The Fedora project has announced the launch of the Fedora Forge collaborative development service, built using the Forgejo project. This service is being developed to replace the in-house Pagure platform, which has been used in Fedora for collaboration with code and package metadata. The replacement is necessary as the Pagure platform requires significant resources for maintenance, is in a state of stagnation, and has not gained widespread adoption outside of Fedora. It is anticipated that Fedora Forge will simplify development and the transfer of changes to the core Fedora teams.
Fedora Forge has been launched in a pilot mode and is being tested on several sub-projects and SIG (Special Interest Groups). For example, projects from the RelEng (Release Engineering), Council, and FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) teams have already been migrated to Fedora Forge. In the future, the number of projects developed in Fedora Forge will expand, and this service will become the primary place for collaborative work on Fedora.
To automate the migration of projects from Pagure to Fedora Forge, a tool called Pagure Migrator has been developed, which is included in the Forgejo platform. Pagure Migrator allows for the preservation of pull requests, tickets, discussions, labels, and users after the migration. In contrast to the pagure.io service, Fedora Forge does not allow the hosting of personal projects and focuses solely on projects related to the development of Fedora Linux.
It is also worth noting the release of the beta version of the Fedora Linux 43 distribution, marking the transition to the final testing phase, during which only critical bug fixes are permitted. The release is scheduled for November 11. The release includes Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, Fedora Server, Fedora IoT, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, Fedora IoT Edition, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, and Live builds delivered in the form of spins with customized environments such as Xfce, Cinnamon, LXDE, Phosh, Miracle, LXQt, Budgie, Sway, and Cosmic. The builds are created for x86_64, Power64, and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 43:
- The desktop in Fedora Workstation has been updated to GNOME 49.
- Packages used for running GNOME on top of the X server have been removed from the repositories. All GNOME users who were using X11 will be forcibly switched to a GNOME session based on Wayland. The ability to run X11 applications using XWayland remains unchanged.
- On x86 architecture systems, only the use of GPT (GUID Partition Table) partition tables is allowed in all Fedora installations using UEFI. Support for installing Fedora in UEFI mode on disks with MBR (Master Boot Record) partition tables has been discontinued on x86 systems, but remains available on ARM and RISC-V systems.
- A transition to RPM 6 package manager has been made, notable for supporting a new format that allows creating packages larger than 4 GB, and by enabling package authenticity verification using digital signatures by default.
- All spin builds have been transitioned to a new version of the Anaconda installer, which replaces the GTK-based interface with a web interface, allowing remote installation management through a web browser. In the previous release, the new installer was utilized in Fedora Workstation. Instead of a main screen listing actions, the new interface organizes work in a Wizard format, implying a sequential execution of specific steps without returning to the main screen. An automated (guided) disk partitioning mode is proposed, where the installer selects parameters for creating or modifying partitions based on user-selected settings. Options are available for reinstalling the distribution and installing in dual boot mode on systems with multiple OS.
- The installer has transitioned to using DNF5 package manager for installing RPM packages (DNF5 has been in use since Fedora 41). The core package management functionality in DNF5 has been moved to a separate library libdnf5, DNF Daemon is used instead of PackageKit, and Python components have been rewritten in C++.
- Support for separately updatable modules that are not tied to the main structure of the distribution has been removed from the installer; their lifecycle is independently maintained from the distribution releases, allowing the coexistence of packages with different versions of the same application.
- In Fedora Kinoite, the atomic updating variant of Fedora with KDE, automatic system updates are enabled by default. Updates are now downloaded in the background without user consent and are applied after a reboot. There are options in the settings to disable auto-updates and change the update checking interval.
- The assembler YASM has been classified as deprecated, with its last update released in 2019. Packages that used YASM for building (including Firefox) have been migrated to use NASM.
- The delivery of GnuPG has been split into several packages — the gpg program, auxiliary utilities, and GnuPG services are now distributed in separate packages (gnupg2, gnupg2-dirmngr, gnupg2-g13, gnupg2-gpgconf, gnupg2-gpg-agent, gnupg2-keyboxd, gnupg2-scdaemon, gnupg2-smime, gnupg2-wks, gnupg2-utils, and gnupg2-verify).
- The ability to use the Intel TDX (Trusted Domain Extensions) mechanism for encrypting the memory of guest systems has been implemented (AMD SEV has been supported since Fedora 41).
- Packages with tools for the Hare programming language, developed by the author of the Sway user environment, have been added. The language is optimized for low-level tasks such as operating system development, compilers, network applications, and system utilities that require maximum performance and full control over execution. It uses manual memory management and a static type system, where every variable must explicitly be assigned a specific type.
- When building packages in Go, the Go Vendor Tools are utilized, where copies of the libraries used are included in the src package, rather than using separately supplied dependency packages (i.e., shared library versions for the entire system are not used).
- The transition to using Noto Color Emoji fonts in vector format COLRv1 instead of raster representation has been completed. The use of COLRv1 has improved rendering quality and reduced the size of font files.
- The Zstd algorithm has been used for compressing the initial RAM disk (initrd) images during builds with Dracut. The transition from xz to zstd has reduced the size of initrd by several megabytes and sped up boot times.
- The Greenboot toolkit variant has been implemented, rewritten in Rust (the old version was written in bash). Greenboot is used in atomically updated versions of Fedora to check the system's status during boot and roll back to a previous version when problems are detected.
- Updated versions: LLVM 21, GCC 15.2, binutils 2.45, glibc 2.42, gdb 17.1, Go 1.25, Python 3.14, Java 25, Maven 4, Perl 5.42, Haskell GHC 9.8, Apache Tomcat 10.1.x, Ruby on Rails 8.0, PostgreSQL 18, MySQL 8.4, Dovecot 2.4.
Source: opennet.ru
