In association with heise online

22 March 2012, 09:01

Fedora 18: Name suggestions, system log and ARM support

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • submit to slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • submit to reddit

Fedora logo While the Fedora developers are working on the beta of Fedora 17, which is due to be released in two weeks, first plans are already being made for the Fedora 18 distribution which is expected to arrive this autumn – these include name suggestions, a greater significance of the ARM port, and a proposal to switch logging to the journal that is part of Systemd.

The discussion around the significance of the ARM port arose after the developers of the port proposed to the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) that Fedora's ARM port should be elevated from a "Secondary Architecture" to a "Primary Architecture". This would mean that the development of the ARM port would no longer be separate from, and would instead be tied into, the Fedora versions for X86-32 and X86-64 systems – an ARM-specific problem would then delay the availability of release candidates, final releases and software updates of Fedora. The Fedora developers are currently discussing the pros and cons of this proposal in detail on their mailing list (1, 2). One frequent issue of concern is the considerably longer build times for RPM packages – for example, building the GNU Compiler Collection on ARM takes about a day, while an x86-64 system can complete this task in one and a half hours.

After a brief discussion, the FESCo committee that oversees the development of the distribution has rejected the proposal to exclusively use Journal for logging in Fedora 18. Recent versions of Systemd offer these event logging features that will internally also be used by Fedora 17. Contrary to what one might expect, the suggestion to switch to Journal was not made by Systemd developer Lennart Poettering but by another Fedora developer. A modified version of the proposal may yet be resubmitted for Fedora 18 or a later version of Fedora. The developers have accepted feature requests to switch to RPM 4.10 and implement a better hot spot feature in the Network Manager.

Recently, the project has also started to accept name suggestions for Fedora 18 on its wiki. As usual, the name must have a connection to the previous version's name and will eventually be chosen in a ballot by the project contributors; Fedora 17, which is scheduled for release in early May, is called "Beefy Miracle".

(djwm)

Print Version | Send by email | Permalink: http://h-online.com/-1477545
 


  • July's Community Calendar





The H Open

The H Security

The H Developer

The H Internet Toolkit