Across the Fedora project, community groups are heavily focused on three overarching initiatives this week. First, following the successful launch of the Fedora 45 Beta, teams spanning Release Engineering, Quality, Infrastructure, and various desktop variants (like GNOME and KDE) are actively organizing test weeks, managing freeze exceptions, triaging blocker bugs, and rolling out a broad reduction in release-blocking legacy storage criteria in preparation for the Fedora 45 Final release. Second, a massive cross-group strategic effort has kicked off to unify the CoreOS working group and the Atomic Initiative; these teams are establishing centralized communication channels, Forgejo boards, and Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) to develop a shared base image for IoT, desktop, and server deliverables. Finally, nearly every Special Interest Group and committee is actively debating consent policies for automated LLM data collection used in weekly community reports, with many teams specifically opting their Matrix chat channels out of the summaries to preserve informal, welcoming spaces for newcomers. Alongside these major efforts, developers are collectively managing the oo7-daemon secrets service transition, executing mass package orphanings for non-responsive maintainers, and handling systemic version bumps for core packages like LLVM and libxml2.

Announcements

The highly anticipated Fedora 45 Beta has been officially released, as detailed across the main discussion topic, a community cross-post, the announce mailing list, and the devel-announce mailing list. Early adopters upgrading via rpm-ostree with RPM Fusion repositories should anticipate some manual workaround requirements, and users have reported temporary download delays while mirrors synchronize. In tandem, the Fedora Linux Asahi Remix 45 Beta is now available, bringing the latest changes to Apple Silicon hardware. In other general news, a recent guide outlines BTRFS boot failure and GUI methods for system recovery using live ISOs, while a post-event report from Data Con LA 2026 highlights a highly successful joint booth with openSUSE showcasing offline local AI, which will help shape a new Small Events Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the community.

For contributors looking for active engagement opportunities, the QA team is hosting the CoreOS 45 Test Week starting September 21, calling for community help to verify the upcoming release before it hits stable streams. Additionally, Fedora Podcast 060 announced a major leadership transition: Shaun McCance is stepping in as the new Fedora Community Architect as Justin Wheeler transitions into an AI Alignment role. The podcast team is also actively seeking a volunteer producer to assist behind the scenes with episode scheduling and guest management.

Council

This week, the Council discussed the kickoff for the unification of the CoreOS working group and the Atomic Initiative. The initiative aims to create a shared base image supporting various downstream needs (IoT, desktops, servers, automotive). The team established a dual meeting cadence, a unified Matrix channel, and a new Forgejo board for tracking. Additionally, the Council concluded their evaluation of a temporary private issues process for Fedora Forge and fixed a minor formatting bug in their ticket template.

The Council confirmed that the new temporary workaround for filing private issues on Fedora Forge satisfies their requirements. They also noted that issue locking can be utilized for public-read, restricted-comment scenarios. With these processes validated, the related ticket was closed.

Decisions

• As part of the CoreOS/Atomic Initiative Unification Kickoff, the group decided to centralize communication in the Matrix channel #bootc:fedoraproject.org, track tasks on a new Forgejo board, and use an Architectural Decision Record (ADR) repository for complex technical debates (such as Ignition vs. cloud-init).
• The Council agreed that the proposed private issues process workaround adequately satisfies their requirements for handling sensitive matters on Fedora Forge and closed the ticket as completed.

Contribution opportunities

• Stakeholders of the CoreOS and Atomic Initiatives (especially those involved with IoT and Atomic Desktops) are encouraged to brainstorm ideas, blockers, and priorities in the Etherpad shared in the unification thread.
• Community members interested in the CoreOS/Atomic unification are invited to join the upcoming video call (details and links to be posted in the forum thread).

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo focused on finalizing updates for Fedora 45 ahead of the final freeze and managing non-responsive maintainers. Key actions included approving a major late-stage security update for libxml2 as an Updates Policy Exception, enforcing deadlines for the LLVM 23 update, and limiting the oo7 Secrets Service Provider transition to exclude KDE for this cycle.

Additionally, a massive wave of package orphanings was initiated due to a non-responsive maintainer, though several developers have already stepped up to adopt critical packages. A severe bug regarding kmscon breaking display managers by holding DRM master was also identified and proposed as a release blocker.

Decisions

• The oo7 transition is in progress and will be completed for all deliverables except KDE variants, which are deferred to a future Change.
• The LLVM 23 update must be pushed to stable by Friday, and maintainers must address test failures.
• Approved an Updates Policy Exception to upgrade libxml2 to 2.15.4 in Fedora 45 to address multiple critical CVEs.
• Approved the non-responsive maintainer process for lkundrak, reassigning python-anytree and scheduling over 70 other packages for orphaning.
• Approved the non-responsive maintainer process for mcbeeffx (low-memory-monitor, drpm), moving toward orphaning.

Contribution opportunities

• Multiple packages are slated to be orphaned following the non-responsive maintainer process for lkundrak. While critical packages like NetworkManager have been adopted, dozens of smaller packages (e.g., various perl-*, rubygem-*, and erlang-* libraries) need new maintainers.
• The packages low-memory-monitor and drpm are being orphaned following the non-responsive maintainer process for mcbeeffx and need a new maintainer.
• A community member is looking for co-maintainers and someone to sponsor adoption of the mcelog package in Ticket #3665.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

The Packaging Committee focused heavily this week on simplifying the snapshot versioning guidelines after an incorrect package versioning incident broke an upgrade path for bluez and caused inappropriately waived openQA test failures (discussed in Ticket #1569). The committee recognized that having six different acceptable formats for snapshot versions causes confusion and leads to mistakes that break user upgrades.

During their weekly meeting, the committee decided to begin simplifying these rules. They agreed to completely drop the legacy "snapshot-in-release" format from the main guidelines and move it to a historical reference page. Additionally, Ticket #1570 was opened to discuss standardizing on a single "snapshot-in-version" format going forward. The committee also noted its support for potential policy changes that would require QA team approval to waive certain critical openQA tests, such as version regression checks.

Decisions

• Remove the legacy "snapshot-in-release" format from the main packaging guidelines and move it to a historical reference page.
• Formally begin the process of simplifying the "snapshot-in-version" guidelines down to a single standard format.
• Support potential policy changes that would prevent standard provenpackagers from unilaterally waiving specific critical openQA tests (such as "update is older than installed package" tests).

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, Mindshare and CommOps focused heavily on upcoming events, particularly organizing the Fedora 45 Release Party, while also navigating significant internal governance challenges. The Mindshare Committee is dealing with a troubling decline in meeting attendance and ticket curation speed, prompting a dedicated effort to diagnose and correct the lack of participation.

Meanwhile, multiple event support requests for Q3 and Q4 were triaged, with approvals moving forward for Texas Linux Fest and Software Freedom Day Bukidnon. Alongside event planning, community discussions touched on the project's stance regarding LLM/gen-AI models and proposed policies around AI summarization of community Matrix channels.

Decisions

• @jflory7 was appointed F45 Party Wrangler, @shaunm as Promotion & Content lead, and @amoloney as Speaker Management lead for the F45 Release Party (CommOps Meeting).
• Akashdeep (@t0xic0der) will remain the Mindshare representative to the Fedora Council for this cycle, delaying a transition to the next cycle (Ticket #131).
• The committee approved funding and support for Texas Linux Fest 2026 and Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026.
• A formal ticket was opened to diagnose and address the degrading activity and attendance within the Mindshare Committee (Ticket #153).

Contribution opportunities

• Volunteers are needed to fill the Design and Production & Video lead roles for the upcoming Fedora 45 Release Party (CommOps Ticket #143).
• CommOps is seeking a new representative to sit on the Mindshare Committee for the F45-F46 cycle (CommOps Ticket #145).
• Presenters are encouraged to submit 10-minute talks (such as a Data WG presentation) for the F45 Release Party.
• Mindshare needs committee members to actively vote on pending event tickets to alleviate severe processing delays (Ticket #153).

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Fedora Join

This week, the Fedora Join group focused on communication strategies, newcomer privacy, and refining the contributor onboarding experience. A notable discussion involved evaluating how the group's public data is summarized by automated tools; the team opted to exclude their Matrix channel from LLM-generated weekly reports to maintain a relaxed, informal space crucial for welcoming newcomers.

Additionally, the group is working on improving contribution pathways. This includes defining a new ticket status to track users who successfully route their contributions directly to upstream projects, and gathering feedback for the Docs team to highlight both technical and non-technical contribution opportunities on the Fedora Docs frontpage. A proposal to establish regular synchronous meetings was also evaluated but remains on hold pending greater member interest.

Decisions

• The group agreed to allow automated LLM-based data collection for their issue tracker but explicitly rejected collecting data from their Matrix channel to preserve a safe, informal chat environment for new joiners (#351).
• A new status tag (S: User contributes upstream) is being adopted for WelcomeToFedora tickets to celebrate and track prospective Fedora contributors who end up contributing directly to upstream projects (#350).

Contribution opportunities

• The Fedora Docs team is seeking ideas and feedback on a new "Contribution" section for the Docs homepage. They are looking for suggestions on which topics, SIGs, and teams (especially non-technical ones) should be highlighted in order to best attract new contributors (#349).

Learn more about the Fedora Join team.

Workstation / GNOME

During this week, the Workstation / GNOME group discussed changes to default packages, release blocking criteria, and upcoming Fedora 45 features. Key topics included the ongoing migration to the new oo7-daemon for secret management, which encountered integration issues in the F45 beta, and discussions surrounding third-party repository policies. The group also evaluated multiple user proposals regarding default packages and installer behavior.

Notable outcomes from these discussions include the Fedora Quality team reducing the list of release-blocking storage interfaces to exclude outdated hardware, and the working group voting to approve the 1Password third-party repository while deciding to retain gamemode in the default Workstation installation.

Decisions

• Implemented a reduction in the release-blocking storage interfaces during installation, formally removing PATA, SCSI, Firmware RAID, Hardware RAID, Fibre Channel, and FCoE from the blocker criteria (Criteria change proposal).
• Voted to approve adding the 1Password repository to the approved third-party repositories, pending verification that it has appropriate AppStream repodata (Ticket #529, Meeting summary).
• Rejected the proposal to remove gamemode from Workstation, deciding to keep it installed by default unless concrete performance data proves it to be detrimental (Ticket #526, Meeting summary).

Contribution opportunities

• Vote on proposed F45 blockers and freeze exceptions directly through the blockerbugs app prior to review meetings to help shorten the meetings.
• Volunteer to author the "What's New in Fedora Workstation for F45" Fedora Magazine article. The deadline for the pitch is October 6, 2026. The team is particularly interested in highlighting non-GNOME features, such as notable kernel changes.
• Contribute actual performance data or propose functionality equivalents in tuned if you wish to advocate for the removal of gamemode.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group focused on core system components, beta testing, and future desktop defaults. A significant update for the broader Linux community is the complete removal of the X11 launcher in the newly available KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta. Additionally, the QA team has officially reduced the list of release-blocking storage interfaces for the Fedora installer, deprecating older technologies like PATA, Hardware/Firmware RAID, and Fibre Channel from blocker status.

On the desktop side, discussions are ongoing regarding replacing kwallet with the Rust-based oo7-daemon, though this change is officially deferred for KDE due to integration hurdles. There was also a community proposal to make Collabora the default office suite instead of LibreOffice, but it requires substantial packaging work before formal consideration. Finally, an issue was raised regarding system freezes under heavy memory pressure on Fedora Kinoite, where systemd-oomd fails to trigger appropriately.

Decisions

• The list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation has been formally reduced. PATA, parallel SCSI, Firmware RAID, Hardware RAID, Fibre Channel, and FCoE are no longer release-blocking, while SATA, NVMe, SAS, and iSCSI remain blockers.
• The transition from kwallet to oo7-daemon is officially deferred for KDE due to unresolved integration issues, meaning KDE variants will not require oo7 immediately.
• The X11 launcher has been completely removed in the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta.

Contribution opportunities

• Test the newly available KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta via COPR on Fedora 44 or 45, bearing in mind that it may be unstable.
• A maintainer is needed to package Collabora as an RPM in Fedora (starting with a COPR repository) to make it eligible for future Change Proposals regarding the default office suite.
• Contributors familiar with KDE integrations are needed to help resolve migration and implementation issues for replacing kwallet with the oo7-daemon.
• Help is requested to investigate and tweak systemd-oomd configurations to prevent system freezes under extreme memory pressure in interactive Plasma Wayland sessions (Fedora Kinoite).

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Fedora Server Working Group finalized a significant change to the Fedora 45 release criteria, agreeing to remove release-blocking status for several outdated or untestable storage interfaces (including PATA, parallel SCSI, and Hardware RAID) during installation. These hardware interfaces will now be handled on a case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, testing for the Fedora 45 Beta is nearly complete, though a severe, unresolved regression remains regarding LVM partition types for KVM guest and ARM images.

In addition, the group made substantial structural progress on its Ansible support project, deciding to transition their playbooks and roles into a formal Ansible Collection. They have officially claimed the fedoraserver namespace on Ansible Galaxy and are actively preparing to release their core setup utilities under the fedoraserver.general collection, with plans to also provide it as a Copr RPM.

Decisions

• The Server WG approved a criteria change to remove release-blocking status for older storage interfaces (PATA, parallel SCSI, Firmware/Hardware RAID, Fibre Channel, and FCoE) during Fedora 45 installation. Issues will now be handled on a case-by-case basis (Forum Topic).
• The Fedora Server Ansible support tooling will be restructured and published as a collection on Ansible Galaxy under the newly claimed fedoraserver namespace, starting with the fedoraserver.general collection (Ticket #265).
• The Ansible collection will also be packaged as an RPM and distributed via a Fedora Copr repository (Ticket #267).

Contribution opportunities

• Test the nearly feature-complete post-install Ansible role; instructions and code updates are available for review in the Ansible-support repository PRs.
• Review the updated Fedora 45 documentation articles: "Adding Virtualization Support" and "Creating a virtual machine using Fedora Server Edition disk image".
• Assist with outstanding F45 Beta testing, specifically verifying if the NFS connection issue between F44 and F45 persists.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

Fedora 45 Beta was successfully released on September 15, and the associated infrastructure freeze was lifted the following day. The next freeze for the F45 Final release is scheduled to begin on October 6. In preparation for the final release, a significant planned outage for mass updates, reboots, firmware upgrades, and database migrations is scheduled for October 1 at 21:00 UTC, which is expected to last approximately 5 hours.

Routine operations this week handled several service hiccups, including intermittent 503 errors on Koji caused by httpd crashes, and a PostgreSQL OOM crash affecting Bodhi and src.fedoraproject.org due to heavy scraper traffic. The team also expanded disk space on several key servers and began reinstalling specific x86 builders due to BTRFS inode exhaustion.

Decisions

• The F45 Beta infrastructure freeze is officially over, and the F45 Final freeze is scheduled to start on 2026-10-06.
• A major planned outage for mass updates, firmware upgrades, and database migrations is scheduled for 2026-10-01 at 21:00 UTC, expected to last approximately 5 hours.
• The team agreed to allow LLM data collection from their Matrix channels and issue trackers to support weekly community reports.
• The team decided not to create a teemtee dist-git group counterpart, opting to keep the status quo as the group does not fit standard packaging group conventions.

Contribution opportunities

• Help is requested to build approximately 70 packages in EPEL10 to migrate the mailman servers to RHEL10.
• A PR review is requested on datagrepper to fix CI test failures and clear out the final pull request before migrating the repository.
• New contributors Sarah Laura Wangari and Karii recently joined and are looking to learn and contribute via the fi-apprentice group.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

Fedora 45 Beta was successfully released this week. This process involved resolving staging path issues, signing the IoT Beta compose, generating release torrents, and processing Bodhi stable pushes for F45 blockers and freeze exceptions.

In infrastructure news, the team resolved a recurring issue that caused Rawhide ostree builds to fail due to missing commits, tracing it to a race condition with the fedora-ostree-pruner job. Additionally, pungi and koji-image-builder were updated on the production compose hosts and builders to prepare for the boot.iso modernization change proposal.

Decisions

• Bug 2530897 (F45 grub boot fails with 'invalid magic number') was accepted as a Final Blocker.
• Bug 2531850, Bug 2524990, Bug 2529069, and Bug 2533000 were accepted as Final Freeze Exceptions.
• The team agreed to allow the #releng Matrix channel to be included in data collection for the weekly LLM-powered Fedora activity reports (Ticket #13525).

Contribution opportunities

• Help is needed to update the release SOPs to include instructions on running the sign_iot.sh script and the expected timing for torrent generation (Meeting log).
• The branching SOP needs to be updated to ensure the new release is added to koji-gc, preventing signed RPMs from being inadvertently cleaned up during branching (Ticket #13534).

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality team successfully approved and shipped the Fedora 45 Beta (Beta-1.3) this week, officially kicking off the Fedora 45 Final phase. The team held its regular meeting and a blocker review meeting, accepting one Final Blocker and four Final Freeze Exceptions. A major update to the release criteria was also finalized: the proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces was officially implemented, removing legacy and untestable interfaces like PATA, SCSI, and hardware/firmware RAID from the blocking criteria.

Test days were a major focus this week: the KDE Plasma 6.7 test week is ongoing, the CoreOS F45 test week is scheduled for September 21-25, and an Anaconda F45 features test week is planned for September 28 to October 2. Behind the scenes, the team continued working on CI infrastructure, including planning the migration of tests away from Jenkins, fixing a bug in the installability test pipeline, and tweaking rpmlint configurations.

Decisions

• Accepted Bug 2530897 (grub boot fails with invalid magic number on FW RAID) as a Final Blocker.
• Rejected Bug 2533000 (Reboot and poweroff no longer work in console for regular users) as a Final Blocker, but accepted it as a Final Freeze Exception.
• Accepted Bug 2531850, Bug 2524990, and Bug 2529069 as Final Freeze Exceptions.
• Reduced the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation: PATA, parallel SCSI, Firmware RAID, Hardware RAID, Fibre Channel, and FCoE are no longer release-blocking. SATA, NVMe, SAS, and iSCSI remain release-blocking (Criteria change proposal).
• Decided to downgrade rpmlint spelling errors to warnings and add common technical terms to the allowlist, rather than turning the check off globally (Ticket #591).
• Decided against collecting the Quality Matrix channel for the LLM-powered weekly reports to preserve the informal nature of the chat (Ticket #940).

