors with packaging expertise are invited to review and collaborate on AI agent skills Pull Requests, such as PR #18 and PR #25.
• The SIG is looking for a contributor to submit a Pull Request to list the AI-ML SIG on the Engineering Teams documentation page.

Learn more about the AI team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group focused on finalizing Fedora 45 readiness, exploring kernel updates (including testing the 7.3 kernel), and advancing the Fedora ELN bootstrap for the RVA23 architecture. Contributors performed extensive debugging for various packages, successfully resolving LLVM 21.1.1 test suite failures, rebuilding Python packages for the 3.15 migration, and addressing nodejs, mysql, and cmake build issues.

Additionally, the team conducted build performance benchmarks comparing the SpacemiT K3 (RVA23) against older hardware like the P550, demonstrating significant speed improvements. Ongoing hardware stability investigations include debugging persistent glibc crashes on Milk-V Titan builders and testing transparent huge page (THP) disablement to fix GCC build failures on K3 boards.

Decisions

• The team decided to drop the VF2 PCIe patch from the kernel, shifting focus to the Omni kernel for users with older hardware.
• To mitigate GCC build failures on K3 boards, the group decided to disable transparent huge pages (THP) on affected builders as a non-invasive workaround.
• The weekly RISC-V SIG meeting has been rescheduled to Wednesdays at 18:00 CET.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors with RISC-V hardware are invited to inspect mesa.spec to identify and enable missing hardware acceleration drivers.
• Help is requested to track down and permanently fix the underlying kernel issue requiring THP to be disabled on K3 boards.
• Assistance is needed to debug and resolve random glibc assertion failures (pthread_mutex_cond_lock) that are currently breaking builds on Milk-V Titan hardware.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

NeuroFedora

This week, NeuroFedora officially closed its long-standing initiative to rethink its Python packaging strategy, as the new test-suite is now fully implemented and running regularly (Ticket #580). Following this strategy, the team is actively identifying leaf Python packages to orphan, such as python-interface-meta and potentially python-poetry-dynamic-versioning, while keeping others like python-dunamai until they are no longer required by the dependency chain (Matrix chat).

Additionally, the SIG is investigating packages that are failing to install in the test-suite for Python 3.14 and 3.15 (Ticket #588). Many of these failures are due to missing wheels for Python 3.15, which has sparked discussions on whether the test-suite should be limited to testing wheels only. The group also confirmed that they have provided all necessary approvals to be included in automated weekly reports (Ticket #587).

Decisions

• The initiative to rethink Python packaging and reduce the SIG's package count has formally concluded with the successful deployment of a regular test-suite (Ticket #580).
• python-interface-meta will be orphaned as it appears to be a leaf package, which may also allow python-poetry-dynamic-versioning to be orphaned (Matrix).
• python-dunamai will be retained by the SIG until it becomes a leaf package (Matrix).

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to review packages failing to install on Python 3.14 and 3.15 in the test-suite, and weigh in on whether the suite should be limited to testing binary wheels only (Ticket #588).
• Help is welcome to further improve the new package testing suite by implementing Forgejo actions (Ticket #580).

Learn more about the NeuroFedora team.

Gaming

This week, the Gaming group discussed the upcoming 64-bit Steam client beta and its impact on multi-lib support. A community member inquired whether the new client would resolve previous concerns that had sparked discussions about potentially dropping support for Steam. It was clarified that while the 64-bit client itself will not require 32-bit libraries—running instead inside the same runtime container used by the games—32-bit support (such as Mesa and glibc) will still be necessary for older 32-bit games to access graphics hardware.

Learn more about the Gaming team.

Perl

Between October 12 and October 18, 2026, the Perl group focused exclusively on routine package maintenance and version bumps. Contributors successfully updated several Perl packages to their latest versions across various branches, including perl-Net-CardDAVTalk, perl-ExtUtils-Typemaps-Default, and perl-CPAN-FindDependencies.

Additionally, there was minor ongoing coordination regarding disabling optional dependencies for perl-File-ShareDir on RHEL. Overall, the week saw smooth and rapid integrations of pull requests without any major disruptions or sweeping policy changes.

Decisions

• Merged pull requests to update perl-Net-CardDAVTalk to version 0.13 (PR #5 and PR #6).
• Merged pull requests to update perl-ExtUtils-Typemaps-Default to version 1.07 across multiple branches (PR #2, PR #3, PR #4, and PR #5).
• Merged a pull request to update perl-CPAN-FindDependencies to version 4.01 to address rhbz#2547436 (PR #3).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

The Python group's activity this week centered around a call for new maintainership for a highly utilized package. Miro Hrončok announced that he is seeking a new primary maintainer for python-hypothesis. Due to the upstream practice of releasing on every commit, keeping up with updates has become unmanageable for a single primary contact.

However, because python-hypothesis is a critical dependency required by over 100 packages (including pytest) during build time, it will not be orphaned. The current maintainer will remain available to assist whoever steps up to take over the primary duties.

Decisions

• It was decided that python-hypothesis will not be orphaned to avoid disrupting the builds of over 100 dependent packages in the broader ecosystem.

Contribution opportunities

• An experienced Python packager is needed to step up as the primary maintainer and main point of contact for python-hypothesis. The current maintainer will remain available to provide assistance and ensure a smooth transition.

Learn more about the Python team.

Ruby

Jarek Prokop announced the start of Ruby 4.1 development, beginning with a snapshot build based on upstream Git revision ad29ad7ad8. The initial Rawhide builds have completed successfully without any major surprises.

Continuous builds for Fedora are now available in a dedicated Copr repository, with the corresponding source code maintained in the 4.1 branch of Prokop's fork.

Decisions

• The Ruby group has initiated development on Ruby 4.1.
• Fedora gem ecosystem rebuilds will be performed periodically using a dedicated Copr repository, which will allow package maintainers to test compatibility as development progresses.

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Rust

This week, the Rust group focused heavily on resolving security advisories and cleaning up obsolete compatibility packages. Significant effort was directed toward addressing RUSTSEC advisories for crates like faster-hex (Issue 45), rustls (Issue 43), and ruzstd (Issue 42), which involved mass updates, creating side-tags, and coordinating rebuilds for dependent applications.

In addition, maintainers successfully concluded multiple package cleanups. Several old compat packages were officially retired, and progress was made on migrating applications away from unmaintained libraries like structopt, rustls-pemfile, and older versions of env_logger, itertools, and the gtk4-rs stack.

Decisions

• Rebuilds for specific packages affected by the faster-hex update (rust-cargo-semver-checks, rust-onefetch, and rust-cargo-c) will be delayed until the Fedora 45 Final Freeze lifts and side-tag updates stabilize (Issue 45).
• The rust-itertools0.11 compat package has been officially retired after backporting the final dependent package (Issue 11).
• The rust-signal-hook0.1 compat package was retired following the porting or retirement of its dependencies (Issue 23).
• The serial_test v0.5 compat packages were retired as their remaining dependencies were cleared (Issue 24).

Contribution opportunities

• Volunteer to package the qmassa GPU monitoring tool for Fedora, starting from the Non-crate Rust project spec file template (Issue 44).
• Assist with rebuilding dependent applications against the newly secured rustls v0.23.46 in the available Bodhi side-tags (Issue 43).
• Help port applications away from obsolete crates, such as moving structopt users to clap/derive (Issue 22), rustls-pemfile to rustls-pki-types (Issue 5), and bincode to modern serialization alternatives (Issue 6).
• Verify and rebuild stable branch applications (like akonadi-search, newsboat, or dnsdist) that may be affected by the cxx RUSTSEC-2026-0202 vulnerability (Issue 36).

