Distributions

Fedora 20 takes shape

By Jonathan Corbet
September 25, 2013

The Fedora 20 alpha release was announced on September 24. This release provides the first opportunity for many outside the Fedora development community to see what is being planned for the next version of Fedora which, according to the current (revised) schedule, is due to be released on December 3. This seems like as good a time as any to take a look at what Fedora is up to and what Fedora users can expect in Fedora 20.

It's not given its own billing in the Fedora 20 change list, but, for many users, one of the headline features may well be the Wayland preview that is expected to be shipped as part of the GNOME 3.10 release. It may well be the first time that it will be possible to run a Wayland setup from within a major distribution. That said, it seems unlikely that most users will actually want to do so; as Christian Schaller put it:

Well there will be a quite a few things missing or maybe not working as expected. What we hope to have ready is a system where you can have the option of a Wayland session available in GDM, so that instead of logging into your normal X based session you log into one running Wayland instead. Once in that session you should be able to launch and run some applications, but stability is likely to not be great and we don’t know how well XWayland will work by then, so you will also likely having limited mileage with applications that still rely on X. The goal for the tech preview is not to create something an end user is likely to find very useful, rather it is about lowering the barrier for developers and contributors to get involved and start preparing for the Wayland future.

The hope is that the preview will help developers to find problems and stabilize things to the point that a shift to Wayland as the default could be considered for Fedora 21. Given all that has to happen, though, and given the developers' intent (as reiterated by Christian) to ensure that users don't even notice the change, a switch for Fedora 21 may be an overly ambitious goal. But it's worth a try, and it will be interesting to see how Wayland holds up if one tries to do real work with it.

The change that many people got worked up over, of course, was the dropping of sendmail from the default install. The project did decide, after some back-and-forth, to take sendmail out; those who need it can put it back with a single yum command. There has been a lot less noise in the wider community about the decision to drop rsyslog from the default install as well. Without rsyslog, the classic text system log in /var/log/messages will be no more; there will also be no support for the syslog network protocol. Instead, systemd's journal will be solely responsible for system logging. Once again, anybody who relies on syslog functionality can have it with a single yum command. But, doubtless, there will be some complaints from users who are unhappy to see Fedora taking another step away from traditional Unix practice.

The years-long effort to support ARM as a primary architecture took a big step forward when the Fedora 19 ARM release happened on the same day as the x86 release. With the Fedora 20 release, ARM as a primary architecture should be official. The user base for Fedora on ARM remains small, but it can be expected to grow as ARM processors find homes in laptops, servers, and other systems of interest.

There are, needless to say, numerous other additions beyond the usual upgrades to the latest versions of various packages. For example, the new GNOME Software application installer will be present. This tool intends to ease the task of installing and maintaining applications; it's not clear how many applications will be managed that way in the F20 release, though. Apache OpenOffice will be added to the distribution, though nobody seems to envision it replacing LibreOffice as the default Fedora office suite. There is a plan to add a snapshot and rollback facility to facilitate recovery from bad updates. And so on.

Interestingly, one feature that appears to have fallen off the list entirely is the proposed shift to Btrfs as the default filesystem. The new snapshot feature is, instead, built on LVM. Once upon a time (around Fedora 17) switching to Btrfs was an explicit release goal. Various difficulties with the filesystem, the departure of one of the key developers from Red Hat, and installer difficulties all seem to have pushed Btrfs off the radar for now; indeed, a recent discussion suggests that openSUSE will get there first.

Fedora's "Foundations" notwithstanding, being the first to ship every shiny new feature is not necessarily the best way to run a distribution, especially if, as some people still feel about Btrfs, a feature is not yet ready for production use. Even without Btrfs, Fedora 20 will clearly contain a large amount of new and interesting software. Needless to say, the quality of that release will be improved if more people download the alpha release, give it a try, and report any bugs that they find.

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Giving and taking constructive feedback is a hugely useful skill to have - it helps you as well as others to learn and get better. And while most of our communication takes place online, these rules apply as much if not more so. Thanking somebody for a patch, starting by commenting on the good side of it, before you hack and slash in on the less-than-great parts, adding concrete ideas for improvements, and finishing with a high-note in proper sandwich style: it can make the difference between getting an improved patch or never hearing from the contributor again.

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