Contribution opportunities

• Participate in the KDE Plasma 6.7 Test Day from September 14 to 20.
• Participate in the Fedora CoreOS 45 Test Week from September 21 to 25.
• Prepare to participate in the Anaconda F45 features test week planned for September 28 to October 2.
• Test for graphical corruption on Intel laptops running kernel 6.19 and report back on the forum thread.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

This week, the Websites and Apps team heavily focused on optimizing website performance by migrating beta download pages from client-side JavaScript execution to static Server-Side Rendering (SSR). This change, successfully rolled out for several pages including Spins and Labs, significantly improves initial page load times. In addition, the team addressed routing issues, such as fixing a broken redirect for the Kinoite sub-site.

Other discussions included a forum proposal to build a web-based interactive package dependency visualizer to help users understand why certain dependencies (like openh264) are pulled in by dnf. The team also approved the inclusion of their communication channels in the LLM-powered weekly project reports.

Decisions

• Transitioned the beta download pages (such as Spins, Labs, and /misc) from client-side JavaScript toggles (?beta) to static server-side rendered routes (/beta) to dramatically reduce page load times (implemented via static (SSR) beta download pages?).
• Decided not to expose "Bootable Containers" download artifacts on the website unless explicitly requested by the Silverblue or Workstation teams.
• Fixed a broken redirect for kinoite.fedoraproject.org to properly point to the Atomic Desktops Kinoite page.
• Agreed to allow LLM data collection for the Websites and Apps group to assist with weekly reporting, and added the Fedora CMS repository to the tracked sources (Collection of this group's data for a LLM-powered weekly report).

Contribution opportunities

• Help migrate remaining download pages away from client-side JavaScript to static server-side rendering (SSR) to improve page load times across the Fedora website.
• Contribute to building a web-based interactive dependency tree visualizer for Fedora packages (potentially using sigma.js) to help users trace why specific packages are pulled in during dnf installs.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Design team successfully launched the new How to Join and FAQ pages as part of the Fedora Design Docs Revamp project, and completed their review of design repositories migrated from Pagure. While the weekly meeting in the Design Matrix Room was canceled due to low attendance, async collaboration continued on various tickets.

The EPEL Steering Committee officially approved their new member badge designed by the team. Meanwhile, new work has kicked off, including a high-priority request for F45 Virtual Release Party graphics and ongoing user experience research for Project Resistor. The team is actively welcoming community contributions for the upcoming F46 Wallpaper and a custom avatar for the Matrix Moderation Bot.

Decisions

• The EPEL Steering Committee officially voted in favor of accepting the new EPEL member badge design created by the Design team (Ticket #60).

Contribution opportunities

• Any contributor is welcome to lead or collaborate on promotional graphics and visual assets for the F45 Virtual Release Party (Event Banners, Streaming Assets, Badge Art). The deadline is October 16.
• Anyone in the Fedora community is encouraged to contribute sketches and visuals for the F46 Wallpaper by September 28.
• The team is looking for a community member to design a new avatar for the Matrix Moderation Bot (e.g., a police hat with the Fedora logo).
• Team members are asked to provide their input on whether they consent to their Matrix chat being collected for LLM-powered weekly reports.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Docs group focused heavily on modernizing site infrastructure and improving community engagement and discoverability. Key themes across the four active tickets included making the documentation more accessible to both human contributors and artificial intelligence, as well as enhancing the reliability of the site's automated builds.

Notable progress was made on planning a modern design for the Docs homepage, which aims to introduce clear, high-contrast calls to action for new contributors. In parallel, the team debated providing summaries of their Matrix channel to This Week in Fedora via an LLM bot, and discussed adding llms.txt discovery indexes to help AI agents parse the site efficiently. Furthermore, a simple monitoring solution was deployed to catch stalled documentation builds.

Decisions

• The Docs Team Initiative Leads decided that the new homepage design will feature clear invitations for users to become contributors, specifically introducing a high-contrast ribbon banner on every page and dedicated buttons near the navigation header.
• The team decided to defer a final ruling regarding the Matrix channel bot for This Week in Fedora to the September 22 meeting to allow more time for community feedback.
• A simple monitoring solution based on timestamps was implemented and merged to track staging and production build delays, while the team continues to evaluate a more comprehensive Zabbix setup.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to experiment with prototypes for the Docs homepage redesign before official prototypes are drafted in late September/early October.
• Help is welcome to evaluate, configure, or assist with setting up Zabbix for infrastructure monitoring as a more robust alternative to the current timestamp-based workflow.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

This week, the Internationalization group received a ticket regarding data collection for the LLM-powered "This Week in Fedora" weekly report. The author outlined the planned data sources, which include the i18n, trans, and trans-announce mailing lists, the issue tracker, and Matrix meeting channels. Per a decision made last week, general chat messages in #l10n and #i18n will be excluded. The author is currently seeking confirmation on these sources and asking if any additional platforms (such as RSS feeds) should be included in the collection.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

Legal

The Legal team continued to discuss the Copr hosting question regarding packages that build against proprietary software, specifically the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit. Maintainers requested clarification on whether compiled artifacts could be distributed under open-source licenses if they do not directly bundle the proprietary library.

However, respondents in a follow-up thread cautioned against this approach. They noted that compiling against proprietary C/C++ headers often inadvertently embeds proprietary functional code into the resulting binary. Due to the unfeasibility of auditing headers at every version update to ensure no proprietary code is included, it was suggested that such software should be packaged in third-party repositories like RPMFusion rather than Fedora proper or Copr.

Learn more about the Legal team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group expedited an ffmpeg update in EPEL 9 to resolve Qt 6 build issues stemming from the LLVM 22 update in CentOS Stream 9. Several administrative cleanups were also announced, including the sunsetting of the defunct epel-packagers-sig mailing list and the planned retirement of the unused rust-libz-rs-sys package.

Additionally, the EPEL Steering Committee approved a new badge design for its members and evaluated a proposal for LLM-powered data collection of group activities. The committee decided to opt out of data collection for their main Matrix channel while deferring the decision on other sources to a future meeting. Development work also continued with updates to mock-core-configs for CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux Kitten EPEL 10 chroots.

Decisions

• An update for ffmpeg, ffmpeg5, and dependent packages will be pushed to epel9 via a side tag sooner than originally planned to fix qt6 build issues.
• The epel-packagers-sig mailing list has been sunset and configured to reject and discard emails due to inactivity and spam.
• The new EPEL Steering Committee Badge graphics were officially approved by committee vote.
• The steering committee voted to reject the collection of data from the main #epel:fedoraproject.org Matrix channel for LLM-powered weekly summaries (Issue 373).

Contribution opportunities

• A maintainer is sought for the rust-libz-rs-sys package in EPEL 9 and EPEL 10. The package is currently an unused leaf package and will be retired in two weeks if no one steps forward.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG held a meeting this week. The group announced that the Content Resolver is now based on dnf5, making it significantly faster and allowing for more frequent updates. They also reported that recent weekend composes failed due to llvm and libxml2 soname bumps, but the issues were resolved by building compatibility versions.

In addition, attendees noted ongoing upstream discussions regarding the unification of Bootc and CoreOS, and will monitor for any implications for ELN. Finally, the group issued a reminder that with the Fedora 45 feature freeze now past, any changes targeted at RHEL 11 must land in Rawhide as soon as possible.

Decisions

• Community members are reminded that since the Fedora 45 feature freeze has passed, any work targeted at RHEL 11 must land in Rawhide ASAP.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The primary focus of the Atomic group this week was the kickoff of the unification between the CoreOS working group and the Atomic Initiative. This strategic shift aims to create a shared base image supporting various downstream needs (such as IoT, desktops, and servers) while establishing unified community structures, including shared meetings, issue trackers, and a single Forgejo board. Central to this effort is the immediate goal of building a Minimum Viable Project (MVP) for an initial unified bootable image, while complex architectural debates—such as whether to support both Ignition and cloud-init—are being moved to an Architectural Decision Record (ADR) repository.

In addition to the unification efforts, the community engaged in a lively discussion regarding the Anaconda installer's handling of EFI System Partitions (ESPs) in multi-boot scenarios, weighing the benefits of dedicated ESPs against firmware limitations. Technical work across the trackers included addressing missing /run/ostree-booted checks for composefs backend compatibility, improving trademark compliance workflows for derivative bootc images, and removing redundant packages from Silverblue. Finally, the group evaluated modifying their data collection permissions for LLM-powered weekly reports, opting to exclude Matrix chat channels from future summaries.

Decisions

• The group decided to reorganize its meeting cadence, maintaining a tactical Wednesday chat meeting for CoreOS maintenance and moving forward-looking unification discussions to a TBD video call on Tuesdays.
• A new Forgejo board has been adopted to track unification work, and an Architectural Decision Record (ADR) repository was established to manage complex technical proposals like cloud-init vs ignition support.
• Communication for the unified initiative will be centralized by renaming and repurposing the existing Matrix channel #bootc:fedoraproject.org.
• The group decided to exclude the #atomic-desktops Matrix channel and the atomic mailing list from being collected by the LLM-powered 'This Week in Fedora' report, restricting data collection to Discourse posts and tracker issues.
• Work prioritization for the unification initiative will follow a 'Doacracy' model, meaning contributors are empowered to work on what they prioritize, though some baseline tasks may be requested first to unblock subsequent efforts.
• The redundant totem-video-thumbnailer package is being removed from the Silverblue image in favor of the newer gst-thumbnailers.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors are invited to participate in the CoreOS/Atomic Initiative unification planning, including providing input via the Architectural Decision Records (ADR) on foundational technical choices.
• Feedback and stakeholders from IoT and Atomic Desktops are explicitly requested for the unification brainstorm via this Etherpad.
• Help is needed to establish a reliable reproducer for Issue #130 regarding systemd-oomd failing to kill runaway processes before the KDE Plasma desktop completely freezes on Fedora Kinoite 44.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the Fedora CoreOS team focused heavily on preparing for the Fedora 45 CoreOS Test Week (September 21-25) and rolling out the rebased next stream to Fedora Linux 45. The F45 beta brings features like native Butane support in Ignition and chunked container images for better layer reuse, while preparations are well underway to address incoming bug reports and document major changes.

Additionally, the community formally kicked off the CoreOS and Atomic Initiative Unification working group to discuss merging their outputs and community structures, starting with base image alignment. To resolve ongoing boot partition space constraints, the team also made the strategic decision to drop all Device Tree Blobs (DTBs) on aarch64 builds for F45.

Decisions

• The team agreed to remove all Device Tree Blobs (DTBs) on aarch64 builds starting in F45 to resolve ongoing boot partition space constraints. This change is being fast-tracked before the F45 Test Week to allow for early ecosystem testing (Meeting log, Issue #2222).
• The CoreOS/Atomic Initiative Unification working group decided to establish a unified communication channel by repurposing the #bootc:fedoraproject.org Matrix channel and will track architectural decisions in a new Forgejo board (Forum post).

Contribution opportunities

• Fedora 45 CoreOS Test Week (Sept 21-25): Community members are invited to help test the F45 beta release. A live virtual session will take place on Sept 21. Details are available on the Fedora Wiki and discussion post.
• CoreOS/Atomic Unification Feedback: Interested stakeholders (especially from IoT and Atomic Desktops) are asked to provide their input on blockers, priorities, and stakeholder mapping in the brainstorming Etherpad.
• Meeting Scheduling: Contributors interested in participating in the Unification working group can share their availability for future meetings via Timeful.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The Fedora IoT Working Group focused on reviewing Koji composes and OpenQA test results for Fedora IoT 44, 45, and 46, which all generally look good despite a few expected minor issues. In notable news for the broader community, the Fedora IoT 45 Beta has been officially released. Additionally, the group's CI pipeline is now running green following recent fixes, and routine cleanup of older issues took place.

Decisions

• Closed Issue #136 regarding F-44 image passwords, as the maintainers could no longer reproduce the bug.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

This week, the Fedora ARM group focused on troubleshooting Wi-Fi regressions on the Raspberry Pi 5, specifically regarding WPA3 support and the latest brcmfmac firmware. The group was also invited to the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting and received a request for consent regarding the automated collection of their communications for an LLM-generated weekly community report.

Contribution opportunities

• Vote on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for Fedora 45 Final prior to the review meeting to speed up the process.
• Provide feedback on whether the group consents to having their Matrix chat history and mailing list data collected for automated "This Week in Fedora" weekly summaries.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Hummingbird

This week, the Hummingbird group focused on the proposed unification of the CoreOS working group and the Atomic Initiative. To ensure all stakeholders could participate in the unification kickoff discussions, the regular Hummingbird community meeting scheduled for September 17 was canceled (URL). The unification effort aims to build a shared base image for IoT, desktop, server, and automotive use cases, and the community has begun defining the Minimum Viable Project (MVP) and restructuring their communication channels (URL).

Decisions

• The regular Hummingbird community meeting for September 17 was canceled to avoid overlap with the unification discussions (URL).
• Communication for the CoreOS and Atomic unification initiative will be centralized by repurposing the #bootc:fedoraproject.org Matrix channel (URL).
• The unification group will adopt a two-track meeting cadence: tactical chat-based meetings on Wednesdays and a future-focused video call on a day to be determined (URL).
• Work and architectural decisions will be tracked on a new Forgejo board using "decide:" tags, alongside a newly created Architectural Decision Record (ADR) repository (URL).

Contribution opportunities

• Stakeholders, especially from IoT, Atomic Desktops, and CoreOS, are invited to share ideas, blockers, and priorities regarding the CoreOS/Atomic unification in the project's Etherpad before the next meeting (URL).
• Community members interested in the technical direction of the base image are encouraged to join the newly designated #bootc:fedoraproject.org Matrix channel and participate in upcoming asynchronous Architectural Decision Record (ADR) discussions (URL).

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

Kernel

Aurelien Bompard reached out to the Kernel group to discuss data collection for an LLM-powered weekly report called "This Week in Fedora." The goal of the report is to summarize group activities, foster newcomer participation, and highlight requests for help. He is requesting the group's consent to collect public data from their mailing list and Discourse tags, as well as their public Matrix channel.

Learn more about the Kernel team.

AI & ML

The AI & ML group engaged in a robust discussion this week regarding the alignment of various LLM and generative AI models with Fedora's open-source values, specifically weighing raw AI performance against software freedom. This was sparked by a proposal to set up an "Olmo" 32B-Instruct Fedora playground and expanded into a broader forum debate about whether Fedora needs to standardize on a model for potential centralized inference infrastructure.

In other activity, a prototype of newly proposed build tools was successfully utilized to package vLLM on Fedora. Additionally, the group discussed including their Matrix channel data in the automated "This Week in Fedora" LLM-generated reports. While some concerns about chat privacy were raised, the group is leaning toward a trial inclusion provided there is clear signage and communication in the room.

Contribution opportunities

• Share your perspective on which LLM models best align with Fedora's principles and whether the project should focus on fully-open models versus performant open-weight alternatives.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

This week, the RISC-V group focused heavily on preparing for upcoming Fedora releases and evaluating future architectural baselines. The Fedora 45 rebuild is largely complete with key kernel updates landed, and massive rebuilding for Fedora 46 is now underway. The team is also actively investigating bootstrapping Fedora ELN (Enterprise Linux Next) for RISC-V, which will provide downstream distributions with vital configuration previews.

Additionally, discussions began on transitioning the Fedora architecture baseline from RV64GC to RVA23. The group plans to keep the existing ABI while defaulting the toolchain (GCC/LLVM) to RVA23 to maintain compatibility. Finally, the group successfully coordinated with upstream LLVM to address failing test suites and submitted a proposal to host the RISC-V microconference at FOSDEM.

Decisions

• The group decided to opt out of having their public Matrix channel logs collected for LLM-generated weekly reports, limiting data collection to Discourse, meeting logs, and the issue tracker. (Collection of this group's data for a LLM-powered weekly report)
• The transition to the RVA23 baseline will retain the current ABI (which does not enable vector registers by default in the calling convention) to ensure compatibility between existing and new binaries. (Investigate the switch to RVA23 baseline)

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security SIG cancelled their September 17 meeting, postponing discussions on allowing LLM data collection for weekly reports to September 24. A major focus this week was addressing the poor quality of CVE reports swamping Bugzilla and causing maintainer fatigue. Red Hat Product Security provided an in-depth look at their transition to a new koji-sbom scanning pipeline, which relies strictly on RPM metadata rather than source code analysis, significantly reducing false positives for unshipped code, interpreters, and dynamically linked libraries.

Contribution opportunities

• The SIG is seeking community input on how to handle EPEL CVE bugs in Bugzilla: Should they continue to be collapsed into a single epel-all tracker, or should a separate tracker be filed for each specific EPEL version (8, 9, 10) that actually ships the affected package? Join the discussion on Issue #23.
• Maintainers are asked to review the Vulnerability Reporting Contact ticket to confirm if it can be officially closed.

Learn more about the Security team.

NeuroFedora

The NeuroFedora Special Interest Group reviewed a recent orphaned packages report this week and adopted several dependencies to keep them maintained in the distribution. To reduce unnecessary maintenance burdens, the team decided to drop some leaf packages and break a test-dependency chain, allowing a few test-related packages to be gracefully retired. Additionally, group members expressed support for having NeuroFedora's public data collected and summarized for the "This Week in Fedora" automated weekly report.

Decisions

• Adopted multiple orphaned packages to maintain them in Fedora, including python-pyqt-feedback-flow, python-trx-python, python-annarchy, textdistance, and units-llnl.
• Decided to break the test-dependency chain from python-xnat to allow retiring python-xnat4tests and python-medimages4tests.
• Approved the collection of the group's public communication data for the This Week in Fedora LLM-powered weekly report.

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors interested in maintaining the openneuro-py CLI tool for Fedora are welcome to take over the python-openneuro package, which is otherwise slated for retirement.

Learn more about the NeuroFedora team.

Go

A ticket was opened to discuss the collection of the Go group's data for "This Week in Fedora," an LLM-powered weekly report. The author confirmed that while the #golang chat channel will not be collected based on prior feedback, they plan to collect data from the golang and go-sig mailing lists, the issue tracker, and Matrix meeting channels. Feedback is requested from the group to approve these sources and identify any additional platforms to track.

Decisions

• It was noted in Issue #69 that the group previously decided against allowing the collection of messages from the #golang chat channel for the weekly report.

Contribution opportunities

• The author of Issue #69 is seeking feedback on whether it is acceptable to collect activity from the golang and go-sig mailing lists, the issue tracker, and Matrix meeting channels for the "This Week in Fedora" report. They are also asking if the group has other sources, such as RSS feeds, that they would like included in the collection.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused entirely on routine package maintenance, including version updates, test corrections, and compliance fixes. All 15 mailing-list posts were automated notifications representing pull requests that were successfully opened and merged by package maintainers.

Key updates involved version bumps for perl-CPAN (2.41), perl-Dist-Zilla (6.039), and perl-LWP-MediaTypes (6.05). Furthermore, maintainers addressed test stability in perl-Dist-Zilla and ensured proper open-source documentation by adding missing license files to perl-Net-DAVTalk and perl-Net-CalDAVTalk.