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• In the Fedora Badges signed_fpca forum topic, a user inquired about gaining access to award badges. It was clarified that signing the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement grants visibility to the limited administrator frontend, allowing authorized users to hand out awards and create QR codes.
• A review of the Fedora-maintained hardening for general use cases documentation was posted on the forum. Users praised the thoroughness of the guide and debated whether permanent changes should overwrite or respect existing custom settings when implementing systemd-based hardening configurations.
• A thread explored whether packages would be easier to build by selecting specific dependency releases. The author proposed adding "upstream-release branches" in Fedora dist-git to help isolate complex application builds into containers or Flatpaks without bloating the traditional repository with parallel dependencies.
• Marián Konček shared the results of an Unused BuildRequires fields mass build using the unbreq Mock plugin on all Fedora packages. The report identified false positives related to hook ordering in %prep sections, which Konček plans to address in a future fix or through a new LD_PRELOAD implementation.
• The proposed Thin LTO Build Flag Change seeks to introduce an option to replace -ffat-lto-objects with thin objects (%global _lto_cflags %slim) to reduce memory exhaustion and build times on Koji. However, some developers doubted this would solve linking memory issues on 32-bit architectures like i686.
• A returning maintainer ran into authentication issues when trying to release a new version of the tss2 package. He was informed that his package had been orphaned and reassigned due to a period of inactivity, and he must now contact the current maintainer to be re-added to the package.
• The proposal to Relocate the SELinux policy store to /etc/selinux aims to unify standard, atomic, and ostree-based systems by storing policies outside of /var to assist with rollbacks. Reviewers pointed out that upcoming versions of libselinux will support loading policies from /usr, which is preferred by developers.
• A discussion about the present and future of Bodhi highlighted its unmaintained dependencies and UI freezes, sparking a conversation about whether to rewrite it or integrate it into larger Red Hat testing frameworks. QA members emphasized that Bodhi's tight integration with gating, package signing, and compose generation makes it difficult to easily replace.
• On the java-devel mailing list, Kenz S announced a New Fedora Forgejo repository for the Java Lounge matrix group. Maintainers are coordinating the addition of Java team members and planning to migrate documentation to Forge to improve integration with Fedora Docs.
• On the libteam mailing list, patches were successfully merged to factor out lacp_port_synced() and related functions in the teamd daemon.
• Other discussions included instructions on how to reach an inactive maintainer for a toxcore upgrade, a user reporting a damaged macOS DMG for Fedora Media Writer, the official deprecation of the quay.io/coreos/fcct Container Registry, a proposal to bump the Server aarch64 netinst image size limit, questions about outdated libicu timezone databases, and ongoing tracking of documentation pull requests and Design Suite documentation integration within the Fedora Docs Alerts matrix room.

Orphaning packages

• python-kerberos
• OpenImageIO2.5 compat package
• rubygem-ethon, rubygem-typhoeus, and rubygem-faraday
• python-proton-vpn-network-manager

Package updates

• SoapySDR (unannounced SONAME bump)
• uv 0.13 and ruff 0.17
• pygit v1.20.0
• z3 5.3.1
• ddcutil 3.0.2
• perl-SVK (license tag corrected)
• Imath 3.2
• perl-Gtk2-Notify (license tag corrected)
• aml v1.0.0, neatvnc 1.0.3, and weston 16.0.0

New contributor introductions

• Dawid Wrobel
• X. C.
• Nikita Sizikov

All contribution opportunities

For community members looking to jump right in, software testing and quality assurance offer immediate and highly impactful ways to contribute without requiring specialized group membership. Volunteers are urgently needed across multiple groups to review and vote on Fedora 45 blocker bugs via the blockerbugs app or through specific mailing lists for Desktop, Server, and ARM. Opportunities abound for general QA, including participating in the GRUB EFI and Podman Conmon-v3 Test Days, testing the KDE Plasma 6.8.0 and Apps 26.08.2 COPR release, and providing feedback on the new Fedora 45 nightlies for IoT. You can also help by testing the newly updated design-suite-docs locally, evaluating kiritan & subatomic as a performant alternative to createrepo_c, or investigating a keyring invalid content type bug.

If your strengths lie in communications, writing, or media, several teams are actively recruiting creative talent. The Fedora Magazine is seeking new writers, and FESCo specifically needs someone to draft an article explaining the migration away from vulnerable NetworkManager plugins. Documentation writers are invited to refine a Git cheat sheet for non-developers or assist with EPEL build-tagging instructions. On the design and media front, Mindshare is looking for volunteers to draft social media content and edit YouTube videos for the upcoming release party, as well as recruiting a brand new volunteer team dedicated to Fedora Badges. Those interested in community building can help brainstorm themes for Flock to Fedora 2027 or apply to organize and represent the project at the FOSSASIA 2027 Summit.

Developers looking to submit code patches have numerous approachable entry points. A great introductory task exists in the Infrastructure team to add error checking to the mote script, while the CoreOS team is looking for help rewriting a Python PoC newsletter tool into Golang and adding unit tests to Ignition's Azure logic. Web developers can assist by fixing a Wiki login loop UI bug, reviewing CSS for the WebUI installer, or submitting a pull request to the upstream ai-code-review tool to configure the verbosity of Forgejo LLM outputs. Additionally, Rust programmers are encouraged to help port applications away from obsolete crates.

For experienced contributors, there is a strong demand for package maintainers and architectural strategy reviewers. A large roster of orphaned packages needs adoption, and specific roles are open, such as primary maintainer for python-hypothesis, packaging the bup backup utility for KDE, or reviewing the Gufo AI package. Contributors are also invited to engage in package review swaps. Finally, at a higher structural level, members from any technical background are highly encouraged to review and comment on ADR-0003, which proposes a unified monorepo strategy for atomic image configurations and CI/CD pipelines.

Across the Fedora project this week, the primary focus is stabilizing the upcoming Fedora 45 release, which has officially entered its Final Freeze. Teams including Release Engineering, Quality, and various desktop and architecture groups are actively triaging blocker bugs, testing deliverables, and locking down infrastructure changes. Beyond the immediate release, a major collaborative focus is the newly named "Atomic Fusion" initiative, a strategic effort uniting the Atomic, CoreOS, IoT, and Hummingbird groups to design a unified, Konflux-built base image that minimizes attack surfaces by excluding tools like cloudinit and ignition. On the operational front, groups are heavily engaged in evaluating workflow tooling, marked by widespread assessments of a Bugzilla-to-Forgejo migration—which FESCo is currently pushing back against—and the rollout of LLM-powered community reporting tools, which prompted teams like Workstation and CoreOS to establish strict privacy and human-review boundaries. Finally, repository health remains a continuous cross-team priority, with FESCo, the Rust community, and NeuroFedora actively addressing orphaned packages and non-responsive maintainers to prevent downstream dependency breakages.

