Goodbye F20, F23 development, and Fedora Hubs

Fedora 20 End-of-Life Imminent

The Fedora Project keeps three versions of the OS active at any given time — the current release, the release before that, and a new one in development. With last month’s release of Fedora 22 and Fedora 23 development underway, it’s time to bid a fond farewell to Fedora 20.

That release will reach end of life on June 23rd, 2015. No further updates will be pushed out beyond that point.

Because of the extended Fedora 21 development cycle (as the initial steps were taken for Fedora.next), both F19 and F20 enjoyed about 18 months in the spotlight — each 553 days, to be exact. (That makes them our longest-supported releases ever.)

If you’ve been using Fedora 20 — or even something older — now is the time to upgrade. The good news is that both Fedora 21 and the new Fedora 22 are very solid releases across all of Workstation, Server/, and Cloud — and our various alternative desktop spins and functional software bundles, too.

F23 Change Deadline

Clearing support for F20 from the plate leaves more room for development, and that’s in full swing for Fedora 23. Most of the big changes developers plan for each release are communicated and coordinated through what we call Changes, with a capital C.

Anyone with an idea can file such a change (see the procedures at the bottom of the page above), but keep in mind that these are primarily a planning tool, and aren’t work orders — each idea needs to come with commitments to actually do the implementation, or else it won’t happen even if approved. So, once you have a draft change, start shopping it around to others who could help or who might be affected — getting early sign-on significantly increases the chances of success.

F23 Mass Rebuild in process

Occasionally (but not every release, which is why you might see packages labeled “f21” in Fedora 22), we go through a mass rebuild, where every package in the distribution is rebuilt from source even if the contents haven’t changed. This allows us to take advantages of compiler improvements, and sometimes to change build options — in this case, for a Change which increases security hardening of all packages.

Because these underlying changes sometimes trigger latent bugs (or introduce new ones), it’s almost always the case that some packages fail to rebuild properly. If you are a Fedora packager and are responsible for a package which failed, you’ve probably already gotten a notification. There’s quite a few this time around — see this list — these will need to be fixed or will eventually be dropped from the distribution. (If you need help, post to the devel list.) Once you have a successful build into Rawhide (Fedora’s master development branch), you don’t need to do anything extra.

Fedora Hubs

Fedora, of course, has http://getfedora.org/ and the project wiki, but our active online presence is on IRC and a large number of mailing lists. This is comfortable and useful to a lot of us old-school Linux hackers and developers, but can be overwhelming to new users and contributors. And, it’s not always so great for even the old-school types, especially for casual contributors who don’t have time to drink from the firehose.

So, we have this idea for a new, active web presence called “Fedora Hubs”. This will integrate with and complement IRC and the mailing lists (thanks, HyperKitty). And, we’re very fortunate to have an awesome intern, Meghan Richardson, working on the design this summer. Follow her blog posts to see how this develops:

• Intro to Fedora Hubs
• Bookmarking Hubs
• Joining Hubs & Personal Profiles
• IRC on Hubs

5tFTW: off for Summit next week

I’ll be at Red Hat Summit next week, and 5tFTW will take a break. If you’re attending, make sure to stop by the Fedora booth and say hello!