Decisions

• Updated perl-CPAN to version 2.41 to resolve bug ticket rhbz#2533611 (PR #5).
• Updated perl-Dist-Zilla to version 6.039 (PR #13).
• Updated perl-LWP-MediaTypes to version 6.05 (PR #3).
• Added missing LICENSE files to the perl-Net-DAVTalk and perl-Net-CalDAVTalk packages to ensure proper compliance (e.g., PR #10).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

This week, the Python SIG welcomed a new contributor, Renato Loureiro, a UK-based student and Python developer who plans to help package and maintain Python applications. Additionally, Aurelien Bompard requested permission to include the group's public communications (mailing lists, Discourse, and the Matrix channel) in the LLM-generated "This Week in Fedora" report. A group member responded favorably, agreeing that summarizing public sources is acceptable.

Decisions

• The group tentatively agreed that the "This Week in Fedora" automated report may collect and summarize data from the Python SIG's public sources, including the Matrix channel, provided it avoids extensively quoting fleeting messages.

Learn more about the Python team.

Rust

The Rust group had 2 tickets this week, focusing on legacy package deprecation and community communication policies.

Members initiated a major cleanup of outdated Rust bindings for GLib and GTK4, specifically targeting the unmaintained gtk-rs-core v0.20 and gtk4-rs v0.9 packages. Tracking bugs have been filed for affected downstream applications, and third-party libraries will require updates to matching versions before the old compatibility packages can be completely removed. Additionally, the group concluded a vote on whether their communication channels could be collected for an LLM-powered weekly report. The SIG reached a consensus to allow the ingestion of mailing lists, Discourse posts, and ticket trackers, but opted out of including their Matrix chat channel history due to its casual and ephemeral nature. Detailed discussions can be found in the package cleanup ticket and the LLM data collection ticket.

Decisions

• Initiated the deprecation of unmaintained gtk-rs-core v0.20 and gtk4-rs v0.9 packages, requiring maintainers of downstream applications and third-party libraries to update their bindings. (Ticket)
• Approved the collection of data from the Rust mailing lists, Discourse, and ticket trackers for the LLM-powered "This Week in Fedora" weekly report. (Ticket)
• Declined the collection of Matrix channel history for the weekly report to preserve the casual and ephemeral nature of the chat. (Ticket)

Contribution opportunities

• Maintainers of applications depending on gtk-rs-core v0.20 or gtk4-rs v0.9 (e.g., envision, gnome-commander, gnome-user-share, libibpuz, rust-tiny-dfr, wildcard) are requested to update their applications to newer bindings so the legacy packages can be retired. (Tracking Ticket)
• Assistance is needed to update third-party libraries like rust-delicious-adwaita, rust-relm4, and rust-vte4 to match the updated GTK/GLib binding versions. (Tracking Ticket)

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• JC introduced btrfs-patrol, a new snapshot and rollback tool designed specifically for Fedora's default btrfs layout, triggering a discussion on handling kernel modules and updates that led to hardening releases and new recovery features being added.
• Ellie started a discussion about the potential risks of AI-generated code in the Linux kernel, with participants noting that many developers remain quietly skeptical about the cognitive impact and sustainability of LLMs despite recent remarks from leadership.
• Norihiro Nakaoka reported that over 2,300 Fedora/EPEL security tracking bugs became private and broke downstream CVE mapping tools, which Alasdair Kergon later confirmed was an accidental spam flag that would be reverted.
• Aoife Moloney submitted a Change Proposal to enable Shadow Stack protection by default for x86_64 applications in Fedora 45, prompting developers to analyze specific build failures and discuss debugging methods for the new hardware-enforced security features.
• Christopher highlighted that GMail will soon remove the ability to send emails from @fedoraproject.org addresses, while other members shared examples of strict DMARC/SPF/DKIM policies causing Google to reject even valid mailing list messages.
• Michal Schorm shared a list of roughly 3,400 leaf packages that could drop i686 support because they are only used in the buildroot, gaining support from maintainers looking to safely prune the legacy architecture.
• Miroslav Suchý asked developers to donate a minute of their time to test Fedora 44 to 45 upgrades using a dry-run distro-sync, which successfully uncovered broken dependency chains for packages like openh264, protobuf, and ceph.
• Gordon Messmer proposed integrating got-audit as a generic Fedora test to detect ELF namespace tampering in systemd service units, successfully updating the tool with debugging assistance from Florian Weimer.
• Norbert Manthey from Amazon proposed extending default compiler settings to harden applications, sparking a debate with GCC maintainers over the potential performance penalties and breakage of valid C++ code.
• Martin Gansser asked for help processing a stuck review request, discovering that the original reviewer had lost packager privileges before another maintainer stepped in to help.
• Other discussions this week included fedora-review crashing on Fedora 45, an inquiry about Mangohud seeming unmaintained, a request for a meshoptimizer review swap, a new contributor seeking sponsorship for their first package, a question about sources files still using the plain md5sum format, delays with F45 beta images on mirrors, the scheduling of the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, reports that kmscon is broken, a proposal for splitting perf out of the kernel packaging, a patch submission for teamd on the libteam list, and a notification of a pushed devel branch on the glibc list.

Package updates

• ffmpeg upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0
• update of libxml2 and mini mass rebuild in rawhide and for F45
• OCaml 5.1.1 rebuild
• OpenVDB 13.1.0 SONAME change and coordinated rebuilds
• abseil-cpp 20260817.0 coming to F46/Rawhide
• pnpm version updates to 11 and 12
• Updating opencascade to 8.x

New contributor introductions

• Damian Daniel
• Albert Esteve
• Angelo Theodorakis

All contribution opportunities

For community members with Quality Assurance & Testing skills, there are numerous highly accessible ways to contribute to upcoming releases. Volunteers can participate in formal test events like the KDE Plasma 6.7 Test Day, the Fedora 45 CoreOS Test Week (with discussions on the forum), and the Anaconda F45 features test week. Testers are also needed to evaluate the unstable KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta, check for graphical corruption on Intel laptops running kernel 6.19, establish reproducers for systemd-oomd freezes on Fedora Kinoite, and verify F44 to F45 dry-run distro-sync upgrades. Additionally, users can contribute performance data for tuned or expedite meetings by voting on proposed blockers for Workstation and ARM.

Contributors with Software Development & Package Maintenance skills are urgently needed to adopt orphaned packages, including low-memory-monitor, drpm, mcelog, rust-libz-rs-sys, python-openneuro, and numerous small perl-*, rubygem-*, and erlang-* libraries. Developers can also help by packaging Collabora for a future Change Proposal, updating Rust applications to newer GTK/GLib bindings (Ticket #40), or assisting Infrastructure by building ~70 EPEL10 packages and reviewing datagrepper pull requests. Web developers are invited to migrate download pages to Server-Side Rendering or build an interactive dependency tree visualizer, while experienced packagers are encouraged to assist with stalled package reviews and sponsor new contributors.

Those with Design, Writing, & Event Production skills can make a significant impact without deep technical expertise. Creatives can generate promotional graphics for the F45 Virtual Release Party, submit sketches for the F46 Wallpaper, or design a new avatar for the Matrix Moderation Bot. Writers can author the "What's New in Fedora Workstation for F45" article, update release engineering SOPs for torrents and script timing (Meeting log and Ticket #13534), or review Server documentation. Event organizers and speakers are encouraged to take on the Production & Video lead roles for the F45 Release Party (Ticket #143) or submit 10-minute talks.

Finally, anyone capable of providing General Feedback & Strategic Discussion is strongly encouraged to help shape project direction. A major ongoing effort is the CoreOS/Atomic Initiative unification; stakeholders are asked to brainstorm in this Etherpad, join the kickoff discussions, review foundational Architectural Decision Records, and share meeting availability. Broad community input is also needed to decide which LLM models best align with Fedora's principles, how to organize EPEL CVE bug trackers, and which groups to highlight on the new Docs Contribution page.

A primary focus across the Fedora project this week was the successful testing, blocker review, and official "GO" approval for the Fedora 45 Beta release, alongside preparations for associated test weeks. Another dominant, cross-group administrative discussion centered on this LLM-powered "This Week in Fedora" summary bot. Numerous teams debated whether to consent to automated data collection from their public Matrix channels, actively weighing the benefits of newcomer visibility against privacy concerns and the need to preserve informal, safe conversational spaces. Additionally, several desktop and server groups evaluated a Quality Assurance proposal to drop legacy hardware requirements from the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation. On the technical and operational front, infrastructure teams focused on RHEL 10 database migrations and Forgejo repository transitions, while various other working groups collaborated on package rebuilds, CVE triage processes, and managing a wave of orphaned packages to prevent maintainer burnout.

Announcements

In broader Linux community news, the newly announced Framework Laptop 12 will optionally come with the KDE Edition of Fedora Linux pre-installed, offering a hardware-validated experience straight out of the box. A recent Fedora Magazine article also highlights BTRFS boot failures and easy GUI methods for system recovery using a live USB to roll back to previous snapshots. Additionally, after navigating various processing challenges, the session recordings from the 2025 and 2026 Flock To Fedora events have officially been published to the project's YouTube and PeerTube libraries.

For existing contributors, please be aware that the Fedora Linux 45 Beta is GO and will ship on September 15, 2026; mark your calendars as the Final Freeze will begin shortly after on October 6, 2026. On the community leadership front, Fedora Podcast 060 highlighted a changing of the guard: Shaun McCance is taking over as the new Fedora Community Architect, while Justin Wheeler transitions into a new AI Alignment Community Architect role. If you are looking for a way to get more involved, the Fedora Podcast is currently seeking a behind-the-scenes producer to help manage episode scheduling and guest lists.

Council

The Fedora Council met this week to push forward several ongoing governance and policy items. The newly drafted Fedora Forge Usage Policy reached its fifth iteration and is scheduled for a final vote at the next Council meeting, following extensive community discussion and a compromise regarding repository archiving rules. Additionally, the Council reviewed a temporary workaround for handling private issues on the Fedora Forge and deemed it sufficient for their needs, moving to close the related tracker.

The Council also addressed Fedora's expiring recognition as a Digital Public Good (DPG). While the current and incoming Fedora Community Architects will handle the immediate 2026 renewal, the Council voted to formally ask the Mindshare Committee to take on the broader representation responsibilities going forward. In other business, brainstorming has begun for the Flock to Fedora 2027 Call for Proposals (CfP) themes, and a proposed Conflict of Interest policy addition was put on hold as discussions on Fedora Discussion suggest a formal policy change may be unnecessary.

Decisions

• The Council agreed to schedule the final vote for the Fedora Forge Usage Policy for September 23, 2026.
• The Council voted to have the current and incoming FCAs handle the immediate 2026 renewal for the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), and to open a ticket requesting the Mindshare Committee to absorb this representation role long-term.
• The Council agreed that the temporary ForgeFiler solution for private issues and issue locking in Forgejo satisfies their requirements and moved to close the item.

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are invited to provide feedback and suggestions for the Flock to Fedora 2027 CfP Themes. Following the Council's initial drafting phase, the themes will be opened for wider community input from September 21 to October 16, 2026.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

FESCo concluded the requirements gathering phase for the upcoming Bugzilla migration, with an extensive analysis pointing toward migrating to a modernized Bugzilla (Harmony) instance rather than Forgejo due to critical missing tracking features. The committee also completed a massive review of the F45 Incomplete Changes, deferring several high-profile changes (including mkosi-initrd, disabling Vendor Change by default, and libxml215) to Fedora 46.

Additionally, a significant policy exception was granted allowing the use of aws-lc Rust crates for cryptography. This unblocks projects relying on Rustls from using the unmaintained ring crate in favor of an AWS-supported implementation.

Decisions

• Concluded the requirements gathering for the Bugzilla migration, with analysis leaning heavily towards sticking with an upgraded upstream Bugzilla instance rather than moving to Forgejo.
• Approved an exception to allow aws-lc-sys and aws-lc-rs crates in Fedora for low-level cryptography (specifically to enable TLS via Rustls, replacing the ring crate).
• Deferred several F45 Changes to F46, including: mkosi-initrd, Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64, Package builds expected to be reproducible, Disable Vendor Change by Default, and Libxml215.
• Initiated an expedited non-responsive maintainer process for libxml2 to address critical security vulnerabilities, adding zbyszek as a co-maintainer immediately.
• Handed over maintenance of thermald, libfprint, and fprintd to smallorange following a non-responsive maintainer process.

Contribution opportunities

• Dozens of packages maintained by gui1ty (Issue #3678) are slated for mass orphaning and will soon need new maintainers.
• Community members looking to join the packager group have an opportunity to take over orphaned packages. Users have already expressed interest in mcelog (Issue #3665), xaos (Issue #3678), and python-anytree (Issue #3681), but some require packager sponsorship.
• Feedback and testing are requested for the Encapsule isolated devel containers F45 Change Proposal, particularly regarding GUI support and SELinux policies.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

Tyler Fanelli reported an issue when trying to add a newly approved package (libnsm) to the SCM system using the fedpkg request-repo command. The execution failed and returned a 404 Not Found HTML error from Pagure, prompting a request to the committee for advice on how to proceed.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare committee was heavily focused on approving budgets and swag for upcoming international events, reflecting a strong global presence. Approved funding includes travel and swag for LinuxDays 2026 in Prague, IndiaFOSS 2026 in Bangalore, a Fedora Podcast recording trip to Texas Linux Fest, and event support for Software Freedom Day Bukidnon in the Philippines. Additionally, the committee confirmed its Fedora Council Representative for the current cycle and is considering formally adopting the representation of Fedora Linux in the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).

The team is also working on improving post-event follow-up, keeping tickets open for Data Con LA and FrOSCon until event reports are submitted, and exploring a new standard template for event reporting to better evaluate the impact of community funding. Finally, a community request was submitted to collect Mindshare's public data, including Matrix chat logs, for this LLM-powered "This Week in Fedora" newsletter.

Decisions

• Confirmed that Akashdeep will remain the Mindshare representative to the Fedora Council for this cycle (URL).
• Approved a $150 budget for Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026 (URL).
• Approved a $200 travel budget and the distribution of stickers for LinuxDays 2026 in Prague (URL).
• Approved travel support for Eric Hendricks to record Fedora Podcast episodes on-site at Texas Linux Fest 2026 (URL).
• Approved $800 for travel and $200 for swag to host a Fedora sub-booth at IndiaFOSS 2026 (URL).
• Approved sending stickers to promote Fedora among IT students at a technical school in Jankowice, Poland (URL).
• Closed the Data Con LA Event Box Shipment ticket, moving remaining financial and reporting follow-ups to the main event ticket (URL).

Contribution opportunities

• A volunteer shadowing the Fedora Ambassadors process is being considered to help draft a standardized event report template for funded event owners.
• The committee is seeking feedback on a proposal to collect its public data, including Matrix chat logs, for this LLM-powered weekly report called "This Week in Fedora."

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Diversity & Inclusion

This week, the Diversity & Inclusion team discussed whether to allow their communications to be collected for this LLM-powered weekly report called "This Week in Fedora." In issue #69, a request was made to ingest data from mailing lists, Discourse, the issue tracker, and the Matrix channel. Initial feedback is supportive of collecting data from Discourse and the tracker, but there is strong hesitation regarding the Matrix room. Keeping the Matrix room out of automated summaries is seen as critical for maintaining a safe space to discuss sensitive topics. Additionally, it was noted that the team's meetings are currently on a temporary pause.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group discussed the upcoming Fedora 45 release, notably tracking a Mutter bug that is currently breaking openQA tests for the 51 Release Candidate, and began searching for a volunteer author for the Fedora Magazine's release article. The QA team also requested feedback on a proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation by dropping outdated technologies like PATA and Hardware RAID.

Additionally, the working group deliberated on their strategy for Flathub integration, addressing pre-installation requirements and metadata fact-finding. Several package and tooling requests were debated by the community, including a proposal to add 1Password as an approved third-party repository, a suggestion to remove gamemode from Workstation, packaging the local AI assistant Newelle, and a request for consent to allow an LLM to collect Matrix channel history for community reports.

Decisions

• The working group decided to postpone the Flathub strategy discussion until fact-finding regarding available metadata is completed, at which point they will reconvene and potentially re-invite external developers. (Meeting Summary)

Contribution opportunities

• Call for Testers: Help test the proposed restoration of Google Drive integration in GNOME. Feedback is essential to help get this implementation upstreamed.
• Writing/Marketing: The Fedora Magazine is looking for a volunteer to author the Whats New in Fedora Workstation for F45 article.
• Feedback Needed: The QA team is seeking feedback on their proposal to reduce release-blocking storage interfaces.
• Community Input: The team is collecting opinions on whether to allow LLM data collection of the group's Matrix channel.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group announced the availability of the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta for testing on Fedora 44 and 45. Alongside this, work is being tracked for the Plasma 6.8 release, including package updates, retirements, and required rebuilds due to library changes.

In other discussions, the Fedora QA team requested feedback from desktop teams on a proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation. Users also discussed how to disable startup and shutdown sounds in Plasma, and a Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting was scheduled to review bugs and freeze exceptions.

Decisions

• kcm_wacomtablet and kgamma will no longer receive updates as part of the Plasma 6.8 transition (Link).

Contribution opportunities

• Test the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta via COPR or Rawhide on Fedora 44 and 45 and report any instabilities.
• Provide feedback on the proposal to reduce release-blocking storage interfaces, particularly regarding whether Firmware RAID is still a relevant desktop use case.
• Vote on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions ahead of the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting using the blockerbugs app.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

This week, the Server Working Group heavily focused on Fedora 45 Beta testing, major restructuring of the Server documentation, and planning for upcoming feature announcements. Beta testing across local, remote, and SBC ARM installations has largely passed, though a regression in the KVM x86_64 image was identified in Beta 1.3. The documentation is being reorganized to feature a new "Postinstallation Customizations" section, and updates are being pushed to reflect DNF5 syntax changes. Additionally, the group reviewed a QA proposal to drop legacy storage interfaces from the release-blocking criteria and debated the adoption of an LLM-powered weekly summary bot for their Matrix channel.