Announcements

On the development and infrastructure front, Fedora 45 has officially entered its final freeze, and an impact assessment for removing inactive packagers for the F45 release cycle lists potentially orphaned packages that currently need new maintainers. Infrastructure updates include detailed progress and plans for s390x improvements to address resource constraints, necessitating a planned s390x reboot. For QA and testing contributors, a Podman Test Week (also covered in a detailed Fedora Magazine article) invites help testing the Rust-based conmon v3, while community members continue to share advice on BTRFS system recovery methods.

Council

The Council held a bi-weekly meeting to discuss the F45 Final Freeze, finalize the new Decision Support Process, and begin brainstorming for Flock to Fedora 2027 Call for Proposals (CfP) themes. The Fedora Forge Usage Policy and Fedora Docs 2025 Initiative were formally closed following their approvals and updates, while @jflory7 was officially off-boarded from the Council following the end of his term as Fedora Community Architect.

New proposals were introduced regarding internal processes, including a non-binding "Sense of Council" vote process and making the Council Matrix channel publicly logged. A Bootable Image Unification Meeting also took place, where the team discussed Architecture Design Records (ADRs) and agreed on the project name "Atomic Fusion".

Decisions

• The Council finalized the conflict of interest discussions into a new Decision Support Process, deciding that the Fedora Operations Architect (FOA) will be the default owner to triage and action these requests.
• The Fedora Forge usage policy was officially approved and a request was made to add it to the official documentation.
• The Council voted to review and provide feedback on the Flock 2027 CfP themes via ticket comments, aiming for a usable draft by October 21, 2026.
• The external fundraising / Open Collective exploration ticket was closed to restart the effort properly with fresh, public discussion alongside the Mindshare Committee.

Contribution opportunities

• The Fedora Docs 2025 Initiative is requesting a six-month extension and is actively looking for a new executive sponsor to take over the role.
• Contributors interested in the "Atomic Fusion" Bootable Image Unification effort are invited to participate in consolidating the umbrella ADRs by joining the Bootable Image Unification Matrix channel.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

FESCo addressed several critical governance, security, and infrastructure topics this week. The committee continued pushing back on the proposed migration from Bugzilla to Forgejo due to major feature regressions (e.g., cross-repo searches, bug relationships) and discussed exploring a self-hosted or consultant-supported Bugzilla instance instead. Additionally, FESCo processed multiple non-responsive maintainer tickets, notably prioritizing the retirement of vulnerable NetworkManager VPN plugins (NetworkManager-vpnc and NetworkManager-fortisslvpn) going back to Fedora 43. This obsoletion will impact existing users but was deemed an unavoidable security measure to prevent privilege escalation.

Other highlights include the nomination of a new FESCo member (maxamillion) to fill a vacant seat, progressing the change to use Sequoia (%openpgpverify) for post-quantum cryptography, and reaffirming strict boundaries for provenpackagers regarding mass package changes.

Decisions

• Retired and obsoleted NetworkManager-vpnc and NetworkManager-fortisslvpn across Fedora releases down to F43 due to unpatched privilege escalation vulnerabilities. (Ticket #3681)
• Elected to mark fedora-third-party updates as a blocker for Fedora Linux 45. (Meeting Log, Ticket #3682)
• Reaffirmed the provenpackager policy, specifically that provenpackagers must not perform mass cleanups or changes—such as converting to %autorelease or %autochangelog—without explicit maintainer permission. (Ticket #3687)
• Nominated maxamillion to fill the vacant FESCo seat left by duffy's resignation, which he accepted. (Ticket #3689)
• Processed non-responsive maintainer tickets for lkundrak, prarit, and gui1ty, resulting in the transfer to new volunteers or mass-orphaning of their respective packages. (Ticket #3681, Ticket #3665, Ticket #3678)

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee focused on two major themes: simplifying RPM snapshot versioning and updating Emacs packaging guidelines. Triggered by a recent versioning error in the bluez package that broke upgrade paths and caused openQA failures, the committee is heavily discussing a move to standardize snapshot versioning to a single, simpler format (<number>.<revision>) to prevent future mistakes (Issue #1570, Issue #1578).

Additionally, the group is modernizing its Emacs guidelines. This includes a new Work-in-Progress proposal to introduce RPM macros and dependency generators that natively support Emacs' built-in package management system, alongside finalized updates to existing Emacs packaging rules.

Decisions

• The pure GTK Emacs build is now explicitly packaged under the name emacs-pgtk (Issue #1575).
• The packaging guidelines were updated to clarify that Emacs 'compilation' refers strictly to byte compilation, distinguishing it from newer native compilation features (Issue #1574).

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

During the week of October 5 to October 11, 2026, the Mindshare committee actively cleared a backlog of event funding and swag requests while taking concrete steps to improve its own administrative efficiency. The committee successfully formalized a weekly meeting cadence—alternating between text and video formats—to curb previous delays in ticket resolutions.

Alongside standard event approvals, strategic discussions took place regarding the modernization of Fedora's physical event presence. This included plans to replace aging US and EU event boxes with new Pelican Air cases, the creation of a dedicated event box for India, and the production of localized tablecloths for EMEA events. Additionally, in response to persistently vacant seats on the committee, members proposed a structural change to allow rotating representation from active teams like Fedora Docs and Magazine, rather than static appointments.

Decisions

• Decided that the Fedora Design team will no longer supply custom artwork for event badges; event organizers must now design their own badges and submit them for Mindshare approval with a 30-day lead time (Ticket #145).
• Adopted a new weekly meeting cadence, alternating between text and video formats, to improve the committee's responsiveness to requests (Ticket #135).
• Approved producing an EMEA-specific event tablecloth first before expanding regional physical assets to APAC (Ticket #119).
• Maintained the current shared-responsibility model for Fedora's representation in the Digital Public Goods Alliance (Ticket #152).
• Approved regional swag and travel budgets for Texas Linux Fest 2026 (Ticket #148), LinuxDays 2026 (Ticket #149), IndiaFOSS 2026 (Ticket #147), and a Polish technical school (Ticket #138).

Contribution opportunities

• Provide feedback on the proposal to reconsider Mindshare Committee representation by rotating seats based on team activity and needs, potentially reallocating vacant CommOps or Marketing seats to the Fedora Docs or Magazine teams (Ticket #154, Ticket #145).
• Weigh in on the idea to create a DIY printable "Ask me about Fedora" t-shirt design (complete with a QR code) for community members to wear at conferences where Fedora lacks an official booth (Ticket #99).
• Mindshare Committee members are requested to pledge their timely availability to address recent delays in ticket voting and event curation (Ticket #153).

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Fedora Join

This week, the Fedora Join group's primary focus was on addressing technical debt and improving the visibility of Fedora's web applications. Efforts are underway to update the outdated apps.fedoraproject.org directory. This exploratory project involves auditing existing applications, identifying unlisted infrastructure tools, and upgrading the web app's underlying Python software stack.

A community member has recently been assigned to take on this task as a "good first issue." The work will require collaboration with the broader Fedora Infrastructure team to ensure that the web directory accurately reflects the current state of active Fedora services.

Contribution opportunities

• The task to update apps.fedoraproject.org was identified as an excellent "good first issue." Although a community member has begun the initial exploratory work, the effort requires reviewing current infrastructure, discovering missing tools, and potentially upgrading the codebase to support modern software versions, which may offer further avenues for collaboration.

