CentOS Community Newsletter: September 2021

Dear CentOS community,

It’s been another interesting and productive month in the CentOS project.

If you’d like to contribute your own stories or articles to this newsletter, please join us on the centos-promo mailing list.

Project News

Public Board of Directors Meetings

As part of our onging effort to increase transparency and participation at CentOS, the August board of directors meeting was completely public. You can watch the proceedings on YouTube, and see the [meeting minutes on the CentOS blog.(https://blog.centos.org/2021/08/minutes-for-centos-board-of-directors-for-2021-08-11/)

We know that board meetings aren’t exactly exciting, and we’re not expecting to have a lot of people watch the whole thing, but transparancy is at the heart of Open Source, and so we are working towards opening every part of the process which has not been thus far.

After the board meeting, we held an open town hall on IRC, where various community members brought their questions and comments. The transcript of this meeting is available in the archive.

Both of these features (i.e., the public meeting, and the post-meeting IRC town hall) are intended to continue for future board meetings.

If you’re interested in attending the September board meetings, please see the centos-devel mailing list, where the invitation for September board meetings has been sent. If there’s something you would like to have discussed by the board, that thread is also the right venue for that.

CPE to staff EPEL work

We are pleased to announce that Red Hat is establishing a small team directly responsible for participating in EPEL activities. Their job isn’t to displace the EPEL community, but rather to support it full-time. We expect many beneficial effects, among those better EPEL readiness for a RHEL major release. The EPEL team will be part of the wider Community Platform Engineering group, or CPE for short.

As a reminder, CPE is the Red Hat team combining IT and release engineering from Fedora and CentOS.

Right now we are staffing up the team and expect to see us begin this work from October 2021. Keep an eye on the EPEL mailing list and the associated tracker as we begin this exciting journey with the EPEL community.

CentOS Stream 9

Also on worth reading centos-devel this month is a thread in which Brian sketched out an estimated timeline for CentOS Stream 9 progress.

In the Press

A few weeks ago Steven Dickens wrote this article about the project’s ongoing efforts to improve transparency, and include the community more in decision making.

Events

We have a number of events coming up in the next couple of months, including our first in-person events since early 2020.

CentOS Dojo, October 7, 8

The Call for Presentations for the online CentOS Dojo in October has just closed, and we expect to post the schedule later today. This event will include SIG reports, a Board of Directors AMA (Ask Me Anything) and other technical content. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at that event.

During the second day of the event, we will be hosting a Bug Smash event, where you can learn how to contribute changes to CentOS Stream. This will include tooling setup, and discusison of what kinds of changes are likely to be accepted.

Open Source Summit, Seattle, September 27-30

Our first return to an in-person event will be Open Source Summit in Seattle, which will be held September 27-30th. CentOS will be in the Red Hat booth at that event, and we hope to see you there!

All Things Open, Raleigh, October 17-19

We also expect to be present at All Things Open, which will be held October 17-19 in Raleigh, North Carolina

SIG Reports

Special Interest Groups are where you can get involved providing additional packages, or other extra value, on top of the base CentOS platform. The following SIGs are reporting this month:

Artwork SIG

Purpose

The CentOS Artwork SIG exists to produce the CentOS Project visual
identity.

See https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Artwork

Membership Update

We are always looking for new members.

Releases

The Artwork SIG is wrapping up the ticket about CentOS Project Logo
redesign. Final slides have been designed and will be presented to
CentOS Board next month.

The Artwork SIG releases one brand new artistic motif with each major
release of CentOS distribution. For CentOS Stream 9 distribution, the
next major release of CentOS Project, we have designed the following
artistic motif:

https://wiki.centos.org/ArtWork/Motifs/CentOS9/Sketch3

The Artwork SIG, in coordination with CentOS-Infra, is redesigning the
CentOS Websites and have put online the following resources so you can
test it:

• https://www.dev.centos.org/
• https://lists.dev.centos.org/mailman/listinfo
• https://blog.dev.centos.org/
• https://people.dev.centos.org/

The artistic motif, the websites design, and everything the Artwork SIG
does is open for contributions. If you want to participate, please send
an email to centos-devel@centos.org showing your interests.

Health and Activity

The Artwork SIG is not as healthy as other SIGs could be. The lack of
SIG members in it during an extended period of time is a red light
difficult to avoid. To workaround this, artwork propositions are
eventually shared in social media looking for public opinion and so get
more context for the results we produce. We need more folks to push
harder on Artwork SIG purpose.

The Artwork SIG is in doubt about the boundaries related to CentOS
branding and would like to have a clear answer to the following
questions:

• What design process does Red Hat expect the CentOS community to
  follow regarding CentOS brand constant reviewing? How much freedom does
  CentOS community has to agree or disagree with changes coming from the
  brand owner as well as the other way around.

• The CentOS brand is owned by Red Hat, but the process by which the
  image is produced/enhanced, could it be considered an open source
  project on its own, with open and clean directives to follow. So, to
  make visible what we can and cannot do when we talk about enhancing the
  CentOS brand?

Issues for the Board

The following issue will be brought to the Board of Directors in the September board meeting: https://git.centos.org/centos/Artwork/issue/1

OpsTools SIG

Jun 01, 2021 - Aug 31, 2021

Purpose

Provide tools and documentation, recommendation and best practices for operators of large infrastructure.

Membership update

Sadly, we did not attract new volunteers to contribute to the SIGs purposes, but at the same time, we didn’t loose any.

Activity

After initial euphoria setting up the SIG and getting to work, we can now observe a kind of settlement. Collectd was upgraded to 5.12 (in testing).
The next goal is to build both on CentOS Stream and also to look at what’s coming for CentOS 9.

Issues for the board

Nothing to report.

Virtualization SIG

Advanced Virtualization

• CentOS Virt SIG has been updated with latest 8.4.0 advanced virtualization packages (qemu 5.2.0, libvirt 7.0)
• CentOS Stream 8 SIG follows 8.5.0 pre-release packages, with most recent builds done last week (qemu6.0, libvirt 7.5)

oVirt

• upstream released oVirt 4.4.8 (https://blogs.ovirt.org/2021/08/ovirt-4-4-8-is-now-generally-available/)
• oVirt conference is coming on September 14th, opening the week to KVM forum (https://blogs.ovirt.org/ovirt-2021-online-conference/ )
• oVirt started the development for next major, oVirt 4.5.0 which will feature CentOS Stream 9 support ( https://ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/integration/centos-9-stream-support.html )