Decisions

• The group agreed to create a new documentation section titled "Postinstallation Customizations" and position it immediately after the "Installation" guide. (Issue #228, Meeting)
• Documentation referring to dnf group install will be updated to use group IDs (e.g., cinnamon-desktop-environment) instead of group names, as DNF5 no longer supports group names. (Issue #264)
• The decision regarding the collection of Matrix channel data for LLM-powered weekly reports was deferred to an informal meeting, due to concerns regarding privacy and the need for an opt-out mechanism. (Issue #263, Meeting)

Contribution opportunities

• Feedback is requested on the QA proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation.
• An author is needed to write the "Whats New in Fedora Server for F45" article for Fedora Magazine before the October 6 deadline.
• Contributors are welcome to vote on subsection naming conventions for the Server documentation revision.
• Assistance is needed to update the rubygem-rbs package in the F45 repositories to ensure Ruby on Rails 8.1 default apps can deploy without pulling in heavy development tools.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team made significant progress on the RHEL 10 database server migrations this week, successfully moving several staging databases (including koji and fas). Plans are forming for the next mass update window, which is targeted for the week before the final freeze. Several maintenance emergencies were efficiently handled, including planning reinstalls across the buildhw-x86 fleet to resolve a BTRFS inode exhaustion issue breaking 32-bit builds, and compressing firewall logs to prevent disk space exhaustion on ns* nameservers.

In addition, the team welcomed new contributors from the community, granted heavybuilder access in Koji for the vtk and nodejs-electron packages, and set up new Copr tracking groups. They also resolved an intermittent Kerberos pre-authentication issue impacting Packit and RISC-V Koji by restarting the ipa01 service, and approved the collection of public Matrix chat data for LLM-powered community weekly reports.

Decisions

• Approved the collection of public Matrix channels (#admin and #forge) data for this LLM-powered "This Week in Fedora" report (Ticket #13552).
• Approved a freeze break to increase storage on os-control01 to serve as a temporary backup scratch space for Forgejo (Ticket #13555).
• Granted Koji heavybuilder channel access for the vtk and nodejs-electron packages (Ticket #13544, Ticket #13545).
• Discontinued investigating Apache LoadBalancer monitoring in favor of opening a spike to migrate components to HAProxy (Ticket #13553, Ticket #13525).

Contribution opportunities

• Contributors interested in Python and Matrix development are invited to help rewrite the Standupbot using the Maubot framework.
• Assistance is needed building required Mailman 3 packages in the epel-infra or epel10 tags for the Mailman RHEL 10 migration.
• The team is looking for someone to review Zabbix data and help define what "abnormal" triggers should look like for the new Varnish monitoring template.
• Newcomers are encouraged to introduce themselves in the Fedora Infrastructure Matrix Room and read through the Infrastructure Join Guide.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

Fedora 45 Beta is officially a "GO" and is scheduled for release on September 15th, 2026. Prior to the final decision, multiple Beta release candidates were composed and tested, incorporating various blocker and freeze exception fixes. Additionally, a recurring issue causing Rawhide OSTree composes to fail due to missing commits was diagnosed as a race condition involving a weekly pruning job; manual repairs were applied to unblock composes while a permanent fix is developed.

In other news, the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting will take place on September 14th to review final blockers and freeze exceptions. The Release Engineering team has also agreed to include its Matrix channel discussions in automated LLM-generated weekly reports to improve team visibility and lower the barrier for new contributors catching up on active topics.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 Beta has been approved (GO) and will be released on September 15th, 2026.
• The Release Engineering team consented to have their public Matrix channel history collected for the "This Week in Fedora" weekly report to improve visibility.

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are encouraged to review and vote on F45 blocker and freeze exception bugs via the QA blockerbugs app prior to the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting. Voting early helps shorten the meeting.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality group successfully held the Fedora 45 Beta Go/No-Go meeting, resulting in a unanimous 'GO' decision for Release Candidate 1.3, which is scheduled to ship on September 15. The team also conducted blocker review meetings to handle freeze exceptions and blockers ahead of the beta release.

In other activities, a formal proposal was submitted to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation, aiming to remove obsolete or untestable hardware requirements. Test days are actively being organized, including the ongoing Internationalization (i18n) test days, and upcoming events for KDE Plasma 6.7 and Fedora CoreOS. Additionally, the community discussed concerns regarding LLM summarization of informal Matrix channels, leaning towards excluding chat history to preserve conversational freedom.

Decisions

• Fedora 45 Beta is officially GO with Release Candidate 1.3 and will be released on September 15, 2026.
• Accepted the Freeze Exception for "Restrict ptrace by default" (BZ 2448388) for F45 Beta.
• Conditionally Accepted the Freeze Exception for "GNOME 51.rc" (BZ 2528432), provided the related Anaconda freeze issue is resolved first.
• Punted Freeze Exceptions for "Ship sticky vendor feature configuration" (BZ 2528348) and "selinux blocking podman remote ssh connections" (BZ 2529069) pending a FESCo opinion and further details, respectively.
• General agreement was reached to archive the obsolete qa-devel mailing list due to lack of use.

Contribution opportunities

• Provide feedback on the Criteria change proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation.
• Participate in the KDE Plasma 6.7 Test Week from September 14 to September 20.
• Participate in the upcoming F45 Fedora CoreOS Test Day tentatively scheduled for September 21.
• Provide testing feedback for the proposed Google Drive integration in GNOME via COPR or manual build.
• Help automate the Testcase_base_update_cli in Cloud tests as requested in Ticket #938.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Websites and Apps

During the week of September 7 to September 13, 2026, the Websites and Apps group discussed a feature request for visualizing package dependencies. A user proposed adding an interactive web-based package dependency tree to packages.fedoraproject.org. The goal is to help users visually trace and understand why specific, seemingly unrelated packages are pulled in during dnf installations without having to remember complex terminal commands.

In response, a community member noted that omitting the -y flag in dnf provides a preview of what will be installed, but agreed that requesting a built-in dependency tree view directly from dnf would also be a reasonable feature request.

Contribution opportunities

• Community members who know of existing interactive package dependency visualization tools are encouraged to share their links in the Interactive package dependency tree thread.
• Web contributors and developers have an opportunity to explore adding an interactive dependency tree feature to packages.fedoraproject.org.

Learn more about the Websites and Apps team.

Design

The Design team heavily focused on standardizing and redesigning the Jekyll-based website for "Project Resistor," a Fedora Remix. This effort was organized into an Epic, kicking off with research into existing remix sites and planning for initial wireframes. Alongside this new project, the team advanced the design of an EPEL Steering Committee badge, managed the archiving of older repositories migrated from Pagure, and began discussing consent for data collection in LLM-powered weekly community reports.

Decisions

• Decided to use existing Jekyll themes and components to redesign the Project Resistor website rather than building it from scratch.
• Decided to keep older migrated repositories (like designassets) archived to maintain a clean workspace, and added custom Fedora-colored icons to active repositories to differentiate them.

Contribution opportunities

• Participate in the discussion regarding consent for LLM data collection of the team's Matrix channel and issue tracker.
• Contribute to the initial research of existing Fedora remix sites and Jekyll themes to inspire the Project Resistor design.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Docs team is evaluating new initiatives to streamline documentation and improve accessibility. A proposal is under discussion to generate llms.txt indexes for the English Fedora Docs site, aiming to help AI agents navigate the documentation more efficiently (Ticket #64). Concurrently, the team is polling members on whether to retain the "This Week in Fedora" summary bot in their Matrix channel (Ticket #63) and preparing to propose targeted questions for the Fedora Release Notes Change templates to better guide system change owners (Meeting).

Internally, efforts to modernize documentation are progressing. A comprehensive review of outdated wiki pages is underway, requiring manual vetting of older content to prevent data loss, and a push is being made to deprecate legacy Commops SIG wiki pages in favor of the modern Docs site (Ticket #59). Work is also kicking off to update the Beginner's Guide for Fedora 45, presenting an excellent onboarding opportunity for new contributors.

Decisions

• The Docs team decided to manually vet outdated wiki pages for deletion rather than using automated batch scripts, minimizing the risk of accidentally deleting content that remains relevant to the broader community (Meeting).
• The team resolved to draft specific, targeted questions for the official Fedora Change proposal templates to compel Change owners to clarify their target audience and user impact. This will be formally proposed to FESCo for approval (Meeting).
• Meeting agenda threads on the Fedora Discussion forums will now be opened immediately following the conclusion of the previous meeting, rather than right before the next one, to allow more time for asynchronous participation (Meeting).

Contribution opportunities

• Fedora 45 Beginner's Guide: Contributors are needed to help update the Beginner's Guide for F45. This is noted as a straightforward task and an excellent starting point for newcomers. Feedback is also requested on whether to switch the guide's recommended backup solution from kbackup to Vorta (Meeting).
• Matrix Bot Polling: Team members are asked to vote (+1 or -1) on whether to keep the "This Week in Fedora" bot active in the public Docs Matrix channel (Ticket #63).
• Feedback on llms.txt: The team is seeking input on a proposal to generate llms.txt discovery indexes for the Docs site to better support AI agents and LLMs (Ticket #64).

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization group kicked off the Fedora 45 i18n test week on September 7th, which notably includes a new section for testing installation-related issues.

Additionally, an article proposal was submitted for the Fedora blog to highlight the recent migration of the MATE Desktop project translations to the Fedora Weblate instance. This migration transitions the MATE project from Transifex to an open-source collaboration platform, aiming to resolve previous upstream integration issues and improve the overall experience for translators and developers.

Contribution opportunities

• Participate in the Fedora 45 i18n test week and submit test results, particularly focusing on the newly added installation section.
• Review and provide feedback on the MATE Desktop migration article proposal to ensure no important information is missing before it is published on the Fedora blog.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

COPR

The COPR group announced that they are dropping support for pyp2rpm as an on-the-fly specfile generator for PyPI builds. This change is being made because the Fedora package for pyp2rpm was recently retired. Users can continue submitting builds directly from PyPI using pyp2spec, which has been Copr's default option since 2023.

The removal of pyp2rpm will go live with the next Copr release. The overall impact is expected to be minimal, as database metrics show only 9 builds used pyp2rpm in 2026, compared to over 114,000 builds that used pyp2spec. The remaining affected users are being notified off-list.

Decisions

• Support for pyp2rpm is being dropped from Copr in the next release due to its upstream Fedora package retirement; users submitting PyPI builds must use the default pyp2spec generator instead. (Source)

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

The EPEL team focused heavily on infrastructure maintenance following the recent mass-branching, specifically adjusting mock configurations and symlink scripts to accommodate the new CentOS Stream 10 structure ("10s"). Several package updates were released to the wider Linux community, including critical security fixes for gum (fixing three CVEs) and a pending fix for a djvulibre out-of-bounds write vulnerability. Additionally, new packages like keychecker were added to EPEL 10, and epel-rpm-macros was added to ELN.

Internally, the team is actively refining their release engineering automation by converting legacy branching and archiving processes into RBAC-compatible Ansible playbooks. They are also discussing community governance topics, including whether to allow automated LLM tools to summarize their public Matrix chat logs, weighing transparency and accessibility against the casual, ephemeral nature of the chat medium.

Decisions

• Postponed the decision on whether to allow LLM data collection from the EPEL Matrix chat for one week to gather more community feedback (Issue #373).
• Decided to restrict the epel-release latest symlink creation exclusively to EPEL 10.2 to prevent constant link churning across minor releases, bypassing 10.3 and 10.4 (Issue #117).

Contribution opportunities

• Community Feedback: Provide feedback on whether the public EPEL Matrix chat should be included in automated LLM weekly summaries (Issue #373).
• Packaging Help: Assist in updating the Alma Kitten mock configurations to use the new CentOS Stream 10s paths, following the recent fixes applied to mock-core-configs (Issue #126).
• QA/Testing: Investigate and resolve the dependency issue that caused negative karma for the yubikey-manager update in EPEL 10.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG met this week to discuss extending the EBS timeout duration for Bodhi updates and to review progress on image-builder configurations. The group agreed to extend the Bodhi update wait time to 24 hours, though implementation is deferred until after an upcoming asyncio rewrite. In addition, composes for Rawhide and ELN had been paused for a few days due to a systemd bug, but a fix is now available and composes are expected to resume.

On the container front, the generic and minimal container images were updated to remove unwanted weak dependencies, and the fixes are currently rolling out. A new minimal install image is also planned, which will allow non-network installations without requiring the large DVD image. Finally, the group discussed and informally opted out of having a summarization bot process their main Matrix channel for the "This Week in Fedora" publication.

Decisions

• Increase the EBS Bodhi update wait time to 24 hours, contingent on adding an endpoint for administrators to terminate the wait early and sending an email notification at the 24-hour mark (discussed in Issue #586).
• Opt out of the 'This Week in Fedora' Matrix channel summarization bot for the main ELN chat room (discussed in the meeting).

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The Fedora Atomic group spent the week advancing integration efforts, most notably hosting a kick-off meeting for the proposed unification of Fedora CoreOS and Fedora bootc base images ahead of Fedora 46. This shift aims to consolidate community efforts, build pipelines, and documentation into a more unified strategy.

On the technical side, contributors are investigating an issue where systemd-oomd fails to intervene during severe RAM exhaustion on Kinoite-based systems, and addressing image bloat by dropping redundant packages. Additionally, CI infrastructure on the new forge has successfully transitioned to Testing Farm, leading to the closure of previous runner requests.

Decisions

• Remove totem-video-thumbnailer from the Silverblue image in favor of the newly added gst-thumbnailers, starting with Rawhide.
• Switch back to the full curl build in Atomic images for now, as libcurl-minimal lacks HTTP/3 support and an upstream enhancement request was closed.
• Close pending infrastructure requests for dedicated Forgejo runners since the new Testing Farm CI setup is sufficient for current needs.

Contribution opportunities

• Code contribution: Submit a Pull Request to remove totem-video-thumbnailer from the Silverblue image, starting in Rawhide: Issue 129
• Testing: Help reproduce and test the systemd-oomd failure to intervene during severe RAM/zram exhaustion on pristine Fedora Kinoite: Issue 130
• Community Feedback: Provide feedback on the inclusion of Matrix chat logs for the "This Week in Fedora" LLM-powered summary: Issue 128
• Collaboration: Join the effort to build and distribute systemd-sysexts by participating in the proposal to create a systemd-sysexts SIG

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

The CoreOS group is preparing for the Fedora 45 Beta release scheduled for September 15, 2026. As part of this transition, the team plans to switch over next-devel and cut the first next release based on F45, while preparing for a test week starting on September 21. In other developments, releases for coreos-installer, afterburn, and zincati are planned for the current sprint, and the group is scheduling a dedicated meeting to discuss the unification of CoreOS and bootc in Fedora.

Community interest continues to grow around the proposed systemd-sysexts SIG, with members actively joining the initiative to build and distribute system-extensions based on Fedora content.

Decisions

• Switch over next-devel and cut the first next release based on F45 assuming the Fedora 45 Beta Release occurs on schedule (2026-09-15).
• Begin weekly releases of the next stream when entering "Final Freeze" as per the design guidelines.
• Hold a CoreOS test week starting on 2026-09-21, kicking off with a video session on the first day.
• Host and record a dedicated meeting to discuss CoreOS and bootc unification in Fedora.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and provide input on Tracker Issue #2185. The team mentioned they "could really use some eyes" on this if anyone has spare cycles.
• Help investigate Tracker Issue #2184 to ensure the project is ready to support the new golang version.
• Join the newly forming systemd-sysexts SIG by adding your name to the wiki page, as discussed in the forum proposal.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

ARM

This week, the ARM group investigated a potential Wi-Fi regression on the Raspberry Pi 5 following a recent brcmfmac-firmware update. The package maintainer noted that WPA3 has known upstream issues with this driver and suspected an access point misconfiguration rather than a package regression, advising the user to open a bug report if the problem persists. Additionally, the group was notified about the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, featuring a call for asynchronous voting on proposed blockers and freeze exceptions.

Contribution opportunities

• Review and vote on proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions for Fedora 45 using the Fedora QA blockerbugs app. Instructions for asynchronous voting can be found here.
• Users experiencing firmware-related hardware regressions (such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth issues) are encouraged to file comprehensive bug reports against the linux-firmware package.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Alternative Images

The Alternative Images group held a meeting to announce the release of the CentOS Stream 10 RISC-V images, which include minimal Generic (qcow2) and P550 (raw) builds. These images are now available on the AltImage RISC-V page and the AltImages Download page. Currently, the images use a default centos:centos login with a forced password change, but the group plans to integrate the text-mode initial-setup package in the next quarterly release.

Additionally, the group resolved previous issues with building RAW images using Kiwi and plans to release their first aarch64 RAW image soon, starting with a minimal build. This upcoming aarch64 release will also serve as a testbed for the initial-setup integration. It was also noted that Kiwi 11.0 is coming soon but will only be available for EPEL 10 and above due to dependency limitations in EPEL 9.

Decisions

• Integrate the text-mode initial-setup package into the next quarterly release of the RISC-V images, as decided in the Alternative Images meeting.
• Begin producing aarch64 RAW images, starting with a minimal image, to test the initial-setup integration.

Learn more about the Alternative Images team.

Cloud

The Cloud group's activity this week centered around data collection policies and project visibility. In Issue 447, the creator of the "This Week in Fedora" LLM-powered report requested the group's permission to ingest data from their mailing lists, Discourse tags, issue tracker, and public Matrix channel. The author emphasized that summarizing Matrix channels helps newcomers understand the group's current topics and tone, but explicitly requested the group's consent to ensure contributors feel comfortable with their chat messages being included in public summaries.

Contribution opportunities

• Group members are requested to review and provide feedback on Issue 447 regarding which data sources (mailing lists, Discourse, tracker, Matrix channel) they are comfortable having collected for the "This Week in Fedora" weekly report.
• Individuals who wish to opt out of Matrix channel collection can request to have their specific usernames excluded from the LLM summary generation.

Learn more about the Cloud team.

AI & ML

A discussion was opened regarding which data sources from the AI & ML group should be collected for "This Week in Fedora" (TWIF), an LLM-powered weekly report. The author (Ticket #39) proposed collecting data from mailing lists, Discourse, trackers, and the Matrix channel. While a participating group member agreed that collecting data from clearly public sources like trackers and forums is acceptable, concerns were raised about summarizing Matrix channel discussions due to the platform's more informal nature.

Contribution opportunities

• Provide feedback on Ticket #39 regarding whether the AI & ML Matrix channel should be included in data collection for the automated "This Week in Fedora" weekly reports.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The RISC-V group made significant progress on system rebuilds, with the Fedora 45 rebuild mostly complete and Fedora 46 toolchains (Rust, Python, Perl) currently building. A major focus was resolving LLVM test suite failures on Fedora, specifically addressing MLIR, OpenMP, and Flang issues on RISC-V architectures through testing several pull requests from package maintainers.

In the community, members are actively working on installer images and Fedora "omni" kernel builds. The group is also currently discussing whether to opt into having their Matrix channel, Discourse posts, and issue tracker collected for automated LLM-powered weekly Fedora reports.