Learn more about the Fedora Join team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group focused on preparations for the Fedora 45 release, evaluating blocker bugs and freeze exceptions as the Final Freeze begins. A major technical priority was fixing integration issues for the new oo7-daemon (which replaces gnome-keyring-daemon), specifically ensuring its portal component is correctly installed on Silverblue and GNOME systems. Additionally, developers are actively scripting the automation of appstream-data generation to prevent GNOME Software and KDE Discover metadata from becoming outdated between releases.

In other discussions, the Working Group addressed third-party software requests and clarified questions about dependencies. The group also provided feedback on these weekly reports, requesting that human review remain in place to filter out irrelevant or personal information before publishing chat summaries.

Decisions

• The Working Group rejected a proposal to include the proprietary, subscription-based LiveFaceSwap Desktop application in Fedora Workstation's third-party software discovery (Issue #530).
• To resolve missing dependencies during the transition to oo7-daemon, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome will now explicitly require oo7-portal to ensure it is installed by default on GNOME and Silverblue variants (Issue #506).
• The Working Group requested that human review of community posts and Matrix chat logs be required before including them in these automated weekly summaries, ensuring personal or irrelevant details are not broadcast (Issue #527).

Contribution opportunities

• Vote on Fedora 45 Blockers: Community members are encouraged to vote on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for Fedora 45 in the blockerbugs app before review meetings. Voting in advance helps shorten the meetings (Meeting Announcement).
• AppStream Data Automation: There is ongoing work to automate the weekly generation of appstream-data. Contributors interested in packaging automation or verifying metadata diffs between Fedora versions can follow or assist in the progress (Issue #507).

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

The KDE group is preparing for the upcoming releases of KDE Plasma 6.8.0 and KDE Apps (Gear) 26.08.2. Due to the Fedora 45 final freeze, these major updates have already been pushed to Rawhide. For Fedora 44 and 45 users, the updates will be temporarily combined and made available via a COPR repository until the freeze is lifted and Fedora 45 is officially released.

In other news, the team is actively working on pulling the Union theme into Plasma Workspace, and preparations are underway for the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting to finalize the upcoming OS release.

Decisions

• KDE Plasma 6.8.0 and KDE Apps 26.08.2 updates will be delayed for Fedora 44 and 45 until the F45 final freeze concludes; they will be provided via a COPR repository in the interim.
• The kgamma and kcm_wacomtablet packages will no longer receive updates and will be retired once Plasma 6.8 is released.
• Due to a libplasma soname bump in the Plasma 6.8 update, several dependent packages (including merkuro, kweather, kclock, kalgebra, kcm-fcitx5, kup-backup, and applet-window-buttons) will be rebuilt.
• The Union theme will be added to the KDE deliverables, starting with a recently rebased pull request for plasma-workspace.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors and upstream community members are needed to help plan and participate in the KDE Plasma 6.8.0 Test Day, including exploring testing methods for Kinoite.
• Community members are encouraged to review and vote on F45 blocker bugs prior to the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meetings using the blockerbugs app.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server working group focused this week on F45 Beta release testing and advancing their Server Ansible support project. In F45 testing, initial-setup issues with the KVM image were successfully resolved, though some partition type issues with Kiwi persist. The group also briefly discussed aligning with the wider Fedora ecosystem by exploring a Borg-based backup solution, as backup coverage for F44 Server is currently lacking.

On the Ansible front, work is nearing completion to package the Server Ansible collection as an RPM, which will soon be released on Copr. Contributors identified idempotency and permission issues in the postinstall role, leading to plans to set up a molecule testing harness to test idempotence continuously. Finally, an announcement was shared on the mailing list regarding the upcoming F45 Blocker Review meeting for finalizing the release.

Decisions

• The group decided to hold off on immediately fixing the Kiwi partition type issue, as it is non-blocking and can be corrected during post-installation.
• Agreed to provision a dedicated VM for a molecule testing harness to ensure idempotence across the Ansible collection.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are asked to keep an eye on the F45 Beta testing tickets and claim tasks by leaving a comment.
• The working group is seeking help to draft the first versions of user documentation for their new Ansible support.
• There is a known gap in backup strategies and coverage for F44 Server; contributors familiar with backup tools (like Borg) have an opportunity to help shape Server backup documentation and defaults.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure group entered the Fedora 45 Final Infrastructure Freeze on October 6th, locking down system changes until after the release. Operations this week involved handling s390x hypervisor memory issues, replacing a failing RAID controller on a Copr builder host, and resolving an EPEL 10 repository access issue caused by version differences between RHEL and CentOS Stream. Additionally, discussions continued on migrating from Bugzilla to Forgejo, tracking AWS resource costs, and optimizing LLM code reviews on Forgejo.

The team welcomed several new contributors this week and processed multiple new tracking groups in FAS (including Fedora Java Lounge, dpdk, Regolith, and Free Explorers) alongside updates to mailing list ownerships and documentation fixes.

Decisions

• The Fedora 45 Final Infrastructure Freeze is in effect until at least October 20th. Frozen hosts should have no changes made to them without a sign-off from at least 2 sysadmin-main or rel-eng members.
• For CentOS 10 containers failing to install EPEL packages, a temporary workaround has been provided (dnf -y install epel-release && dnf -y upgrade epel-release) until RHEL 10.3 is released in November and the main epel-release-latest-10 symlink can be safely updated.
• Due to repeatedly failing disks on vmhost-p09-copr03, the host will be swapped out for a spare IAD2 Power9 host rather than reinstalling the existing faulty hardware.
• The Bugzilla to Forgejo migration assessment is underway; the team notes significant required workflow adaptations (e.g., losing global issue tracking and rewriting automated scripts like bugzilla2fedmsg and the-new-hotness).
• Documentation sources for the Fedora Design Suite Wiki are migrating directly to Forgejo instead of relying on a MediaWiki OIDC integration.

Contribution opportunities

• Review untagged AWS resources older than 24 hours. Owners must add the FedoraGroup tag to prevent automated deletion.
• Help is requested to create a playbook to automate the creation of tracking groups, which requires defining variables for description/display names and setting up FAS group configurations.
• The team welcomes newcomers! Interested contributors are encouraged to read the Infrastructure Join Guide and start with good-first-issues or small ticket requests in #noc:fedoraproject.org.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, the Release Engineering team successfully initiated the Fedora 45 Final Freeze. The team managed several critical build and infrastructure issues, including fixing a permissions bug that caused 403 errors on PXE boot images, resolving an AWS IAM role policy issue that broke Fedora CoreOS uploads, and mitigating an XML parsing failure on Koji builders triggered by a Python 3.14 update.

Looking forward, discussions and preparations have begun for a major system-wide change in Fedora 46 to switch to the RPMv6 package format. The team plans to test the rollout conservatively in a side-tag using a few select packages before considering broader implementation.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 officially entered its Final Freeze phase on October 6 (Issue #13544).
• Bug 2540692 (Cannot authenticate to secure wifi during gnome-initial-setup) was accepted as a Fedora 45 Final Blocker during the October 5 Blocker Review meeting.
• Bug 2545485 (Storage editor ignores BTRFS subvolumes under specific naming conditions) was rejected as a Final Blocker but accepted as a Freeze Exception during the October 5 Blocker Review meeting.
• The Fedora-ELN-NetworkInstaller package was created in the eln tag so Fedora ELN can transition to using image-builder for building artifacts (Issue #13547).

