Steps in the Fedora transition

The recent Fedora Summit reached a number of conclusions about the future of the project. These include the elimination of the distinction between Fedora Core and Fedora Extras and the extension of the support period for Fedora releases to approximately 13 months. Since then, various parts of the project have tried to figure out what is really going to happen. It is beginning to appear that a few things, at least, are coming into focus.

When changes of this magnitude are in store, one's thoughts immediately turn to the most important topic: what will be the project's new name? Quite a few possibilities were discussed, including Fedora Union (not everybody liked the acronym) and Fedora Freedom (which, it seems, brings unwelcome associations with "freedom fries" to a fair number of people). After weeks of discussion, it would appear that people are converging on (...drum roll...) "Fedora." Who would have guessed?

So when will the next Freedom Fries Fedora release be? According to a recently-posted schedule proposal, Fedora 7 will come out on April 24, 2007. That date seems to be driven by the Red Hat Summit, which starts on May 9; the Fedora folks would like to have something to show off at that event. On this schedule, the first test release would be on January 30, just before the next FUDcon, which appears set for February 2 to 4. Assuming the schedule does not slip, it should be possible to hand out Fedora 7 disks to Red Hat Summit attendees.

The only problem is that Fedora schedules have been known to slip at times. This realization has led to a discussion on what went wrong, and how schedule slips might be avoided this time around. There were a number of issues that came up toward the end of the Fedora Core 6 effort, some of which would have been hard to anticipate and avoid. One of the biggest issues, however, was the fact that Xen didn't work. Fedora kernel maintainer Dave Jones has some choice words about Xen, along with a grim prognosis about the potential for future problems. It rather appears that Fedora might be best served by dropping Xen altogether, but that is unlikely to happen in the short term. Red Hat Enterprise Linux needs to have Xen (after all, Novell ships it), and Fedora is where these technologies get much of their early testing.

That said, there seems to be a fair amount of sympathy for the idea of simply dropping features with problems that threaten to delay the release. Hopefully the Fedora developers won't have to make any such choices this time around, but, should something come up, it will be interesting to see how they respond.

Another open question is what happens to the Fedora Legacy project. Nobody has really taken the step of officially shutting it down. Jesse Keating has walked away from it, however, and few people seem to see much reason for keeping it going. There are users who would like to see more than 13 months of security support for Fedora releases, but the subset of those users who are willing to help Fedora Legacy provide that support is quite small.

Meanwhile, the project did (on December 12) put this note onto its web page:

Given that the project only managed one Fedora Core 4 update ever, one could argue that the situation has not changed much. But at least it is now clear. What is less clear is how the various hosting companies which offer Fedora Core 4 servers have kept them secure so far, and what they intend to do now.

Finally, the project still has not come to a final resolution on what to do about RPM. The subject was apparently discussed at the December 12 board meeting, but no communications are, as of this writing, available. With luck, we'll hear from the project on this topic before too long. Infrastructure like RPM is too important to leave in a limbo state for this long.

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