Decisions

• It was determined that patches for MLIR and Flang are not needed for CentOS Stream 10 (c10s), as those sub-packages are not built on that platform (Ticket #2).

Contribution opportunities

• Community members are asked to provide feedback on whether they consent to having the #riscv Matrix channel, Discourse posts, and issue tracker collected to generate weekly LLM-powered Fedora reports (Ticket #30).

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security SIG met this week to tackle the high volume of invalid CVE bugs being filed against Fedora packages. A tool called fedora-cve-triage is being updated to help maintainers interactively close these invalid reports. Red Hat Product Security shared that they are working on internal tools (ManifestCube and BomQ) and an SBOM database to improve vulnerability tracking, though these are not yet public. In the interim, the SIG plans to propose an opt-out mechanism for automated CVE reporting to protect package maintainers from burnout.

In other discussions, the group is evaluating a request to allow an LLM-powered tool to summarize their Matrix channel and tracker activities for the "This Week in Fedora" report, with some members expressing ethical and accuracy concerns. Additionally, the scope for the proposed Fedora Privacy SIG has been refined to focus on privacy-related packaging and analyzing or mitigating privacy issues in existing packages, explicitly excluding legal compliance evaluation.

Decisions

• To file a formal ticket proposing an opt-out mechanism for automated CVE reporting to prevent package maintainer burnout, as decided in the weekly meeting.
• To officially discuss and vote on the inclusion of the Security SIG's Matrix channel and tracker in the LLM-powered weekly report at the next meeting, following the creation of Ticket #22.

Contribution opportunities

• Provide feedback on the drafted scope and activities for the Fedora Privacy SIG.
• Share opinions in Ticket #22 regarding whether the Security SIG's Matrix channel and issue tracker data should be collected for the LLM-powered "This Week in Fedora" report.

Learn more about the Security team.

Gaming

An issue was opened regarding the collection of the group's data for an LLM-powered weekly report called "This Week in Fedora". The author is seeking the group's consent to aggregate activity from mailing lists, Discourse, the issue tracker, and particularly the Matrix channel, in order to improve visibility for newcomers and highlight engagement opportunities.

Learn more about the Gaming team.

DotNET

The DotNET group received a request regarding the collection of the group's data for an LLM-powered weekly report known as "This Week in Fedora" (this page). The author is seeking permission from the group to gather activity data from their mailing lists, meetings, issue trackers, and the public Matrix channel. The goal of this data collection is to help newcomers catch up and to provide visibility for the group's work.

Learn more about the DotNET team.

Go

During the Go SIG meeting, which was lightly attended due to a US national holiday, it was announced that Go 1.26 is already available in Fedora 43. Additionally, updates for Go 1.27.1 and 1.26.8 are currently pending in Bodhi.

On the mailing list, a prospective packager reached out for assistance to finalize the adoption of the orphaned "fx" package. While the package review has successfully passed, the contributor is looking for a sponsor to grant them packager permissions so they can officially request the repository.

Contribution opportunities

• A sponsor is needed to approve packager group access for Emanuele Petriglia, which is required to complete the repository request for the newly reviewed "fx" package.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

During the week of September 7 to September 13, 2026, the Perl group's activity consisted entirely of routine package maintenance on Fedora RPMs. Michal Josef Špaček successfully opened and merged multiple pull requests focused on version bumps and license additions across several Perl libraries.

The updates included version bumps for perl-Locale-Codes, perl-Text-VCardFast, perl-Mail-JMAPTalk, perl-Net-DAVTalk, perl-Net-CardDAVTalk, and perl-Net-CalDAVTalk. A missing LICENSE file was also added to the perl-Mail-JMAPTalk repository.

Decisions

• Updated perl-Locale-Codes to version 3.91.
• Updated perl-Text-VCardFast to version 0.12.
• Updated perl-Mail-JMAPTalk to version 0.19 and added a LICENSE file.
• Updated perl-Net-DAVTalk to version 0.25.
• Updated perl-Net-CardDAVTalk to version 0.12.
• Updated perl-Net-CalDAVTalk to version 0.18.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Ruby

Volunteer testing for Fedora 45 Beta 1.3 revealed a deployment issue when following the Ruby on Rails 8.1 change documentation. A tester encountered a dependency error involving rdoc and rbs, which maintainers identified was caused by inadvertently installing a newer version of RDoc directly from rubygems.org rather than relying strictly on Fedora dependencies.

In response to the feedback, maintainer Vít Ondruch tested the deployment in a clean environment and subsequently updated the Fedora 45 change page. Notably, bundler-audit was removed from the instructions as it is unavailable on Fedora, helping to streamline future testing and prevent disruptive surprises for users deploying Rails applications on the upcoming release.

Decisions

• Updated the Ruby on Rails 8.1 change page to remove bundler-audit from the deployment instructions since it is not available on Fedora.

Contribution opportunities

• Volunteers are encouraged to continue testing the Ruby on Rails 8.1 deployment for Fedora 45 using clean environments (such as Mock or by clearing .local/share/gem) to ensure documentation accurately reflects necessary dependencies.
• Users testing the Ruby on Rails deployment are requested to provide feedback on environmental setup steps to help make the change documentation more welcoming and accurate for newcomers.

Learn more about the Ruby team.

Rust

This week, the Rust group discussed a proposal to include their communication channels in an LLM-powered weekly report called "This Week in Fedora" (this page). The author proposed collecting data from the mailing lists, Discourse, the issue tracker, and the public Matrix channel to help newcomers understand the group's current activities and foster participation. While members were generally accepting or neutral toward including data from the mailing list, Discourse, and issue tracker, multiple members expressed opposition or reservations regarding the ingestion of Matrix channel history.

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• On the forum, a user observed that ~2,300 Fedora/EPEL security tracking bugs became private on Bugzilla, impacting downstream security tooling that builds update-to-CVE mappings, and asked if this change was intentional.
• A discussion arose regarding the F45 Change Proposal: Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 (system-wide), with developers working to ensure compatibility for packages like Rust and Ruby by transitioning handwritten assembly to ucontext.
• A thread highlighted that GMail will remove the ability to send email from @fedoraproject.org addresses soon, prompting a debate about potential alternatives, such as setting up an authenticated Fedora SMTP gateway, though concerns were raised about abuse and maintenance burdens.
• Miroslav Suchý asked developers to donate 1 minute to test upgrades from F44 to F45 by running a dummy dnf distro-sync command, leading to several contributors reporting dependency resolution failures for orphaned or retired packages.
• Gordon Messmer proposed integrating got-audit as a generic Fedora CI test to detect ELF namespace tampering, prompting feedback from the CI team about generalizing the tool for systemd services and adjusting it to handle legitimate runtime patching.
• On the libteam mailing list, a patch adding a per-runner col_dist_decoupled option to the LACP runner was submitted and reviewed, which decouples the collecting and distributing states to allow an external control plane to drive the data path.
• Miro Hrončok proposed to remove the "Tracking bugs" section from the "Fails to build from source" page, as the documentation hasn't been updated since Fedora 34 and the policy already explains bug alias formats.
• A contributor requested a review for a dist-git PR fixing a btop crash for rocm-smi, noting that the lack of NDEBUG on the compile line causes the shipped library to abort on unexpected sysfs data.
• Joaquín Daniel expressed interest in adopting the orphaned gnome-shell-extension-openweather package and was advised that since it has been orphaned for over a year, it must go through the standard new package review process.
• A contributor encountered a 404 error using fedpkg request-repo for an approved package, which was quickly identified as being caused by an outdated fedpkg version trying to create issues on pagure.io instead of forge.fp.o.
• Other discussions included concerns that the Mangohud package seems to be unmaintaned, requests for review swaps, the agenda for the Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, an invitation to join the new Fedora Crystal SIG, further replies about testing F44 to F45 upgrades, a notification about Perl modules relicensing, a non-responsive maintainer check for amigadave, and the Fedora Council Bi-Weekly Agenda.

Orphaning packages

• Following a non-responsive maintainer check, Qiyu Yan stepped down and orphaned the ddcutil package.
• On the devel-announce mailing list, a weekly automated report of orphaned packages looking for new maintainers was published, noting numerous packages nearing their six-week retirement deadline.
• Hussein orphaned three related packages: rust-jql, rust-jql-runner, and rust-jql-parser, noting that any interested adopter must take over all three simultaneously.
• Antonio Murdaca announced the orphaning of golang-github-vbatts-tar-split, noting the devel subpackage currently fails to install in F45.

Package updates

• Gordon Messmer announced on the forums, as well as the devel and nodejs mailing lists, that Electron has landed in Fedora Rawhide for x86_64 and aarch64, and shared experimental builds for ppc64le.
• Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski completed the ffmpeg upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0 via a side tag, coordinating with package maintainers to resolve build failures.
• Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek managed an update of libxml2 and a mini mass rebuild in a Rawhide side tag, addressing various dependency issues and coordinating with GNOME 51 RC updates.
• Xavier Bachelot announced a libnfs 7.0.0 soname bump, asking dependent package maintainers to rebuild their packages in the provided side tag.
• José Expósito proposed updating mesa to 26.2 in Fedora 44, and after positive feedback from RPM Fusion maintainers, submitted the update.
• Kaleb Keithley created a side tag for a libarrow (Apache Arrow) SONAME bump in rawhide for version 25.0.1, coordinating the rebuild of hard dependencies like ceph and gdal.

New contributor introductions

• On the Sway mailing list, Damian Daniel introduced themselves and expressed interest in joining the Sway SIG to help package SwayFX and other wlroots-based compositors.

Contribution opportunities

Testing and Quality Assurance Skills There is a massive need for community testing, which serves as an excellent entry point for non-group members. Contributors can participate in dedicated events like the KDE Plasma 6.7 Test Week, the Fedora 45 i18n test week, and the tentatively scheduled F45 Fedora CoreOS Test Day. Independent testing is heavily requested for the proposed Google Drive integration in GNOME, the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta, and the Ruby on Rails 8.1 deployment. Contributors with minimal time can simply run a dummy dnf distro-sync to test F44 to F45 upgrades, while those with debugging experience can help reproduce a systemd-oomd failure on Fedora Kinoite or review bugs using the QA blockerbugs app.

Writing, Documentation, and Research Skills If you have writing skills, several groups need help drafting community-facing materials. The Fedora Magazine needs authors for the "What's New in F45" articles covering Workstation and Server. Newcomers are specifically encouraged to help update the Fedora 45 Beginner's Guide. More experienced writers can shadow the Mindshare committee to draft a standardized event report template or review the MATE Desktop migration article prior to publication. For those preferring research over writing, the Design team needs help researching Jekyll themes to inspire the Project Resistor design, and community opinions are widely sought on the Flock to Fedora 2027 CfP Themes and the Fedora Privacy SIG scope.

Packaging and System Administration Skills The project currently has a high demand for packagers to take over orphaned packages, most notably dozens of packages formerly maintained by gui1ty (Issue #3678), as well as specific software like mcelog (Issue #3665), python-anytree (Issue #3681), mangohud, and ddcutil. Sysadmins and infrastructure-minded packagers can assist by fixing EPEL's Alma Kitten mock configurations (Issue #126), building missing packages for the Mailman RHEL 10 migration, or diagnosing a 404 error affecting libnsm on the Packaging mailing list. Those looking for new collaborations can join the newly forming systemd-sysexts SIG, the Crystal SIG, or the Sway SIG.

Software Development and Automation Skills Developers are needed across multiple languages to build and maintain Fedora's tooling. Python and Matrix developers can help rewrite the Standupbot using the Maubot framework, while web developers can explore adding an interactive dependency tree to packages.fedoraproject.org. Automation engineers are requested to help automate Testcase_base_update_cli for Cloud tests (Ticket #938). Go developers can review CoreOS Tracker Issue #2184 to ensure readiness for the new golang version, and anyone familiar with metrics can help define "abnormal" triggers for Infrastructure's new Zabbix Varnish monitoring template. Finally, a quick Git pull request is needed to remove totem-video-thumbnailer from the Silverblue image (Issue 129).

A dominant focus across multiple Fedora working groups this week is the preparation for the Fedora 45 Beta release, with teams like Quality, Release Engineering, Server, and various architecture SIGs actively managing blocker bugs, freeze exceptions, and candidate composes. Simultaneously, groups are laying the groundwork for Fedora 46, evaluating new Change Proposals—such as the integration of the Crystal programming language—and kicking off the F46 wallpaper design process. Another major common theme is process and infrastructure refinement; the Council, FESCo, and Infrastructure teams are establishing new policies for Fedora Forge repository usage, Matrix moderation, and Change Proposal discussions. Finally, significant effort is being directed toward system cleanup and consolidation, highlighted by the Docs and Localization teams archiving obsolete, end-of-life documentation, the Rust and EPEL groups retiring outdated packages, and the Atomic and CoreOS communities forming a joint working group to unify base image development.

Announcements

In exciting hardware news for the broader Linux community, the Framework Laptop 12 Arrives with Fedora Pre-installed, offering a hardware-validated, out-of-the-box experience featuring the Fedora KDE edition. For users looking to proactively protect their hardware, a newly published guide explains how to Monitor Your Drive Health with Performance Co-Pilot on Fedora, allowing administrators to catch SSD and NVMe failures via temperature spikes and error counts before catastrophic data loss occurs.

For contributors and developers, three Change Proposals have been announced for upcoming Fedora releases. Packagers need to be aware of the F46 Change Proposal: Libical4 (system-wide), which transitions to the 4.x series and introduces API/ABI breakages that will require dependent applications to be rebuilt or patched. To help optimize the build ecosystem, packagers are encouraged to test the F46 Change Proposal: Thin LTO Build Flag (self-contained) (noted as intended for F47), which proposes a new %slim macro to reduce RAM requirements and compilation times compared to standard fat LTO objects. Finally, the F46 Change Proposal Crystal Language (system-wide) aims to introduce official native support for the Crystal programming language, bringing its compiler, shards dependency manager, and a highly secure, offline "Shard-as-RPM" packaging model into the Fedora ecosystem.

Council

The Fedora Council focused heavily on policy, governance, and infrastructure guidelines this week. Key discussions included defining the Fedora Forge usage policy, where a compromise was reached to require a "tickets" repository for organizational contact rather than implementing automatic archiving of inactive repositories. The Council is also reviewing a proposed Authorized Analytics Volunteer Agreement to ensure GDPR compliance for community members analyzing contributor data, which will soon be escalated to Red Hat Legal.

In addition to infrastructure policies, the Council is evaluating how to handle trademark guidelines for internally modified Fedora images, seeking to clarify rules around remixes that are not distributed publicly. Furthermore, with the transition of the Fedora Community Architect role, the Council is deliberating whether to formally maintain and reassign Fedora's Digital Public Goods Alliance representative responsibility or drop the commitment altogether.

Decisions

• A consensus was reached on the Fedora Forge usage policy to drop automatic repository archiving in favor of mandating a "tickets" repository for all organizations to ensure a public point of contact. The policy is now advancing to a formal ratification vote.
• The Council accepted a temporary workaround for handling private issues on Fedora Forge, determining that it satisfies their immediate requirements for restricted communications and clearing the ticket from their perspective.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo focused extensively on evaluating the F45 Incomplete Changes Report during their meeting (URL), determining which features are safe to land late and which must be postponed. Several changes were punted to next week due to absent owners, while others like Libxml215 were formally deferred to Fedora Linux 46.

FESCo also processed major tickets, finalizing a shift in the Fedora Changes discussion process and officially gating stable release updates on rmdepcheck. Additionally, new Change Proposals for Fedora 46 and 47 were introduced on the forums for community feedback, including the introduction of the Crystal programming language.

Decisions

• Change Proposal discussions will now occur exclusively on the devel mailing list, with Discourse acting as a read-only mirror (URL).
• Stable release updates will now be gated on rmdepcheck (URL).
• The Libxml215 Change was deferred to Fedora Linux 46. FESCo requires the creation of a libxml2_2.13 compatibility package as a separate source package (URL).
• The Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 Change is officially approved for Fedora 46, but requires Nvidia and PyPI Python wheel compatibility fixes before the F46 contingency deadline (URL).
• The Relocate RPM repository configs to /usr Change's remaining parts are permitted to land before the final freeze (URL).
• The Filter Fedora Flatpaks for Atomic Desktop v2 Change is officially declared completed (URL).

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

The Packaging Committee held a meeting and processed several tickets this week, focusing heavily on reviewing new packaging guidelines for the Crystal programming language. The committee worked closely with the proposal's author to define standard naming conventions, dependency resolution strategies, and unbundled shard-as-RPM models to prepare for Crystal's integration into Fedora 46.

Additionally, the committee merged guidelines regarding a limited aws-lc exception for cryptographic policies, closed tickets clarifying that RPM Provides tags are not inherited, and updated guidelines to mandate the %openpgpverify macro. Progress was also made on defining multi-version guidelines for NodeJS streams.

Decisions

• Approved merging the guidelines documenting an exception for limited aws-lc use within CryptoPolicies (PR #1566).
• Agreed that the upcoming Crystal compiler should be packaged under the source package name crystal-lang rather than reclaiming the 15-year-old crystal package name to avoid messy git history. Crystal shard source RPMs will be unconditionally prefixed with crystal- (Meeting).
• Merged and closed PR #1562 to adopt the %openpgpverify macro by default in the packaging guidelines.
• Merged and closed PR #1563, adding a note to the guidelines clarifying that Provides tags are not inherited by subpackages or source RPMs.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare committee focused heavily on expanding Fedora's global footprint by reviewing 10 tickets centered around event presence, travel support, and swag distribution. A dominant theme across the community was the preparation for late-2026 regional FOSS conferences, with the committee working to balance budget requests against the need for in-person advocacy. Discussions highlighted a push to empower local ambassadors and foster deeper connections with enterprise Linux users, students, and broader open-source enthusiasts across the globe.

In addition to event planning, administrative efforts were made to improve how the committee tracks its quarterly budget and activities. A recurring priority within the committee's evaluations is the need for comprehensive post-event reporting and the active recruitment of local contributors to represent Fedora. This strategy aims to reduce travel costs while organically expanding the local ambassador network, ensuring that Fedora maintains a sustainable and high-visibility presence at regional events.

Decisions

• Approved a $150 budget request to cover event operations and localized swag for Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026 in the Philippines.
• Approved a travel and hotel budget request for representation and speaking at LinuxDays 2026 in Prague.
• Approved travel funding for the Fedora Podcast to attend, record on-site interviews, and provide coverage at Texas Linux Fest 2026.
• Approved travel and accommodation support to run a Fedora sub-booth focusing on APAC adoption at IndiaFOSS 2026 in Bangalore.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Diversity & Inclusion

Preparations for the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity have officially kicked off. Following a recent call for volunteers and ideas for the upcoming virtual event, the organizers posted a brief status update to the planning discussion confirming that work is underway and more information will be shared shortly.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group addressed critical regressions, evaluated Flatpak metadata certification, and prepared for upcoming releases this week. A major fix was pushed to Fedora 44 for a GDM auto-login regression, eventually culminating in a new upstream GDM 50.3 release. In meetings, the Working Group discussed the Fedora 46 Beta freeze, noting standard GNOME 51 test results, and investigated Rawhide compositor issues alongside Fedora 45 blocker bugs.