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are invited to review and provide feedback on the Fedora 46 change proposal to switch to the RPMv6 package format (wiki proposal here).
• Contributors can help streamline release efforts by voting on proposed blocker and freeze exception bugs prior to the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meetings.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team is highly focused on the final stages of the Fedora 45 release, which has officially entered the Final Freeze. Release validation is currently in progress, with strong test coverage and a relatively short blocker list. The team has been actively testing major new features, including kmscon userspace consoles and imagebuilder-built installer images, and recently discovered and fixed a longstanding bug affecting missing console keyboard layouts.

Test Days remain a major focus, with the Anaconda and CoreOS events concluding, and the Podman Conmon-v3 Test Days scheduled for mid-October. The team also conducted their weekly blocker review meeting, discussed streamlining predictable release chores by adding them to the automatic blockers list, and published the Q3 Heroes of Fedora Quality statistics to highlight and thank top community contributors.

Decisions

• It was generally agreed on the mailing list to add 'updates-testing repository still being enabled' and 'fedora-release package having a release number lower than 1' to the automatic Final release blockers list to save time during future blocker reviews.
• Bug 2540692 (Cannot authenticate to secure wifi during gnome-initial-setup) was officially accepted as a Fedora 45 Final Blocker.
• Bug 2545485 (Storage editor ignores BTRFS subvolume(s) if partition has the same filesystem label) was rejected as a Final Blocker but accepted as a Final Freeze Exception.
• Decision on Bug 2544626 (aarch Server DVD image install fails on RPi4 without network connection) was punted for a future meeting due to a lack of clear consensus.
• To resolve ongoing CI frustrations in dist-git PRs, rpmlint spelling checks will be downgraded to output warnings rather than errors (Issue #591).

Contribution opportunities

• Testers are needed for the upcoming Podman Conmon-v3 Test Days from 2026-10-12 to 2026-10-18.
• Contributors are encouraged to help improve the Heroes of Fedora Quality tools and workflows by automating the data collection and output generation for tester statistics.
• The team is seeking help to automate the mediakit checksums test case, which is currently performed entirely manually.
• Anyone with access to Beaker hardware is invited to help test F45 installations on bare metal and assist in writing a short guide for reserving machines.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

The Websites and Apps team updated the Fedora download pages to visually highlight release-blocking deliverables with a star, clarifying for end users which images are fully tested by the Fedora Quality team versus those that are not. In the Fedora Websites Matrix room, the team discussed improving overall page load speeds by converting images to WebP format, bundling fonts, and downscaling new screenshots to 1360x768.

In the Fedora Apps Matrix room, a new build of Anitya was deployed to the staging environment for testing ahead of an upcoming release. The team also diagnosed a temporary rate-limiting issue with crates.io on release-monitoring, and clarified user confusion around the Badges admin interface, explaining that the UI remains visible but permission checks are safely performed retroactively when actions are attempted. Lastly, a forum discussion was started regarding the verbosity and excessive use of emojis in LLM-generated code reviews on Forgejo.

Decisions

• Release-blocking deliverables on the Fedora download pages are now explicitly marked with a star to distinguish them from non-blocking images that lack guaranteed testing.
• Secondary navigation bar logos on Fedora websites were updated to monochrome SVGs to improve visual consistency and reduce bandwidth.
• New website screenshots for the upcoming Fedora 45 release will be scaled down to a 1360x768 resolution to help optimize page load times.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to update screenshots for Fedora 45 across all Editions, Spins, and Atomic Desktops.
• There is an open opportunity to remove outdated references to Zanata in the event CMS templates and replace them with references to Fedora Weblate.
• Contributors interested in website optimization can help investigate improving page load times by converting large images to the WebP format or bundling fonts.
• There is a long-standing wishlist item to create reusable event-specific page templates for major events (like FOSDEM, SCaLE, and DevConf), which currently rely on the Fedora Wiki.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Fedora Design team delivered promotional graphics and visual assets for the upcoming F45 Virtual Release Party, including social media banners and streaming templates. The team also concluded an investigation into Bugzilla workflow dependencies, confirming they exclusively use Forgejo and will be unaffected by Bugzilla's upcoming retirement. Additionally, a pull request was submitted to add CSS branding for the new WebUI-based installer to the fedora-logos package.

In their weekly meeting, the team reviewed CDUX logo mockups and managed their backlog by closing stale tickets. To improve workflows, they are restructuring their ticket queues to separate feature improvements from operational tasks. Ongoing open tasks include creating a high-resolution logo for GDM to fix fractional scaling blurriness, designing the F46 beta wallpapers, and crafting an avatar for the Matrix moderation bot.

Decisions

• Bugzilla Sunset Assessment: The team determined that the Bugzilla retirement will not impact their workflow, as they exclusively use Forgejo. No further migration planning is required for the Design group.
• Ticket Queue Restructuring: The group decided to establish a separation between standard operational tasks and feature improvements, planning to use a feature/improvements label.
• CDUX Logo Update: The team agreed to replace the fountain pen with a paintbrush in mockup 1C of the CDUX logo.

Contribution opportunities

• Design event-kit hex stickers for CentOS and EPEL, as requested in the Matrix chat.
• Provide a high-resolution (at least 600px width) SVG-derived Fedora logo to fix fractional scaling blurriness in the GDM greeter out-of-the-box experience (Issue #87).
• Create a new avatar for the Matrix Moderation bot (Issue #68).
• Help design the "Beta" wallpaper for Fedora 46 ahead of the mid-November deadline (Issue #77).
• Conduct initial user experience research on existing Fedora remix sites and Jekyll themes for Project Resistor (Issue #84).

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Docs team focused heavily on restructuring their Antora site architecture to allow for flexible module inclusion across different Special Interest Groups (SIGs). They decided to merge components under the ROOT namespace to shorten URLs and simplify maintenance, a massive change that will be tested incrementally on a newly configured staging instance. Furthermore, the team made progress integrating new AI/ML SIG and Security team documentation into the main user documentation structure.

Additionally, the team prepared the Beginner's Guide for the upcoming Fedora 45 release, resolved accessibility issues with image descriptions, and advanced collaborative writing efforts with a live CryptPad instance running in CommuniShift.

Decisions

• To accommodate cross-repository module inclusion (such as the new Security SIG user docs), all Docs repositories will transition to using ROOT as their antora.yml component name, which drops component names from the URLs altogether. This will be implemented and tested on a staging instance first, as discussed in Ticket #66 and the Oct 6 Meeting.
• The Security team's new user-facing documentation module will temporarily be included at the Fedora Linux latest index until the repository grows large enough to warrant its own dedicated space (Ticket #65).
• The obsolete prod branch in the builder repository will be renamed to main, pending successful testing on the staging Forge (Ticket #61).

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to provide feedback and suggest missing commands for a new WIP Git cheat sheet for writers.
• Reviewers are requested to proofread the Vorta backup section in the Beginner's Guide for typos before the Fedora 45 release.
• Community members can test the experimental Cryptpad instance in CommuniShift to evaluate its suitability for collaborative documentation drafting.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Legal

This week, the Legal group discussed the licensing of several projects and revisited existing policies. A significant portion of the conversation revolved around Fedora's policy on the CC0 license (also discussed here), which is currently restricted for software due to its explicit lack of patent grants. Despite user arguments to reconsider based on the license's "quiet enjoyment" waiver, legal experts maintained that the ban remains appropriate and aligns with both the license's original drafting history and current Free Software Foundation guidance.

