The Fedora Project is an online community dedicated to improving the lives of people living in the world of free software. Created in 2003 as a partnership between Red Hat and volunteers around the world, the Fedora Project provides an open source community and increasing success with tens of thousands of members in the project.

For those who have little idea, Fedora remains a very popular flavor of Linux. You can use Fedora in place or in conjunction with other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. The Fedora operating system is completely free and is freely available and redistributable.

The Fedora Project is the name of the global community of people who love, use and creates free software.  In addition, all the code and content produced in the project is provided under a license of open source software and free for users to copy, distribute and make derivative works.

Fedora 19 is the latest version of the Linux Fedora Desktop operating system edition. The development cycle of Fedora Project is purposely restricted to six months to encourage rapid innovation and collaboration between thousands of Fedora project contributors worldwide.

The Big Change

Matthew Miller, Fedora Cloud Architect, Red Hat, responsible for the cloud stack for Fedora Linux, initiated a discussion of restructuring a big change to the distribution. Titled “An Architecture for a More Agile Fedora”, he unleashed a debate on how to improve, modernize and streamline the way Fedora is compiled and published. Matthew proposal is called “Fedora.Next” and will be presented at the Flock conference.

According to his announcement post:

“Whenever I go to a tech meetup or talk to someone from a new startup company, their developers are inevitably using a different (usually proprietary) desktop OS, plus a non-Fedora distribution on their code. We’re being left behind and left out. It doesn’t matter how theoretically great we are if we end up with no users.”

“The Idea — Focus core distro as platform, include layers of modular enabling   technologies, and provide room for special interest groups to create solutions within the Fedora circle.”

Matthew proposes to develop a multi-layered distribution of the product, turning it into a modular platform for the operation of various technologies. As the Fedora kernel is proposed to distribute a basic minimum set of packages on top of which you can organize the supply of layers with the implementation of advanced features and support specific applications, such as the desktop environment for application development tools and kits for the deployment of cloud systems.

Focused on Agility, Better Design

“Fedora.Next” is a concept for organizing Fedora around a series of ‘rings’ that would have their own package requirements and component integration rule sets.

Instead of delivering a huge collection of poorly integrated with each other packages, you will be given the opportunity to install a holistic and proven set of packages with the implementation of a particular layer. In this case, the development of packages for each layer can be maintained quite separately, for each layer can be produced their releases and offered specific requirements for building packages.

This organization will simplify the creation of customized solutions based on Fedora, provide a means to quickly replace the supplied default sets for alternative implementations, easier to maintain collections of packages with the implementation of certain functionality and allow the community to focus on the basic components of the distribution.

Rings give SIGs a way to replace the default expectations with their own sets of policies. Miller proposals is to divide the distribution to ring zero as Fedora Minimal; ring two as Environments and Stacks; and ring three as Applications.

The basis ring will be the layer of zero, which will contain a minimum set of required basic system components. The layer of the first level is proposed to name Fedora Core and develop as a community-supported distribution, similar to today’s Fedora distribution. The second layer will include the implementation of stacks and environments that provide package sets to perform a certain type of code (e.g., PaaS-platform applications to specific scripting languages) or for the operation of certain software systems (such as a graphic stack to start the desktop environment, the components to run the DBMS). Among the stacks and environments that will include in this layer are GNOME, KDE, OpenStack, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, MySQL, and PostreSQL etc.

Miller encourages Fedora users to provide further suggestions and feedback on his proposal.

“This is a vision for the future. The Fedora Core idea can get started now, and the ideas beyond that are for development over a longer term. That doesn’t mean never, and there are some specific things at the higher level to get started on now, but I’m not suggesting to change everything all crazily. We’re not throwing out what have. The idea is to explore several different approaches which will better position Fedora as the distro of choice for future development.”

Miller ultimate aims is to refocus Fedora Core to provide a better platform for building future applications, make room for innovation at the “Ring 2” level and empower SIGs to create solutions that fit for future agile environment. This will make Fedora a stronger base for remixes and spins, an easier target for developers, enable upstream communities to work in Fedora while retaining their own conventions and culture, provide a better app UX for end users, and will put Fedora in the center of interest in computing today, Miller added.

Matthew’s lecture can be read in the annotation conference and also in the mail to developer mailing list. Short summary of the proposal and discussions are also on Slashdot. He is planning to deliver a presentation on his plan at the Flock conference next month, and is aiming for a “more agile architecture” for Fedora. Preliminary slides are available at http://mattdm.org/fedora/next/, and he intends to update his slide deck as public discussion moves forward.