Additionally, the community was invited to test a newly proposed Google Drive integration for GNOME. Discussions also took place regarding the enablement of the new in-kernel NTFS driver in kernel 7.1, with community members sharing alternative akmod packaging solutions in the interim.

Decisions

• The Working Group decided to defer the evaluation of a custom metadata certification process for FlatHub packages to the issue tracker for further investigation and future deliberation.
• A backported fix for a Fedora 44 GDM auto-login regression was pushed to stable, prompting the upstream release of GDM 50.3 to officially address the issue.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group focused on preparations for Fedora 45, including identifying topics for the upcoming Fedora Magazine "What's New" article and participating in the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting.

Additionally, the team is tracking two significant bugs in Fedora Kinoite: a Mesa green/purple tint issue related to AV1 hardware acceleration in Chrome on AMD GPUs, and a Discover crash regression that prevents updates from auto-installing.

Decisions

• The upcoming Fedora Magazine 'What's New' article for F45 KDE will focus primarily on Plasma 6.7 features, with a brief mention of the upcoming Plasma 6.8.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

During the week of August 31 to September 6, 2026, the Server Working Group primarily focused on restructuring the Fedora Server documentation and reviewing Fedora 45 release testing. The QA team introduced a proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation, aiming to drop legacy interfaces like PATA, SCSI, and Hardware RAID while retaining modern ones like SATA, NVMe, and SAS. Additionally, Fedora 45 Beta preparations are underway with a Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for September 7.

Decisions

• The Server documentation will feature a new main section titled "Postinstallation Customizations", which will be placed second in the navigation tree immediately after the "Installation" guide (decided in the weekly meeting).
• The top-level documentation navigation bar names, including "Virtualization" and "Containerization", will remain unchanged, leading to the closure of ticket #224.
• The naming of sub-articles within the new Postinstallation Customizations section will be decided via a formal two-week vote in the Working Group's ticket tracker rather than by an immediate vote during the meeting.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team focused on server migrations, infrastructure improvements, and routine maintenance. A significant effort is underway to transition services like Mailman to RHEL 10 and to prepare storage provisioning for the production Forgejo dist-git instance. The Matrix moderation bot is being officially hosted on Fedora infrastructure, bringing new proposed policies for official Matrix rooms that group owners should review.

Additionally, developers tackled compatibility issues with Ansible and Python's deprecated ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1 on Fedora 45 during staging deployments. The team also reviewed AWS resource usage for August and issued a warning for owners to tag their AWS resources with FedoraGroup to avoid deletion. Several user-reported issues were resolved, including proxy bugs affecting Matrix Fractal clients, upstream login errors in Libravatar, and clarifications on MirrorManager's geographic mirror selection logic.

Decisions

• AWS resources without the FedoraGroup tag are subject to deletion.
• A new policy for "Official Fedora Matrix Rooms" has been proposed, requiring the use of the new internal moderation bot (@moderation:fedoraproject.org).
• Mirrors located in Iran (.ir) will not be included in MirrorManager due to export regulations.
• A 500GB storage volume on NetApp was allocated for the upcoming Forgejo Dist-Git production instance.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, Release Engineering focused heavily on the Fedora 45 cycle, which remains in Beta Freeze. QA and Releng coordinated on multiple Blocker Review Meetings and successfully produced several F45 Beta candidate composes (including Beta 1.1 and 1.2), alongside handling stable push requests for blockers and freeze exceptions.

Beyond the F45 release tasks, Releng resolved significant issues blocking updates, such as a database timeout bug in Bodhi that stalled the Fedora 44 Flatpak (F44F) updates-testing compose, and an issue with compose-tracker not opening tickets. Other routine operations involved un-stalling EPEL package assignments, handling branch requests, generating detached signatures for the ignition release, and preparing Koji infrastructure (like updating koji-image-builder and coordinating a new GPG key for ELN).

Decisions

• Accepted Bug 2524952 (kmscon) and Bug 2526398 (anaconda failure reporting) as Beta Blockers during the F45 Blocker Review meeting.
• Accepted Bug 2526278 (initial-setup on RPi4) as a Beta Freeze Exception, while rejecting Bug 2524726 (pcmanfm-qt) as a Freeze Exception. (F45 Blocker Review meeting)
• Delayed decision (punted) on Bug 2524940 (plasma-login-manager) to request more logs from reporters, and closed Bug 2502678 (plasma-discover update notifications) as NOTABUG. (F45 Blocker Review meeting)
• Decided to use a Koji side-tag and proven packager merges for the libical 4.x rebuild rather than relying solely on the F46 mass rebuild to handle incompatible updates. (Ticket 13504)

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality group focused heavily on Fedora 45 Beta readiness, resolving blocker bugs as the beta go/no-go date approaches. A major community criteria change proposal was initiated to drop older, untestable storage interfaces (like PATA and HW RAID) from the release-blocking list.

In addition, the team finalized their requirements for the upcoming Red Hat Bugzilla replacement, and successfully returned issuebot to production for managing Ask Fedora common issues. Guidelines were also discussed for attributing LLM/AI-generated analysis in bug reports to avoid unwarranted confidence.

Decisions

• Accepted Bug 2526398 as a Beta Blocker since Anaconda fails to report crashes to Bugzilla.
• Accepted Bug 2524952 as a Beta Blocker due to a kmscon null pointer dereference crashing the text-mode initial setup.
• Accepted Bug 2526278 as a Beta Freeze Exception regarding wrong DRM card selection on Raspberry Pi 4.
• Rejected Bug 2524726 (pcmanfm-qt update) as a Beta Freeze Exception.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

The Design team kicked off the F46 Wallpaper project, choosing mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck as the inspiration and establishing a schedule running through December 2026. A call for contributors is open for sketches and ideas around themes like minimal surfaces and geometric analysis. Additionally, the team progressed on the Fedora Design Docs Revamp by posting drafts for the "How to Join" guide and FAQs, which will remain under review before publication, and decided to simplify the design for Ticket 40. Notably, the final badge design request accepted through the ticket queue was completed for the EPEL steering committee.

Decisions

• The team will no longer accept badge design requests through their ticket queue, following the completion of the EPEL steering committee badge. (design#60)
• Publication of the newly drafted FAQ and "How to Join" documentation is deferred until the end of the current or next sprint to allow for sufficient review. (Meeting Log)
• Ticket 40 will be reverted to an earlier, simplified version of the design to improve clarity by reducing the amount of information displayed. (Meeting Log)

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Docs group engaged in community discussions around system optimization and focused heavily on cleaning up outdated documentation. On the forums, users shared helpful resources, including a tutorial on using powertop2tuned for better battery life on minimal Fedora installations and a bash script to display active and installed kernels.

Behind the scenes, the team is working on archiving and removing obsolete documentation. This includes an ongoing effort to clear out hundreds of ancient Docs-related pages from the Fedora Wiki, utilizing a newly developed script to identify pages older than seven years. Additionally, a new ticket was opened to remove or archive documentation for End-Of-Life (EOL) Fedora releases.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) teams are preparing for the upcoming Fedora 45 i18n test week starting September 7, which will feature a new section for testing installation-related issues. Additionally, three i18n changes submitted for Fedora 45 are now in the ON_QA testing phase, as confirmed during the group's weekly meeting.

In localization news, the team prepared an article proposal detailing the successful migration of the MATE Desktop translation project from Transifex to Fedora's Weblate instance, simplifying collaboration for the project's 200,000 words. The team is also managing routine repository maintenance, including centralizing documentation issue trackers, managing translation memory for retired atomic desktop variants, and clearing archived guides from Weblate to free up resources.

Decisions

• The archived and unpublished Sysadmin and Install guides will be removed from Weblate to free up system resources, but their git repositories containing the translations will be preserved. (Ticket #74)
• Requests to hide End-of-Life (EOL) Fedora documentation releases from Weblate will not be handled by the Localization team; they must be directed to the Fedora Docs team, as Weblate mirrors their publication choices. (Ticket #75)
• Translation errors found in upstream software (such as KDE Plasma) will not be fixed downstream in Fedora; users reporting these bugs are directed to collaborate with the respective upstream project's translation team. (Ticket #76)

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

Legal

Jilayne Lovejoy notified the Legal group about a proposed update to the SPDX license inclusion guidelines that could allow linux-firmware licenses to receive an SPDX license ID.

Contributors submitting requests to the SPDX license list are also reminded to explicitly mention if the license is from or included in Fedora, as this helps the SPDX team prioritize those requests.

Learn more about the Legal team.

COPR

Copr has begun migrating existing projects to use Pulp for storing build results, processing them in alphabetical order by owner name (excluding Packit projects). As a result of this migration process, users' builds may temporarily get stuck in a pending state. Users can check if their accounts are currently affected by looking at the blocked_owners field in the Copr backend configuration file.

Decisions

• The decision was made to migrate all existing projects to Pulp in alphabetical order by owner name (excluding Packit projects). Users should be aware that their builds may get stuck in a pending state during their migration window.

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group focused on major package updates and repository lifecycle management. Notably, ffmpeg is being updated from version 5 to 7 in EPEL 9 Next, with a compatibility package provided for applications unable to migrate yet. Additionally, significant work is underway to retire EPEL 10.1 and 10.2, archiving them while shifting focus to EPEL 10.3.

The team also addressed infrastructure issues, fixing a symlink churn problem that was serving the incorrect EPEL 10 release package to RHEL users. Regular meetings indicated smooth operations overall, with several package updates merging successfully, including major updates for cef and obs-studio.

Decisions

• Update ffmpeg in EPEL 9 Next (for CentOS Stream) from version 5 to 7, while introducing an ffmpeg5 compatibility package to prevent breakages. (Source)
• Archive EPEL 10.1 and transition towards the retirement of EPEL 10.2 in favor of EPEL 10.3.
• Update cef (Chromium Embedded Framework) and obs-studio to align with the latest upstream releases. (Source)

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG held a brief meeting this week. Due to light attendance, there were no specific topics discussed beyond a general check-in. The next meeting was scheduled for Tuesday, September 8, 2026, at 12:00 EDT.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic Initiative focused heavily on a proposal to unify base image development between the CoreOS and Atomic/bootc communities. A working group is being formed to collaborate on shared artifacts and technical processes, aiming for tangible results by the Fedora 46 release.

In addition to organizational efforts, the group addressed several technical support requests and policy discussions. Key topics included resolving a missing GPG key error during Fedora 45 upgrades, clarifying that tuned should handle power management instead of including powertop by default, and discussing how derived builds handle /opt//usr/local symlinks and Fedora trademark compliance.

Decisions

• A joint working group is being formed to explore base image unification between the CoreOS and Atomic/bootc communities.
• The powertop package will not be added to Atomic images; power management should be configured via tuned instead.
• Atomic Desktops will retain the /opt and /usr/local symlinks to /var for backward compatibility; derived builds needing a different structure must modify the configuration themselves.
• Generic remix images will not be produced for derived builds. Instead, efforts will focus on simplifying package swaps and improving documentation for downstream trademark compliance.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS group held a meeting and saw updates regarding the newly proposed systemd-sysexts SIG. A major highlight is the ongoing effort to unify CoreOS and Image Mode/Bootc in Fedora; after a positive reception at the Fedora Bootc community meeting, dedicated sessions are being scheduled to explore proposals. In the forums, the proposal to create a systemd-sysexts SIG took a step forward with the creation of an official Fedora Project Wiki page for the group.

During their weekly meeting, the team reviewed various Fedora 45 change proposals, confirming that CoreOS is largely unaffected by changes like disabling the CRYPTO USER API or removing the NIS profile. They noted that Ignition Native Butane Support is rolling out to the next stream for early feedback, and identified the need to release updates for coreos-installer, afterburn, and zincati to support OpenSSL 4.0.

Decisions

• The group decided to roll out Ignition Native Butane Support to the next stream (which is Fedora 44-based) to gather early feedback before promoting it to testing. Source
• New releases of coreos-installer, afterburn, and zincati will be prioritized in the upcoming sprint to ensure compatibility with OpenSSL 4.0. Source

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The Fedora IoT Working Group held a meeting to review branch statuses during the Fedora 45 freeze period. OpenQA tests for the stable branch (F44) are mostly green, aside from a known Clevis issue, and upgrades from F44 to F45 have tested successfully. A minor rebase timeout failure was noted but deemed safe to ignore.

Regarding other branches, Rawhide (F46) recently failed due to a Koji authentication error (GSSAPIAuthError), which the team will continue to monitor. Additionally, a known bug affecting ignition-edge has been resolved by a new upstream version, which now needs to be built and integrated into the distribution.

Decisions

• A recent F45 rebase test failure will be ignored, as it was attributed to a timeout and previous manual tests were successful.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

This week, the Fedora ARM group's activity was centered around hardware compatibility inquiries and upcoming quality assurance coordination. A community member inquired about the availability of an installable Fedora 45 image for the Raspberry Pi 5 Rev 1.1, following earlier troubleshooting of older releases.

Additionally, the Fedora QA team announced the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting for the upcoming Beta release. The meeting is intended to review proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions, with community voting heavily encouraged beforehand to expedite the process.

Learn more about the ARM team.

RISC-V

The Fedora RISC-V group is on target to release the F45 rebuild alongside primary architecture images, maintaining strong sync parity with upstream. Discussions during the September 1st meeting highlighted current hardware stability issues, specifically GCC internal compiler errors on K1/K3 boards that are likely linked to new glibc vector optimizations and kernel/OpenSBI limits. LLVM last-mile integration work is also progressing.

In hardware news, SiFive announced the 32-core P870-D "Big Sky" development server. While pricing and shipping dates remain unannounced, preliminary remote testing by community members indicates it is a highly capable platform for future RISC-V datacenter and build farm usage.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security group held a meeting this week to discuss the drafting of a proposal for a new Fedora Privacy SIG. The focus was on defining a technical, non-ideological scope for the SIG, which would involve privacy-related packaging, analyzing packages for privacy issues, maintaining a list of problematic packages, and potentially providing counter-packages or configuration overrides.

During the open floor, the group also addressed the high rate of misfiled CVEs affecting Fedora, stemming from the abandonment of a prototype vulnerability scanner by Red Hat ProdSec. The group discussed ongoing efforts to improve CVE mapping to Fedora packages through PURL generators for various language ecosystems, and agreed to create a master tracking bug to monitor this progress.

Decisions

• Agreed to create a master tracking bug to monitor the progress of Package URL (PURL) metadata generation, which will serve as a reference point for Red Hat ProdSec to help address the high false-positive rate of misfiled CVEs.
• Agreed to refine the draft proposal for the Fedora Privacy SIG by establishing a strictly technical scope that explicitly excludes legal compliance evaluation.

Learn more about the Security team.

Gaming

The developer of Inertia Blast II, an open-source remake of the ZX Spectrum game Thrust II built with LÖVE2D, has successfully tested the game and several other ports on a phone running Fedora PocketBlue Remix. The games run natively on the platform with full touch control support.

Due to time constraints, the developer is unable to create and maintain official Fedora packages, AppImages, or Flatpaks themselves. They are reaching out to the broader Fedora community to find volunteers interested in packaging, distributing, or beta testing these titles.

Learn more about the Gaming team.

Perl

During this week, the Perl group updated the perl-Date-Manip package to upstream release 7.00. Automated pull requests were generated by Packit Bot for both the Fedora 45 branch and the Rawhide branch, both of which were subsequently merged by Jitka Plesnikova.

Decisions

• Merged PR #12 to update perl-Date-Manip for f45 to upstream release 7.00 (Source).
• Merged PR #13 to update perl-Date-Manip for rawhide to upstream release 7.00 (Source).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

Carl Byington continued a discussion regarding a Fedora packaging question for dupeguru. Because the upstream project is unresponsive regarding their use of generic folder names (like core) that occupy the global Python module space, Carl created a fork incorporating open pull requests. He reorganized the source tree by moving the folders down one level, safely moving the installed code into a /usr/lib64/python3.14/site-packages/dupeguru namespace to prevent conflicts with other packages.

Decisions

• Because upstream is unresponsive, it was decided to use a custom fork of dupeguru that reorganizes the source tree into a specific dupeguru namespace, preventing the package from polluting the global Python module space and conflicting with other packages.

Learn more about the Python team.

Rust

The Rust group focused heavily on mitigating security vulnerabilities and cleaning up unmaintained packages this week. Major actions included submitting repository updates across multiple Fedora and EPEL branches to address security advisories in lru, and tracking newly disclosed vulnerabilities in hickory-dns.

Additionally, the team is actively porting packages away from several unmaintained crates, retiring the orphaned const-cstr package, and initiating a large cleanup of outdated GTK Rust bindings to remove technical debt from the repositories.

Decisions

• Retired the orphaned and unmaintained const-cstr package, which had an active security advisory (issue #2).
• Submitted updates for lru across Rawhide, Fedora 43-45, and EPEL 9-10 to resolve RUSTSEC-2026-0253 (issue #39).
• Initiated the deprecation and removal process for the outdated gtk-rs-core v0.20 and gtk4-rs v0.9 compatibility packages by filing tracking bugs for affected downstream applications (issue #40).

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• Miroslav Suchý provided an extensive list of newly added packages in Fedora Linux, prompting a discussion about the inclusion criteria and testing process for new software in the repository.
• Arjun Shankar requested rebuilds for a list of packages to improve Shadow Stack support coverage, leading to discussions about temporary build failures, including issues with wine in Rawhide.
• Adam Williamson announced changes to his Fedora and Bugzilla IDs due to internal policy updates at Red Hat requiring associates to split their corporate and personal open-source contributor identities.
• Jonathan Wakely pointed out that visudo does not respect the default editor settings or the vim-default-editor package, leading to a discussion on workarounds like writing wrapper scripts or proposing feature requests.
• Norbert Manthey proposed extending the default compiler settings to harden applications, suggesting flags like -fno-strict-overflow, but GCC developers strongly pushed back, explaining that these flags degrade performance and break valid C++ code.
• Tobias Girstmair asked for advice on packaging vim-classic in a way that allows it to coexist alongside standard vim, considering options like alternative naming and subpackages.
• Aoife Moloney reminded the community about the extended deadline to submit bug tracker workflows to help identify the best application to replace Red Hat Bugzilla.
• Orion Poplawski sought help on how to handle pre-release versions with Golang packaging after running into issues passing directory names to %goprep, receiving suggestions to use the %tag macro and go2rpm.
• On the libteam mailing list, Anisha Halwai submitted a patch series for teamd to add a per-runner col_dist_decoupled option, which Jiri Pirko reviewed, identifying potential state refresh and test cleanup issues.
• Bojan Smojver submitted pull requests to fix an issue where a failed F44 Flatpak compose was blocking all other updates, decoupling the logic so failed composes only hold up their own lanes.
• Other discussions included the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, potential SPDX license list updates for firmware, a proposed criteria change to reduce release-blocking storage interfaces, a request for a review swap for grub2-confidential-computing, and an introduction to an open-source AI chat tool on the fedora-join list.