Other discussions addressed specific packaging efforts. The Slint UI Framework was reviewed, and it was clarified that its GPL-3.0-only option is acceptable for packaging despite its broader dual-licensing and inbound MIT-0 contribution policy. Finally, a review of the koneko package determined that copyrighted third-party sprites must be removed at the source tarball stage to comply with distribution guidelines.

Decisions

• The koneko package's source tarball must be modified to remove copyrighted Cardcaptor Sakura artwork before it can be packaged.
• The Slint UI Framework is acceptable for packaging in Fedora under its GPL-3.0-only license option.

Learn more about the Legal team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL team navigated tooling updates for the EPEL 10 transition, noting a bug in fedrq and a new mock release that simplifies repository configurations. In EPEL 9, Qt6 is being updated to version 6.10.3, which requires rebuilding a handful of dependent packages. Additionally, maintainers announced the retirement of several packages, and work continues on creating Koschei playbooks for minor End-of-Life and mass branching processes.

Decisions

• rust-libz-rs-sys is being retired from EPEL 9 and EPEL 10 by its maintainer, as it has been a leaf package for some time and is no longer useful for general development.
• singularity-ce will be retired from EPEL at the start of November, following the upstream project reaching End of Life / End of Engineering.
• python-sphinxcontrib-apidoc is being retired from EPEL 8 and EPEL 9 because it has been uninstallable. Maintenance will continue for EPEL 10, with a community member stepping up to help manage it.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed to fix obs-studio build failures against the new Qt 6.10.3 update in EPEL 9. The maintainer is open to suggestions and has provided a Copr repository for testing installs and builds.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

During the October 6, 2026 meeting, the ELN SIG discussed the transition to building boot.iso with image-builder. Minor OpenQA failures were noted in Rawhide, prompting the team to postpone the switch for a week to allow the changes to stabilize before being pulled into RHEL and CentOS Stream. The group also reviewed ELN Extras build failures (FTBFS), noting ongoing fixes for OpenSSL 4.0 compatibility (the_foundation and libesmtp) and resolving KDE issues caused by missed rebuilds. Finally, the team addressed Bodhi updates getting stuck due to planned outages and agreed on a procedural change to prevent this in the future.

Decisions

• The team decided to delay the switch to building boot.iso with image-builder until next week to let recent Rawhide changes stabilize (Releng Ticket #13547).
• Infrastructure documentation and procedures will be updated to automatically pause and unpause elnbuildsync (EBS) during future planned outages to prevent updates from becoming stuck (Meeting Log).

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group focused heavily on the unification of Fedora CoreOS and Atomic efforts under the new project name, "Atomic Fusion." The team held their first dedicated video meeting to discuss Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), specifically focusing on a unified base image architecture built with Konflux, which excludes cloudinit and ignition to minimize attack surfaces. They also established standard operating procedures for the project, including a weekly Thursday video meeting cadence, a "Doacracy" work prioritization model, and utilizing a renamed Matrix channel for communication.

In addition to unification planning, several technical issues were addressed for Fedora 45. The group merged a change to use kmscon as the default VT console in F45, resolving dependencies to bring it to bootc base images. A packaging bug causing COSMIC Atomic spin rawhide composes to fail was fixed in the latest compose, and an update was pushed to fix a missing public key error during system upgrades. The team is also actively investigating a boot failure and emergency mode issue affecting users who upgrade on non-BTRFS filesystems.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 will use kmscon as the default VT console for Atomic images (Source).
• The official project name for the CoreOS and Atomic unification effort is "Atomic Fusion" (Source).
• The team will prioritize work using a "Doacracy" model, meaning contributors who step up to do the work will set the immediate task priorities (Source).
• Unification meetings will be held weekly over video on Thursdays, as listed on the Fedocal SIG calendar (Source).
• The old initiative Matrix channel has been officially renamed to serve as the main workspace for unification discussions (Source).

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to consolidate the initial Architectural Decision Record (ADR) subdecisions for the unified base image into a single reviewable pull request. Interested contributors should join the Bootable Image Unification channel on Matrix to coordinate (Source).
• Community members are invited to participate in the CoreOS and Atomic Unification effort by joining the newly scheduled weekly video calls on Thursdays and assisting with the migration to the unified architecture.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

The Fedora CoreOS and bootc teams have officially begun merging their efforts, moving unification planning and architecture discussions to a dedicated Thursday video call, while leveraging the regular Wednesday meeting to handle current events, challenges, and tickets for both offerings. As the Fedora 45 Final Freeze is underway, several important fixes have successfully landed, including using kmscon as the default VT console, removing DTBs on aarch64 to save space in the boot partition, and officially declaring the composefs backend stable in bootc 1.17.0.

The community also addressed a slew of hardware and platform-specific pipeline issues this week. Notably, an AWS AMI import pipeline failure caused by a missing IAM role permission was resolved, and Azure Confidential VMs (CVMs) not picking up Ignition custom data was fixed via an upstream Ignition update. Meanwhile, the group agreed to use a build postprocess to patch dracut 111 errors on rawhide rather than continuing to wait on delayed upstream RPM backports.

Decisions

• Decided to unify CoreOS and bootc community meetings and outputs, establishing a regular Thursday video call for architecture and planning.
• Decided to remove Device Tree Blobs (DTBs) on aarch64 builds in Fedora 45 and later to save space in the /boot partition (#2222).
• Decided to manually patch a known failing file in dracut directly during the build postprocess for Fedora \<= 46 instead of waiting on upstream RPM updates (#2206).
• Decided to limit data collection for LLM-powered weekly reports strictly to official meeting logs and GitHub repositories, excluding raw chat conversations due to privacy concerns (#2223).

Contribution opportunities

• Volunteers are needed to help clean up FCOS manifest overrides, which largely involves following up with upstream package maintainers. Interested contributors can reach out in the CoreOS meeting channel.
• Contributors are invited to help write and consolidate Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) for the unified base image architecture. Interested parties should join the Bootable Image Unification channel on Matrix (as noted in the forum discussion).

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

This week, the IoT group focused on standardizing bootable image architectures and general repository housekeeping. The newly named "Atomic Fusion" project held a kickoff meeting for bootable image unification, proposing an Architectural Decision Record (ADR) that leverages container files and downstream variants while excluding cloudinit and ignition to minimize attack surfaces. They also recommended using Konflux as the standard build system for all Fedora bootable image outputs and systemd system extensions for platform-specific configurations.

In parallel, the team closed several long-standing tickets, highlighting that the Fedora ROS2 testing repository is now officially available in the ROS2 documentation as a result of collaboration with the Robotics SIG. Other closed trackers included updates for the deprecation of the Zezere provisioning tool, resolving Lua script upgrade errors, missing license files in osbuild installers, and initial bootc container builds.

Decisions

• The bootable image unification project was officially named "Atomic Fusion".
• Atomic Fusion's base image will exclude cloudinit and ignition to minimize attack surfaces, manage platform-specific configurations via systemd system extensions, and use Konflux as the standard build system for all Fedora bootable image outputs.
• The Fedora ROS2 testing repository was officially declared available for use in the ROS2 documentation, expanding Fedora's support for robotics and factory automation use cases.

