Foreman 1.18 RC1 and RC2 (and test week event) -> RC3 next week
The next major release for Foreman is undergoing final testing, and the first release candidate came out on June 12th, with a ton of fixes and updates. We then held a successful 1.18 test week (kindly organised by Lukas) which aimed to cover a lot of the common scenarios for RC testing. This was largely successful, and many bugs were logged and looked at. Thanks to everyone for helping out!
We’ve just released 1.18 RC2 for the next round of testing, so give it a spin and let us know how you get on - and do report issues as you find them! We couldn’t do this without the testing we get from the community, so thanks very much to you all!
Late-breaking news! I’m told that RC3 will be out early next week, so you may want to hold off a few days!
Katello 3.7 RC1
To go with 1.18 RC1/2, there is also an RC1 release of the next Katello version. Again, lots of bug fixes and new features are in this release, so please do check it out, and report issues if you find any. Thanks!
New Release Manager
It’s no secret that build stability has been an issue for some time in the nightlies, and that’s had a knock-on effect on release schedules, etc.
To try to address this, Tomer Brisker has accepted the role of Release Manager, and will be actively working to improve the state of the build pipeline. You can read all about his new role here
Tomer’s long-time experience in the Foreman project, as his attention to detail, is a welcome addition to this area of the project - I’m sure he’ll have an impact. Thanks Tomer!
Survey analysis
Earlier in the year we asked you all to fill in our survey, as we do every year. I’ve had chance to at least do some descriptive analysis of the raw data, and do some comparisons to the 2017 data. If you’re interested in the results, check them out here
Blog & Forum integration
Staying with the blog, we’ve also enabled comments on the blog again (after a long absence), which now uses our [forum][https://community.theforeman.org/c/blog] to store the comments. As a side effect, you can now read the blog on our forum too, if that’s more your style. Scroll to the bottom of this post to check it out!
Redmine upgrade
In a short while, we’ll start the long-delayed upgrade to our bug tracker. This has blocked for a long time because of the unmaintained plugins we were using, but there is now a plan in place to move past this. Work is scheduled to start soon, so you may see some instability in the bug tracker at times - details will be posted to the forum, of course.
Plugin Maintainers wanted!
Many of our plugins suffer compatibility issues and/or changes in the projects they integrate with over time - when Foreman changes, or (for example) Salt released a new version, plugins can be affected. Sadly, several plugins hit by this have not been maintained, and are now facing being retired from the plugin repository.
If you’re interesting in helping contribute to the community by helping to fix a plugin you rely on, please get in touch! Currently we’d love some help with:
- ABRT
- Chef
- Salt
- Compute resources:
- Azure
- GCE
- EC2
- Rackspace
If these plugins matter to you (or you want to contribute to another plugin!), but don’t know where to start, come talk to me and I’ll help you get started. You can also join the [dev discussion][plugins].
RFCs needing attention
I’m going to start highlighting open RFCs that might benefit from more eyeballs. Here’s this month’s selection:
- M2 MaaS provisioning
- Move GCE to a plugin
- Split Hostgroups and Puppet Classes
- Drop the ‘stable’ link in the DEB repo
Upcoming Events
The Foreman Community has now fully embraced Discourse as the source of its
event data - if you’ve been using the old /events/all.ics in your own
calendar, you’ll need to head over to the forum
calendar and hit the Subscribe
button (which will give you an ICS link). You can also use the Add To Calendar
button on specific events if you don’t wish to import the whole thing.
Future community demos will now be created much further in advance, so you should be able to keep up with upcoming demos there (currently I’ve created topics out to August :P)o
A one-day unconference / hack session in honour of our birthday, hosted by our good friends at ATIX - thanks!
We’d like some more speakers for this, so please get in touch if you want to go along!
There’s going to be some kind of Foreman presence at OSS-EU this year, but the CFP for presentations closes this week (SUnday 1st) - so if you want to get your entry paid for, get your submissions in right away!
Past Events
Our first ever Foreman-headlined conference was held earlier this month, and was great fun - thanks to our partners at NETWAYS and Graylog for helping to make this event happen. A full day of talks, hacking, and discussion, thoroughly enjoyed by all (so I am told :P)
Containers, backups, and oVirt, oh my! A return to force for the demo, with great content from all the presenters.
A packed demo, covering the Redmine and Survey results mentioned above, as well as foreman-hooks for content, more Docker support, better state handling for unattended installs (awesome!) and more. One to watch.
Tereza Novotna took us through the proposed wireframes for the old Audits UI, which has been in need of love for some time. We also had time for a solid discussion around filtering vs sorting, and tables vs list views.
Plugin news
Updated plugins:
- hammer_cli_foreman_remote_execution updated to 0.1.0
- foreman_chef updated to 0.8.0
- foreman_tasks updated to 0.13.2
- foreman_remote_executionto 1.5.3
- foreman_discovery updated to 12.0.1
- foreman_docker updated to 4.1.0
- foreman_openscap updated to 0.10.1
- hammer_cli_katello updated to 0.13.2
- foreman_memcache updated to 0.1.1
- smart_proxy_monitoring updated to 0.1.2
- smart_proxy_omaha updated to 0.0.4
- foreman_virt_who_configure updated to 0.2.2
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, meetups and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!