Orphaning packages

• Johannes Lips is orphaning the elementary-icon-theme package due to build failures and its limited usefulness outside of specific desktop environments, while continuing to maintain the Xfce variant.
• Michel Lind announced he is removing himself from 214 packages (including 114 to be orphaned directly) to refocus his packaging efforts and shift away from LLM-dependent tools.
• Łukasz Patron announced he is taking over the orphaned rubygem-factory_bot because it is needed for a new package submission.

Package updates

• Yann Collette provided news about the Audinux activity for August, including the addition of 24 new packages and updates to 103 existing packages.
• Milan Crha announced GNOME 51.rc updates for Rawhide and Fedora 45, which are being gathered in side tags before being merged.
• Gwyn Ciesla is upgrading Motif to a new, maintained fork in Rawhide, which includes a soname bump and requires a side tag for package rebuilds.
• Artur Frenszek-Iwicki is upgrading the Free Pascal Compiler to fpc-3.2.4~rc2 in Rawhide and branched F45, submitting patches for three dependent packages that experienced build failures.

Contribution opportunities

Testing and Quality Assurance: There are numerous accessible testing opportunities for general users to help stabilize upcoming releases. Non-group members are highly encouraged to vote on proposed Fedora 45 blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the blockerbugs app prior to review meetings for Workstation, KDE, ARM, and Release Engineering. Contributors can participate in the Kernel 7.2 Test Week, the I18n / Anaconda WebUI Test Day (announcement), and upcoming test days for CoreOS, GRUB EFI, and Anaconda F45. Users can also test the proposed Google Drive integration in GNOME, EPEL 10 Mailman server builds in COPR, ffmpeg 7 in EPEL 9 Next, the Robosignatory replacement, or verify performance for the mobile game Inertia Blast II.

Community Organization, Design, and Content Creation: Creative and organizational skills are needed across several groups. The Design team is calling for sketches and concepts for the F46 Wallpaper Project (details). Volunteers with video editing, design, marketing, and logistics skills can help run the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity by joining the discussions or the Matrix room. Community advocates are actively sought to staff event booths at All Things Open 2026 and Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026. Writers and translators can contribute by pitching the "What's New in Fedora KDE" article, cleaning up obsolete Docs Project Wiki pages, or translating MATE Desktop.

Packaging, Development, and Debugging: Technical contributors can assist by adopting over 100 orphaned packages, conducting a package review swap for the GRUB EFI (devel request) or dupeguru packages, or packaging Inertia Blast II. The newly formed Crystal SIG needs packagers and testers to review guidelines and manage applications via their Matrix room. Rust developers are needed to port dependents away from obsolete crates like bincode, rustls-pemfile, and proc-macro-error, update GTK4 applications, and resolve Hickory-DNS vulnerabilities. Python developers can write a fedora-messaging automation consumer for RISC-V builds, while debuggers can analyze Kinoite AV1 tint issues, Discover crashes, IoT Clevis bugs, and RISC-V GCC core dumps.

Policy, Architecture Planning, and Analytics: Contributors can provide critical feedback on policies, including the storage interfaces criteria change (devel thread), the Fedora Forge usage policy, the Matrix moderation setup, and SPDX firmware guidelines. Data scientists are asked to review the Authorized Analytics Volunteer Agreement. Community members interested in technical direction can help define the scope of the Privacy SIG or join the Atomic and CoreOS unification planning discussions via Forgejo, GitLab, GitHub, or the new systemd-sysexts SIG. Finally, AWS administrators must ensure their resources include the FedoraGroup tag.

Across the various Fedora groups, the primary focus is the progression of the Fedora 45 release, with teams actively navigating the Beta freeze, conducting Blocker Review meetings, and completing QA and feature testing. Concurrently, significant infrastructure and tooling transitions are a shared priority; multiple groups are gathering workflow requirements for an upcoming Red Hat Bugzilla replacement, finalizing the migration from the newly retired Pagure.io to the Forgejo-based Fedora Forge, and integrating modern build systems like Konflux. Package maintenance and policy refinement also dominate daily operations, characterized by widespread updates to packaging guidelines across ecosystems (including Python, NodeJS, and cryptography), coordinated responses to security advisories (notably RUSTSEC vulnerabilities), and the mass-orphaning of inactive packages. Finally, strategic structural alignments represent a common operational thread, highlighted by the EPEL 10 mass branching and repository restructuring, as well as ongoing proposals to unify CoreOS with Bootc technologies.

Announcements

Critical deadlines have arrived for Fedora 45 contributors: the "Complete" deadline for F45 Changes requires all tracker bugs to be updated to ON_QA, coinciding with the Fedora 45 Beta freeze, Bodhi updates-testing enablement, and Software String freeze. Additionally, contributors must meet a September 1 deadline to submit bug tracker workflows to help identify a replacement for Red Hat Bugzilla as its maintenance winds down. On the community engagement front, the Fedora Badges application has been completely revamped with a modern, fast single-page interface, and content creators can now utilize editorial-guide-ramalama, a new RAG-based local AI assistant designed to verify article drafts against Fedora's editorial guidelines before submission.

For the broader Linux community, several new technical guides have been published. Users can learn how to monitor drive health using Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) to catch subtle warnings of SSD or NVMe failure before data loss occurs. Those interested in local AI development can explore a guide on running Ollama locally with Podman to keep host systems clean and isolated, as well as a tutorial on how to safely sandbox AI coding agents using microVMs to prevent unauthorized automated access to production clusters or local work environments.

Council

The Fedora Council met to discuss the Fedora Forge Usage Policy and the proposed Innovation Lifecycle (Sandbox). The Council achieved consensus on the Forge Usage Policy, clarifying CI resource access for spins and remixes, and establishing a notification-only process for new remixes.

Additionally, extensive debate took place regarding the level of early technical oversight required for the Innovation Sandbox, prompting the scheduling of a dedicated follow-up workshop.

Decisions

• The Fedora Forge Usage Policy will be updated for version 5 to explicitly state that spins and remixes are permitted CI resources. Requests for infrastructure resources for new remixes must CC a Council member for visibility, but formal Council approval is not required.
• The Fedora Forge Usage Policy will remain open for one final week of feedback; if there are no further edits, it will proceed to an official Council vote.
• The Council will hold a dedicated, public video call on Thursday, September 3, 2026, at 14:00 UTC+1 to workshop the Innovation Lifecycle Proposal to resolve ongoing debates about FESCo's involvement.

See the detailed report for the Council team.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

During this week, FESCo held a meeting to discuss ongoing system transitions and policy updates, including the rollout of 2FA for provenpackagers, the handling of binary executable content in node_modules, and the timeline for gathering requirements for Fedora's upcoming Bugzilla replacement. The committee also finalized a major policy change regarding where Fedora Changes discussions will take place moving forward.

In ticketing and forum activity, FESCo formally approved the use of AWS-LC for cryptography in Rust packages, bringing clarity to package maintainers struggling with the ring crate. Additionally, several non-responsive maintainer tickets were processed, resulting in package handovers and the mass-orphaning of inactive maintainers' packages, while a draft for Crystal packaging guidelines was submitted for community review.

Decisions

• Approved the F46 Change: Changes Discussion Only On Devel List, making it effective immediately. Discussions regarding Changes will now happen solely on the devel mailing list and will no longer be simultaneously discussed on Discourse.
• Approved the inclusion and use of the aws-lc-sys and aws-lc-rs crates for cryptography in Fedora to replace the ring crate wherever possible, via Ticket #3679. This exception will be documented in the Packaging Guidelines.
• Agreed to close the re-review of the F45 Change: RelocateRpmRepoConfigsToUsr, as major known issues affecting rpm-ostree, anaconda, and container composes have been resolved or mitigated.
• Approved extending the deadline for gathering Bugzilla replacement requirements to September 4th to accommodate additional feedback from teams, as discussed in Ticket #3664.
• Approved mass-orphaning of packages for non-responsive maintainers cleber (Ticket #3659) and gui1ty (slated for Sep 4 per Ticket #3678), while approving the handover of packages for benzea (Ticket #3672) and prarit (Ticket #3665).

See the detailed report for the FESCo team.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee's activity focused on updating and clarifying packaging guidelines across various ecosystems to prevent contributor confusion and accommodate structural changes. A new ticket was opened to document an exception for limited aws-lc use within the system-wide CryptoPolicies.

In the NodeJS ecosystem, new guidelines for using different nodejs versions have been finalized to detail how packaged streams should be utilized after the upcoming metapackage change. Additionally, the Python packaging guidelines are being revised to explicitly state that using %pyproject_buildrequires automatically satisfies the mandatory python3-devel build requirement, making redundant declarations unnecessary.

Decisions

• Consensus was reached to update the Python build requirements guidelines to explicitly clarify that utilizing %pyproject_buildrequires automatically fulfills the mandatory python3-devel dependency.
• The proposed guidelines for using different nodejs versions were marked as ready to merge after incorporating guidance on handling runtime dependencies and shebangs.

See the detailed report for the Packaging Committee team.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, Mindshare focused heavily on in-person event representation, travel funding, and committee governance. The core theme connecting the active tickets is establishing a strong physical Fedora presence at regional open source conferences and ensuring proper internal representation on the Fedora Council.

The committee received two new travel support requests: one to record on-site Fedora Podcast episodes and present a talk at Texas Linux Fest 2026, and another to host a Fedora sub-booth alongside Red Hat India at IndiaFOSS 2026. Meanwhile, action was requested on the open Fedora Council Representative Nomination ticket to clarify earlier voting miscommunications and finally select the Mindshare liaison for the Fedora Linux 44 cycle.

See the detailed report for the Mindshare team.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group reviewed progress on several upstream and integration initiatives this week. Key topics included resolving recent bug-reporting friction with the Showtime project, acknowledging the failure of the current Flatpak strategy regarding Flathub integration, and discussions around Bazaar as a potential GNOME Software replacement.

Additionally, community members provided updates on restoring Google Drive integration for GNOME, noting that testing is temporarily delayed while developers adapt to recent upstream changes. Preparations are also underway for the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meetings, with a call for asynchronous QA voting.

Decisions

• The working group confirmed that the effort to filter the Fedora Flatpak repository remains formally blocked by the pending GNOME Software redesign, per the meeting summary.
• It was decided that the integration of the Bazaar app store requires a new contributor to take over the review process, as the original contributor is no longer responding.
• Neal Gompa will review the ticket regarding the replacement of xvfb-run with wl-headless-run for GNOME packages and close it if no further action is required.
• Allan Day will chair the next working group meeting, with Matthias Clasen serving as secretary.

See the detailed report for the Workstation / GNOME team.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

KDE Gear 26.08.0 is now available for testing on Fedora 44 and newer. While a minor bug regarding missing icons in Dolphin's "Details" mode was identified, an upstream patch has already been secured for the forthcoming 26.08.1 release. Additionally, the Fedora QA team has scheduled an upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting to address proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the upcoming Beta and Final releases.

See the detailed report for the KDE team.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server group met on August 26 to discuss Fedora 45 release testing and Project Ansible support. For F45 testing, the team is actively verifying features and installations, though hardware limitations for ARM and RAID setups have caused minor bottlenecks, prompting targeted volunteer efforts. A minor, non-blocking bug regarding Kickstart was identified during the testing phase.

On the Ansible support front, the working group verified that the Wildfly role functions properly when Java 25 is configured. The team agreed that the Wildfly and post-install modules are near completion and will serve as pilot projects, with beta user testing slated to begin in two to three weeks. In addition, the Fedora QA team announced Blocker Review meetings for Fedora 45.

Decisions

• The Server working group will use the post-install and Wildfly Ansible modules as pilot projects, with beta user testing slated to begin in two to three weeks. (Meeting Log)

See the detailed report for the Server team.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Fedora Infrastructure team has officially entered the Fedora 45 Beta infrastructure freeze, which will remain in place until mid-September to ensure stability for the upcoming release. In major ecosystem news, Pagure.io has been officially retired as an active platform and transitioned into a read-only static archive for historical purposes. Concurrently, the team is heavily preparing the new Forgejo instance (Fedora Forge) to take over production Dist Git duties, including provisioning storage, refining access controls, and finalizing project board support.

Ongoing maintenance focused heavily on RHEL 10 migrations, with Zabbix servers successfully upgraded and Mailman servers queued next. The team also addressed a severe spam attack on the fedora-devel mailing list by banning the offending user, cleaning the archives, and implementing new moderation headers. Finally, various monitoring improvements were discussed, including stabilizing database OOM kills and tuning OpenShift app load balancer metrics.

Decisions

• The Fedora 45 Beta infrastructure freeze is in effect from August 25 until approximately September 15. Frozen production hosts cannot be modified without sign-off from sysadmin-main or rel-eng.
• Pagure.io has been officially turned off as an active service and converted into a read-only historical archive.
• A freeze break was approved for the new-updates-sync script to ensure RHEL users receive the correct EPEL 10 epel-release-latest symlink and avoid dependency errors.
• A generic internal guest account was enabled for Zabbix to allow the Copr team to easily forward status metrics to Grafana without complex SAML authentication.
• A new FAS group, sysadmin-public-inbox, was created to manage the public-inbox OpenShift deployment.

See the detailed report for the Infrastructure team.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering team enacted the Fedora 45 Beta Freeze on August 25 and began tracking Beta release tasks. A significant amount of the week was spent navigating infrastructure hiccups, including a Koji hub DDoS that stalled builds and dropped mounts, F44 Flatpak compose timeouts, and Rawhide ostree compose failures. In a F45 mass branching retrospective, the team noted successes in automation but highlighted the need to strictly prevent massive, disruptive updates right before branching.

Meanwhile, several infrastructure requests were addressed, including the setup of a temporary empty repository for F46 OpenH264 to bypass 404 errors until binaries are published. The new fedpkg request-unretirement tool saw active testing by maintainers, revealing some quirks regarding Rawhide branch unblocking.

Decisions

• The Fedora 45 Beta Freeze went into effect on August 25.
• Blocker bugs and freeze exceptions for the Beta release were accepted, including fixes for anaconda-webui crashes, kmscon initial-setup breakage, and the inclusion of LLVM 23.
• A large batch of Fails-To-Install (FTI) packages for F45 in the NEW state were retired as per the release schedule.
• Releng will update docs and templates to firmly warn maintainers against pushing last-minute disruptive changes right before mass branching.
• binutils-2.47.50-4.fc46 and ELN equivalents were untagged due to regressions breaking Rust builds.
• An empty repo was established for F46 OpenH264 to prevent 404 errors during builds while awaiting Cisco's binary uploads.
• The coreos-pool tagging keys were updated by removing the F43 key and adding the F46 signing key.

See the detailed report for the Release Engineering team.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality group was highly active this week as Fedora 45 reached its Beta freeze and Bodhi enablement point. The GNOME 51 test day concluded successfully with 30 participants submitting 135 test results. Early manual validation testing for Fedora 45 was also completed, uncovering multiple bugs across different architectures.

Additionally, the team evaluated proposed blockers in their Beta blocker review meeting, deciding on key anaconda-webui and kmscon bugs. The group is also urgently compiling requirements for the upcoming Red Hat Bugzilla replacement system, which are due by September 1st.

Decisions

• Accepted Fedora 45 Beta Blockers for an anaconda-webui review screen crash (Bug 2519654) and a kmscon bug that breaks console initial-setup on ARM minimal (Bug 2484542).
• Accepted Fedora 45 Beta Freeze Exceptions to pull LLVM 23 into Fedora 45 (Bug 2506941), to address missing obsolete packages for Python 3.14 (Bug 2492124), and to fix an anaconda-webui dependency issue preventing soas livespin creation (Bug 2517903).
• Declared User switching restart failure as an Accepted Final Blocker, but rejected it as a Beta Blocker (Bug 2501857).

See the detailed report for the Quality team.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

This week, the Design team saw continued progress on graphic design requests and repository maintenance, though some coordination activities were paused due to Madeline being on PTO. New artwork was submitted for the EPEL Steering Committee badge, and the migration of historical repositories to the new Forge organization was reviewed.

See the detailed report for the Design team.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Fedora Docs team held a meeting to discuss ongoing projects, including the frontpage redesign and proposed updates to the Release Notes process. A major milestone was reached with the merging of a long-standing pull request that restructures the team documentation, successfully splitting the Docs Contributors Guide into its own module for better visibility.

Additionally, the team evaluated ticket activity, opening a new discussion on archiving or removing End-of-Life (EOL) distribution pages and processing a membership request. The team is actively seeking community input on the frontpage redesign and continues to request help with manual wiki migrations.

Decisions

• The Release Notes process will be updated to include clear documentation questions in the Fedora Change template, which will directly affect all Fedora Change owners. (Meeting Log)
• The Docs Contributors Guide has been moved into a separate module to allow placement on the Docs landing page, finalizing the team documentation restructuring. (Issue #55)
• Docs group membership requests will be denied unless the applicant has already made demonstrable contributions to repositories within the Docs organization on Forge. (Issue #60)

See the detailed report for the Docs team.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization group focused on optimizing translation resources and streamlining issue tracking. Key discussions included centralizing the issue tracker for localization-docs repositories by redirecting them via API to the main localization tracker, and removing archived documentation (sysadmin and install guides) from Weblate to save resources.

Additionally, the team fielded requests regarding unsupported Fedora releases and an upstream KDE translation error. Both were closed and redirected to the appropriate channels (Fedora Docs and the upstream KDE translation team, respectively), clarifying the scope of the Fedora localization team's responsibilities.

Decisions

• Archived and unpublished documentation (Sysadmin Guide and Install Guide) will be removed from Weblate to free up resources, while keeping their underlying Git repositories.
• Unsupported (EOL) Fedora releases will remain in Weblate as long as they are still published on Fedora Docs; requests to hide them must be directed to the Fedora Docs team.
• Translation issues for upstream projects (such as KDE Plasma Vault) are out of scope for Fedora Localization and must be reported directly to upstream translation teams.