Contribution opportunities

• Contribute to the Atomic Fusion image unification work by reviewing and consolidating Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) in the project's Forgejo repository.
• Join the Bootable Image Unification channel on Matrix to participate in ongoing discussions about unified base image architectures.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

The ARM community was notified of the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, scheduled for October 12, 2026, at 16:00 UTC on Matrix. The meeting will focus on evaluating 4 proposed blockers and 7 proposed freeze exceptions for the Final release to determine if they violate any release criteria.

Participants were strongly encouraged to review the bug lists and cast their votes ahead of time using the blockerbugs app, which helps streamline the meeting and reduce its overall duration.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and vote on proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions for Fedora 45 prior to the meeting using the blockerbugs app or Pagure tickets.
• Attend the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting on October 12, 2026, at 16:00 UTC via Matrix.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Alternative Images

The Alternative Images group met to discuss the upcoming quarterly image updates, which are targeted for release in roughly two weeks. A major highlight for this quarter's release will be the introduction of the project's first aarch64 raw images, generated using KIWI configuration.

In addition to the upcoming images, the team reported progress on building RISC-V packages for CentOS Stream 10 and processing Qt 6 updates for EPEL9. Testing for these alternative architectures has also improved, as team members noted that transitioning development laptops to Fedora CSB has successfully enabled multi-arch virtualization for local aarch64 and riscv image testing.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed to patch or update obs-studio for EPEL9; it is currently failing to build during the Qt 6 updates because GUI-Private was removed in Qt 6.10 (Meeting log).

Learn more about the Alternative Images team.

Hummingbird

The Hummingbird group kicked off its video meeting cadence for the bootable image unification effort, which aims to merge the CoreOS and Atomic Initiatives. During the October 8 meeting, the team reviewed a proposed unified base image architecture that leverages container files and downstream variants, excluding cloudinit and ignition to minimize attack surfaces. They also discussed handling platform-specific configurations via systemd system extensions and recommended Konflux as the standard build system.

The group established a formal process using Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) to track project decisions. Moving forward, the team officially adopted "Atomic Fusion" as the project name and began scaffolding an umbrella ADR to consolidate their initial architectural choices into a single reviewable document.

Decisions

• Accepted "Atomic Fusion" as the official project name for the bootable image unification effort (Original topic).
• Adopted a formal Architectural Decision Record (ADR) management process, utilizing sequential numbering and proposal PRs to review and ratify architectural choices (Original topic).

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to participate in consolidating the first round of unified base image architecture decisions on Forgejo Pull Request #2.
• Interested community members can join the discussion in the Bootable Image Unification Matrix channel (Original topic).

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

Kernel

In a discussion regarding an RFC on splitting perf out of the kernel packaging, Fedora Python maintainers expressed a desire for the split. This separation would allow them to independently rebuild perf for Python packaging changes without requiring kernel-level signing permissions. However, other community members questioned whether this is a significant hurdle, noting that Rawhide kernels are already built almost daily to keep up with upstream changes.

Learn more about the Kernel team.

AI

The AI/ML SIG is making significant progress on the ROCm 10.1 stack, which is currently available in the preview COPR and compiling cleanly with downstream consumers like PyTorch. The updated toolchain introduces LLVM 24, preliminary support for the Khronos SPIR-V standard, and initial compiler support for the gfx1170 APU, with a multi-day Koji sidetag rebuild expected soon.

On the community front, the group agreed to enable an opt-in LLM summarization bot for the This Week in Fedora (TWIF) weekly reports to improve external visibility. Additionally, the SIG is debating a proposal to migrate documentation from the Fedora Wiki to Fedora Docs to align with standard project infrastructure, alongside discussions on authoring new beginner-friendly AI tutorials.

Decisions

• Allow the This Week in Fedora (TWIF) summarization bot to ingest the public SIG Matrix chat history on a trial basis to generate weekly reports for the wider community (Ticket #39).
• Relocate automated Forgejo bot notifications from the main Matrix room to a dedicated, opt-in alerts room to keep human discussions clear of clutter (Ticket #42).
• Grant forge-ai-ml-owners membership to @jflory7 to manage organization-wide labels and webhooks on the Fedora Forge repositories (Ticket #41).

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are invited to participate in the upcoming Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Leads (FRCL) open discussion on "Which LLM-gen-AI models are more aligned with Fedora?" scheduled for October 14 (Ticket #43).
• Contributors are welcome to help draft and shape beginner-friendly getting-started guides for Fedora Linux, focusing on topics like local AI inference (Ollama, RamaLama), GPU tuning, and AI coding agents (Ticket #6).

Learn more about the AI team.

RISC-V

This week, the RISC-V team focused heavily on preparing Fedora 45 (successfully testing Server, Cloud, and Container images) and progressing the Fedora 46 sync, analyzing the content-set diffs compared to the main Koji. Significant effort was directed toward bootstrapping Fedora ELN for riscv64, which involved configuring Koji tags, managing test suite failures in problematic packages, and successfully building LLVM from vanilla Fedora sources.

Kernel development centered on the Omni kernel, with maintainers preparing to adopt the upstream kernel 7.3 for F45. The team also investigated a persistent GCC build segmentation fault on K3 hardware and actively participated remotely in the Linux Plumbers RISC-V Microconference.

Decisions

• Disable the openmpi test suite on riscv64 due to persistent hardware-specific hangs to unblock the Fedora ELN bootstrap.
• Remove the VF2 PCIe patch from the unpatched Fedora 7.3 kernel for Fedora 45, steering users of older hardware toward the Omni kernel instead.
• Disable the MLIR execution engine in LLVM 21.1.1 for RISC-V to bypass unresolved test failures (Issue #2).
• Hold off on manually fixing empty debugsource packages caused by lack of LTO, as GCC 17 will naturally resolve this issue later this year.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed from compiler experts to debug and resolve a GCC build segmentation fault on K3 hardware.
• Contributors are invited to help test the Fedora 45 Server, Cloud, and Container RISC-V images.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

NeuroFedora

The NeuroFedora group has successfully reached out to a non-responsive maintainer and consolidated admin rights for all neuro-packages to streamline review and cleanup efforts. This administrative update supports the team's ongoing initiative to reduce their Python packaging footprint by relying on direct installations from PyPI where appropriate. A dedicated test suite has been implemented to monitor the status of these packages and is now running regularly.

The group is currently reviewing packages that fail to install on Python 3.14 and 3.15 in the new test suite, and is considering limiting their automated tests strictly to pre-compiled wheels. Furthermore, team members have agreed to include their public activity in these weekly summaries for the Fedora community.

Decisions

• Admin rights for all neuro-packages were granted to active team members to facilitate the review and retirement of unneeded packages.
• The team finalized its strategy for reducing its Python packaging maintenance, replacing direct maintenance of some packages with a regular test suite to track compatibility.
• The group approved the collection of their public tracking and discussion data for automated weekly Fedora community reports.

Contribution opportunities

• Provide feedback on packages failing to install on Python 3.14 and 3.15 and discuss whether the test suite should be restricted to checking pre-compiled wheels only.

Learn more about the NeuroFedora team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused on maintaining and updating key packages, primarily resolving several lingering pull requests. Maintainers manually incorporated commits to update the rt (Request Tracker) package to version 5.0.10 after encountering merge conflicts, and a new draft pull request was recently opened to push rt further to version 6.0.3.