See the detailed report for the Internationalization team.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group successfully completed the EPEL 10.3 mass branching, officially shifting standard development on the epel10 branch to target the upcoming EPEL 10.4 release. Packagers wanting to build specifically for EPEL 10.3 must now request and use a dedicated epel10.3 branch. The transition went smoothly, overcoming some infrastructure adjustments required for the new "10s" repository naming scheme.

Simultaneously, the team deployed the first phase of the EPEL 10 "de-z-ification" initiative. CentOS 10 systems with the latest release package will now use the new epel-10s metalink pointing to 10.4, while RHEL changes will follow in the fall with the release of RHEL 10.3. The team also addressed a minor but impactful bug regarding symlink churn for the EPEL 10 release RPM, temporarily fixing it to prevent repository dependency errors for users.

Decisions

• Builds submitted to the default epel10 branch now target EPEL 10.4 following the completion of the EPEL 10.3 mass branching. Packagers who need to build against EPEL 10.3 specifically must request and use the epel10.3 branch.
• The first phase of the EPEL 10 "de-z-ification" proposal was put into production. CentOS 10 systems now utilize the epel-10s metalinks and paths, which redirect to the epel-10.4 repository, to prevent package dependency issues on private mirrors. Details were announced on the discussion forum.
• The MirrorManager mapping logic for EPEL 10 was adjusted to use explicit minor versions (e.g., epel-10.4) with redirects for prior minor versions, rather than keeping the existing mapping and setting up redirects for future ones. (Discussion Post)

See the detailed report for the EPEL team.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

CentOS Hyperscale

During the August 26, 2026 meeting (log), the CentOS Hyperscale SIG announced that the wprof tool has graduated from incubation and is now available in Fedora and EPEL 10. The SIG has rebased to 7.1 kernels and plans to transition to 7.2 shortly after Fedora does. In broader ecosystem news, AlmaLinux is actively considering building the Hyperscale kernel for its users, which sparked discussions on kernel signing limitations and potential expansion of Hyperscale packages into AlmaLinux's extra repositories.

The group also discussed the progression of transactional Hyperscale updates, noting that core elements have been ported to dnf5. Work is actively proceeding on packaging these components, tracked via Bugzilla issues 2521657, 2521661, and 2521666. Additionally, a KDE proposal to improve enterprise technologies was highlighted for its strong alignment with Hyperscale's system snapshot capabilities.

Decisions

• The SIG decided to retain the EPEL 9 builds of wprof in the experimental hsx repository, despite its graduation to standard repositories for Fedora and EPEL 10.
• Davide Cavalca and Neal Gompa will finalize and submit the delayed Hyperscale quarterly report this week.

Learn more about the CentOS Hyperscale team.

ELN

During the August 25, 2026 meeting, the ELN SIG focused on infrastructure, sync processes, and tooling improvements. The group discussed options for building ELN and CentOS toolbox and container images, specifically weighing whether to migrate from Kiwi to image-builder for CentOS parity or to wait for future Konflux adoption; the decision was deferred for further investigation. The team also debated how to optimize the ELN Build Sync (EBS) timeout duration to prevent buildroot breakage during high-load events like mass rebuilds, with discussions moving to the tracker.

Most significantly for the broader Fedora and Linux packaging ecosystem, the SIG reached a consensus to stop using the Rawhide GPG key for ELN. Instead, they will provision a dedicated ELN key starting with the F46/EL11 branching. This key will be rotated approximately every three years to align with RHEL branching, which should resolve the recurring signing-related disruptions that typically happen during the Fedora branching process.

Decisions

• The SIG agreed to provision a new, dedicated GPG key for ELN starting with the F46/EL11 branching, rather than continuing to use the shared Rawhide key. This key will be rotated roughly every 3 years (aligned with RHEL branchings) to avoid widespread signing-related breakages during Fedora branching. (Meeting log)

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The Fedora Atomic group successfully added base and compose images for Fedora 45 in Konflux, while actively working to resolve build failures for IoT images alongside the IoT team. Ticket discussions highlighted a strong theme around improving the bootc image derivation process, focusing on trademark compliance and filesystem structure.

Administratively, steps were taken to grant write access to new maintainers for the base-images repository on both GitLab and the Fedora Forge. Users also reported a critical bug causing emergency mode on non-BTRFS filesystems (ext4/XFS) following recent system updates, which is currently under investigation.

Decisions

• Sean Thrailkill and Hristo Marinov were formally approved for maintainer access to the base-images repository and the Fedora Forge.
• A new Fedora Account System (FAS) group will be created for maintainers to safely isolate bot permissions on the Forge.
• The IoT team will fix their Konflux image builds now that they are aware of the failures, and coordinate future strategy for CoreOS, bootc, and IoT images.
• Ticket #125 will strictly track logos, release, and release notes packages for derived builds, with a separate ticket (#126) opened to track the /usr/local and /opt symlink issues.

See the detailed report for the Atomic team.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

During the week of August 24-30, 2026, the CoreOS group held one meeting to review pending action items, coordinate around the Fedora 45 (F45) release schedule, and discuss a major proposal to unify CoreOS and Image Mode/Bootc. Key discussions revolved around navigating the F45 beta freeze to implement zram/oomd enablement, and scheduling the F45 Test Day for September 21st.

The team had a highly positive initial reaction to the Bootc unification proposal, viewing it as a natural progression that could reduce duplication of effort across Fedora variants. This initiative will be proposed to the Bootc community next week to evaluate feasibility and alignment.

Decisions

• Tentatively scheduled the Fedora CoreOS 45 Test Day for 2026-09-21 (tracked in CoreOS #934).
• Agreed to prioritize completing the zram/oomd implementation for F45 and address any beta freeze exceptions afterward if necessary.

See the detailed report for the CoreOS team.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

ARM

This week, the ARM group primarily discussed hardware compatibility and upcoming release blockers. A user reported a kernel error when attempting to boot an older Fedora 43 installation on a Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.1. The issue was bypassed by upgrading to a Fedora 44 image, prompting maintainers to close the inquiry since Fedora 43 is no longer a focus.

Additionally, QA announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for August 31, 2026. Community members were invited to participate in the triage of proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the Beta and Final releases.

Decisions

• Maintainers will not investigate or support boot issues specific to Fedora 43 on newer hardware revisions (like the Raspberry Pi 5 Rev 1.1), as development focus has shifted to Fedora 44 and newer.

See the detailed report for the ARM team.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Hummingbird

This week, an update was shared in the Hummingbird Community Meeting - 20 August 2026 thread regarding a new project. Jorge Castro announced that a version of Bluefin built on Hummingbird technology is essentially finished and will serve as a full peer to Dakotaraptor. He emphasized his complete commitment and support for this variant, noting that initial code pushes to its new repository are expected shortly.

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

AI & ML

The AI & ML group met to discuss ongoing packaging efforts and long-term goals (meeting log). Work on PyTorch 2.13 has temporarily stalled in Rawhide and Fedora 45 due to a libstdc++ update that conflicts with ROCm, causing build breaks. Meanwhile, ROCm 10.0 (previously referred to as ROCm 8) was released on August 26. This major upgrade marks a shift in AMD's release pace and support model. The group is currently evaluating potential ABI breakage, though efforts are slightly hampered by libabigail crashing on debuginfo packages.

The group also explored the feasibility of shipping "open weights" AI models (like Nvidia's Nemotron 3 or AMD's open models) directly in Fedora. The consensus is that training or rebuilding these models from scratch within Fedora's build system (Koji) is currently unrealistic due to extreme hardware requirements (e.g., 64x MI300 GPUs) and timeouts. Doing so would require dedicated infrastructure proposals and deep-pocketed sponsors to provide heavy cloud compute resources.

Decisions

• ROCm 10.0 packages will be staged and maintained in the ROCm packagers preview COPR until basic testing is completed and the scope of ABI changes is fully quantified.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

Security

This week, the Security SIG's primary focus was discussing a draft proposal for a new Fedora Privacy SIG, which originated from earlier conversations about maintaining the ff-disable-ai-ml package. The group debated the appropriate scope for such a SIG, noting that while security and privacy are closely related, a dedicated Privacy SIG might inadvertently attract ideological or political debates rather than technical contributions.

To address these concerns and ensure good optics—particularly to avoid appearing antagonistic toward the AI/ML SIG—the group agreed to postpone any formal launch. Instead, members will take extra time to review the RFC and intend to focus initially on concrete, ad-hoc technical work, such as packaging clear privacy config toggles for users.

Decisions

• Deferred the formal creation and announcement of the proposed Privacy SIG to allow members more time to review the draft and refine its scope.
• Agreed to focus on tangible, ad-hoc technical implementations (such as packaging user privacy toggles) to establish a technical foundation before officially spinning off a new SIG.

See the detailed report for the Security team.

Learn more about the Security team.

Go

During the Go SIG meeting, it was announced that Go 1.27.0 is now available in Rawhide. Maintainers will soon move this update into Fedora 45 and trigger a mass prebuild on COPR. The SIG is also preparing to retire Go 1.25 in Fedora 43 in favor of Go 1.26, aligning with upstream Kubernetes requirements which have dropped support for 1.25 across all supported releases.

Additionally, the team discussed a new method for handling security vulnerability reports. A community member modified an upstream CRI-O script to generate govulncheck output in openvex format. This script makes it much faster to verify if a package is actually affected by specific CVEs without having to run manual checks for each one. The script will be shared publicly on platforms like GitHub or Forgejo to help maintainers triage Bugzilla tickets more efficiently.

Decisions

• Move Go 1.27.0 into Fedora 45 and perform a mass prebuild on COPR.
• Open a ticket to retire Go 1.25 in Fedora 43 and transition to Go 1.26 to support recent Kubernetes releases.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

This week's activity on the Perl mailing list consisted entirely of package maintenance pull request notifications from Michal Josef Špaček. Key updates centered around the perl-DBD-ODBC package, which was re-submitted for Fedora review, updated with a new EPEL10 package, and received miscellaneous updates. Additionally, the perl-Archive-Extract package received version 0.90 version bumps across multiple branches.

Decisions

• The perl-DBD-ODBC package was re-submitted for Fedora review and merged.
• An EPEL10 package was created and merged for perl-DBD-ODBC.
• The perl-Archive-Extract package was bumped to version 0.90 across several pull requests.

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

This week, the Python group discussed the behavior of %pyproject_patch_dependency when packaging multiple Python distribution packages in a single specfile. They agreed that its current behavior—filtering dependencies from all distributions—is sensible for most use cases but needs to be properly documented. An option to filter by a specific distribution name might be considered in the future.

In addition, flit-core has been updated to version 4. A deprecated compatibility package, python3-flit-core3, was introduced for packages that still require older versions. However, maintainers are expected to eventually migrate their packages to flit-core 4+.

Decisions

• Maintain the current behavior of %pyproject_patch_dependency (filtering from all dists) when multiple distributions are present, but document it properly.
• Update flit-core to version 4 and provide a deprecated python3-flit-core3 compatibility package for packages that have not yet migrated, with the expectation that all packages will eventually migrate to flit-core 4+.

Learn more about the Python team.

Rust

This week, the Rust group focused heavily on addressing various RUSTSEC security advisories and dealing with unmaintained crates across the ecosystem. Significant efforts were directed toward updating critical dependencies, notably the lru and git2 crates, to mitigate vulnerabilities, alongside planning migrations away from archived crates with unfixed soundness issues like smartstring, bitmaps, sized-chunks, and im-rc.

A major theme of the week was coordinating package updates and rebuilds gracefully. Because of the large number of dependent packages in the Fedora ecosystem, temporary compatibility packages are being introduced (such as for git2), and the group finalized a strategy for handling security rebuilds for affected packages they do not directly co-maintain, prioritizing cross-team communication over unilateral action.

Decisions

• Rather than invoking provenpackager privileges to force rebuilds of applications affected by the cxx RUSTSEC advisory, the group will file targeted bugs against the applications, linking the advisory and advising maintainers to simply rebuild their packages (Issue #36).
• A temporary rust-git2_0.20 compatibility package will be added to the repositories to prevent breaking a large number of dependent packages while they are being ported to git2 v0.21.0 (Issue #30).
• The group will wait until lru v0.18 is available in the repositories before attempting to patch the bounds for dependent packages like pydantic (Issue #39).

See the detailed report for the Rust team.

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

• Michael Scherer initiated a discussion on Dynamic users with sysusers and bootc/image mode, noting that sysusers.d in image mode can cause UID mismatches on upgrades, and proposed amending packaging guidelines to pair it with a tmpfiles.d fragment to properly chown files in /var.
• Mattia Verga posted the latest report on Inactive packagers for the F45 release cycle, prompting a request from Miroslav Suchý to include plain text lists of usernames directly in the email rather than relying solely on the ticket tracker links.
• Norbert Manthey proposed to Extend default compiler settings to harden applications by adding flags like -fno-strict-overflow and -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero. Daniel P. Berrangé noted that while the latter eliminates vulnerabilities, it can cause non-trivial performance degradation (e.g., 9% in virtio-blk) that maintainers must address.
• SY Wang raised an issue regarding No response from the main admin on a libxsmm pull request open for two months. Other users noted similar issues and advised following the formal nonresponsive maintainer policy via Bugzilla.
• Tobias Girstmair asked for advice on Questions on packaging vim-classic so it can coexist with standard vim. Maxwell G and Simon de Vlieger suggested starting with renamed or suffixed binaries rather than using the alternatives system.
• Aoife Moloney announced a DEADLINE: Please Submit your Bug Tracker Workflows by Sept 1, 2026 to collect workflow requirements for an eventual Red Hat Bugzilla replacement, though the tight deadline was questioned by Quality team members.
• Chihurumnaya Ibiam reported a FTBFS/FTI Page Not Found issue in an auto-generated comment link, which Miro Hrončok promptly fixed while reminding contributors to report tooling issues directly to the releng ticket tracker.
• Henryk Paluch noted that the Package Sponsorship page points to decommissioned pagure.io, and was directed to the new Fedora Forge tracker and an open pull request designed to fix the documentation.
• Kevin Fenzi confirmed the spam wave is over, stating that the spammers were banned, the archives cleaned, and new header rules were added to block similar messages.
• Orion Poplawski posted Help wanted with ansible mysql/mariadb collections, seeking a new maintainer for ansible.mysql as they are migrating to ansible.mariadb; Andreas Haupt volunteered to take it over.
• Other discussions included an announcement of the upcoming F45 Blocker Review Meeting, and two PRs from Bojan Smojver to address a Failed F44 Flatpak compose holding back updates.

Package updates

• Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski announced an [SONAME BUMP] ffmpeg upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0 for Rawhide and F45, successfully rebuilding all dependents in a COPR with minimal issues.
• Milan Crha noted the target for libical 4.0 for rawhide is now Fedora Linux 46 due to its incompatibility with the 3.x series API.
• Gwyn Ciesla announced an Upcoming gumbo-parser soname bump to version 0.14.0 in Rawhide, noting dependent packages have built fine in a side tag.
• Christoph Erhardt warned about a SONAME bump in Rawhide: mimalloc 3.5.0, which will require pull requests for dependent packages like moarvm, mold, and rakudo.
• Milan Crha organized a GNOME 51.rc update for rawhide and f45, creating side tags (f46-build-side-149189 and f45-build-side-149193) for maintainers to group their package builds.
• Milan Crha shared a heads-up that gnome-autoar 0.5.0 drops gnome-autoar-gtk in rawhide, and plans to push it to F45 if there are no undetected users.

Orphaning packages

• Peter Hutterer is Orphaning evtest, evemu and some X11 utilities (sessreg, x11perf, etc.), noting that evtest functionality has been superseded by libinput record.
• The automated Orphaned packages looking for new maintainers report highlighted a massive list of unmaintained packages; in response, Henryk Paluch volunteered for python-aexpect and Ben Beasley adopted several Rust crates (rust-find-crate, rust-hidapi, rust-tinystr).
• Benson Muite is Orphaning python-proton-vpn-api-core because tracking its new native Rust extensions and submodule dependencies is too time-consuming.

New contributor introductions

• Charles Haithcock introduced himself as a former RHEL kernel troubleshooter who is now working on Fedora kernel bugs and hopes to become more entrenched in the community.
• Bri Mo introduced himself as an applied AI/ML engineer and OSINT enthusiast running Silverblue 44 and container-first workflows with Podman.

Contribution opportunities

Testing and Quality Assurance: Community members looking for highly accessible ways to contribute can help streamline the release process by voting on proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the blockerbugs app (requested by Workstation/GNOME, KDE, Server, Release Engineering, and ARM). Testers are also needed to evaluate Google Drive integration in GNOME, the KDE Gear 26.08.0 release, ROCm 10.0 packages, and transactional updates. More involved QA tasks include investigating Atomic Desktop boot failures on non-BTRFS systems, benchmarking tuned-ppd performance, and writing test cases for upcoming Anaconda test days or CoreOS testing events.

Design, Documentation, and Community Governance: Non-developers can make significant impacts by shaping project identity, documentation, and policies. Designers are invited to create an avatar for the Matrix Moderation Bot or submit artwork for the upcoming Fedora 46 Wallpaper call. Documentation volunteers can guide the Docs frontpage redesign (Issue #6, Issue #52), assist with Wiki cleanup (Issue #43), and modernize the Request for Resources process. Contributors are also encouraged to review and provide feedback on the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, the Innovation Lifecycle Proposal, Draft Crystal Packaging Guidelines, the Privacy SIG RFC, and the CoreOS Unification proposal. Additionally, bilingual users can report translation errors directly to upstream translation teams.

Programming and Scripting: Software developers have opportunities to write automation tools and patch ecosystems. Scripting tasks include using the Forgejo API to redirect localization issue trackers, building tools to adjust NodeJS shebangs, and creating a programmatic fix for EPEL 10 symlink churn. UI/UX developers can tackle low-hanging fruit by adding a power-off option to the GNOME initial setup screen, building system snapshot integrations aligned with KDE's enterprise goals, or developing user-facing privacy toggles. Rust developers are urgently needed for security auditing and migrating Fedora packages away from unmaintained crates like smartstring (Issue #38) and updating git2 dependents.

Packaging, Infrastructure, and Sysadmin: Contributors with packaging and system administration skills are highly sought after to adopt orphaned packages resulting from unresponsive maintainers, including PackageKit-Qt5, ansible.mysql, and Python utilities (sponsorship is available for adopters of packages like python-aexpect). Python packagers can also assist by migrating spec files to flit-core v4+. Infrastructure volunteers can help prepare for RHEL 10 by building missing EPEL packages needed to migrate Mailman servers, fix Ansible inventory macros, and update the Koji theme footer URI. Furthermore, packaging contributors can help create generic Fedora remix assets to ease trademark compliance for derived bootc builds.