Additionally, housekeeping efforts led to the closure of older, redundant pull requests in rt and perl-Plack, while a dependency update was successfully merged for perl-Package-Generator to conditionalize Params::Util.

Decisions

• Merged a pull request to conditionalize the Params::Util dependency in perl-Package-Generator.
• Closed an outdated pull request intended to fix build-require paths for rt, as the necessary font build requirements (font(droidsans) and font(droidsansfallback)) had already been updated by maintainers.
• Manually incorporated commits to update rt to 5.0.10 due to merge and rebase conflicts, subsequently closing the original pull request.
• Closed a pull request to drop support for mod_perl in EL9 and later in perl-Plack because the author already possesses repository commit access.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Rust

This week, the Rust community was alerted to a looming issue affecting crun-vm builds. Fabio Valentini notified the maintainers that several of the project's dependencies are currently orphaned and are slated for removal from Fedora within the next one to two weeks. The affected packages include rust-rxml, rust-rxml_proc, rust-weak-table, rust-rxml_validation, and rust-minidom.

Contribution opportunities

• Maintainers are urgently needed to take ownership of five orphaned Rust packages (rust-rxml, rust-rxml_proc, rust-weak-table, rust-rxml_validation, and rust-minidom). Community members must step up to unorphan these packages to prevent crun-vm builds from breaking due to missing dependencies.

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• Shivank Sharma asked if signing the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA) automatically grants access to award badges. Akashdeep Dhar clarified that while the admin frontend becomes visible, the user's authorizations dictate which badges they can actually award.
• Miroslav Suchý shared a list of newly added packages in Fedora Linux for September 2026, generated from the rawhide-changes script.
• Gordon Messmer inquired about how to contact the crypto team to add AWS s2n-tls to Fedora, noting that their mailing list is closed to non-members. Dmitry Belyavskiy offered to discuss the issue at the upcoming OpenSSL conference.
• Abdallah Shehawey proposed packaging a source-only version of whatsapp-desktop relying on a system-provided Electron runtime. The discussion highlighted the challenges of maintaining multiple Electron versions in Fedora and keeping dependent packages synced.
• Fabio Valentini reached out to find the maintainer of julia, noting that unmerged pull requests are causing FTBFS errors in Fedora 45 and that the non-responsive maintainer process has been initiated.
• Alejandro Lopez asked why rpminspect was reporting insecure mode failures for a sudo merge request on ELN. Dave Cantrell explained that the rpminspect environment lacked a product definition for ELN, leading to the creation of a new tracking ticket.
• Michel Lind proposed splitting the perf tool out of the kernel packaging to reduce build requirements, simplify the package spec, and avoid requiring kernel rebuilds when updating Python packaging.
• Julian Sikorski asked for advice on adding openh264 as a build requirement for MAME. Neal Gompa and Michael J Gruber recommended using the system package via pkgconfig and stripping the bundled source from the tarball during the prep phase to avoid patent issues.
• Chih-Tao Lee initiated a non-responsive maintainer check for python-authlib and successfully stepped up to co-maintain it alongside the RHEL Lightspeed group.
• Aoife Moloney shared the summary of the latest Fedora Council meeting, noting an agreement to implement a "Decision Support Process" instead of strict Conflict of Interest Guidelines, and starting discussions for Flock 2027 CfP themes.
• Other discussions included a reminder for the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, a review request for coconut-svsm for confidential computing, a non-responsive maintainer check for Luis Bazan, deleted branches and commits in the glibc-maintainer-scripts repo on the glibc mailing list, and updates in the Fedora Docs Matrix channel covering pull requests for image accessibility, rebuilding site scripts, and FIDO2 PIN commands.

Orphaning packages

• Michael Catanzaro announced he is orphaning WebKitGTK across all branches due to leaving his job, with Fabio Valentini volunteering to take over maintenance.
• Benson Muite announced the orphaning of python-proton-vpn-network-manager due to lack of time to maintain its required dependencies, which now involve Rust.

Package updates

• Richard Shaw updated OpenColorIO to version 2.6, handling an upstream SONAME bump and successfully rebuilding all dependent packages.
• Kaleb Keithley announced an update to Apache Arrow 26.0.0, which includes a libarrow SONAME bump and requires rebuilding dependent packages like ceph and gdal in a side tag.
• Antonio Trande announced that PETSc is being updated to 3.26 in Rawhide and F45, and listed the dependencies that require rebuilding.
• Stephen Gallagher warned of a backwards-incompatible update to python-openai 3.24.0 in Rawhide and F45, making HTTPX2 the default and removing deprecated CLI tools.

New contributors

• Andrew Heath introduced themselves, sharing a decade of enterprise Linux and infrastructure-as-code experience, and is looking for a sponsor to help with packaging, image building, and QA.

All contribution opportunities

Contributors with a passion for Quality Assurance and Testing have numerous accessible entry points to help ensure a stable release. Community members are highly encouraged to shorten review meetings by voting early on proposed Fedora 45 blockers and freeze exceptions for Workstation, KDE, ARM, and Release Engineering using the blockerbugs app. Hands-on testers can jump into the Podman Conmon-v3 Test Days or the KDE Plasma 6.8.0 Test Day. If you prefer trying out new builds, you can claim F45 Beta Server testing tickets, run bare-metal installations on Beaker hardware, or test upcoming RISC-V images.

Those skilled in Technical Writing, Community Feedback, and Documentation can make an immediate impact without deep technical onboarding. Writers and editors are needed to proofread the Beginner's Guide Vorta backup section, draft new AI getting-started guides, and create documentation for Server's new Ansible support. Reviewers can also provide valuable insights by suggesting missing commands for a Git cheat sheet, testing a collaborative Cryptpad instance, or weighing in on broad ecosystem changes like the RPMv6 format transition (feedback ticket) and AI model alignment. Additionally, contributors can help coordinate cross-team efforts by reviewing Bootable Image Unification ADRs or sharing thoughts on Mindshare's committee representation adjustments.

For contributors specializing in Design, Web Development, and Automation, several creative and structural tasks are open. Designers are invited to create CentOS/EPEL hex stickers, design the F46 Beta wallpaper, craft an avatar for the Matrix Moderation bot, and supply a high-resolution SVG Fedora logo for GDM. Web developers can help update apps.fedoraproject.org, replace outdated Zanata references with Fedora Weblate in CMS templates, and assist with website optimization and reusable event templates. Meanwhile, scripters and automation enthusiasts can improve infrastructure by automating AppStream data generation, tester statistics (Heroes of Fedora), mediakit checksums, and Infrastructure tracking groups.

Finally, experts in Software Packaging, Debugging, and Systems Engineering are in high demand to maintain the ecosystem's backbone. C/C++ developers can assist in resolving a GCC build segmentation fault on RISC-V K3 hardware or fixing obs-studio build failures against the new Qt 6.10 framework in EPEL. Maintainers are urgently needed to adopt five critical orphaned Rust packages to prevent VM build breakages, alongside other tools like julia and transifex-client. Systems engineers can make an impact by reviewing untagged AWS resources, evaluating Python test suite restrictions, or assisting with the CoreOS and Atomic unification migration. Members with strong leadership experience can also step up to sponsor the Fedora Docs 2025 Initiative.