The FESCo Committee (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical aspects of the Fedora distribution development, implementation proposal (Enterprise Linux Next), aimed at providing an environment based on the Fedora Rawhide repository, which can be used for testing the functionality of future releases of the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) distribution. A new buildroot will be prepared for ELN and for emulating the formation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux based on packages with source texts from the Fedora repository. The project is planned to be implemented as part of the development cycle of Fedora 33.
will provide infrastructure to collect Fedora packages using methods applied in CentOS and RHEL, allowing Fedora package maintainers at an early stage to catch changes that could potentially affect the development of RHEL. ELN will also enable testing proposed changes to conditional blocks in spec files, i.e., building a package with the condition that the variable "%{rhel}" is set to "9" (the variable "%{fedora}" in ELN will return "false"), simulating a build for the future RHEL branch.
The ultimate goal is to rebuild the Fedora Rawhide repository as if it were RHEL. ELN is planned to rebuild only a small portion of the Fedora package collection that is in demand in CentOS Stream and RHEL. Successful ELN rebuilds are planned to be synchronized with internal RHEL builds, adding additional changes to packages that are not permissible in Fedora (for example, adding trademarks). Developers will also strive to minimize differences between ELN and RHEL Next, delineating them at the level of conditional blocks in spec files.
Another important application of ELN will be the ability to experiment with the implementation of new ideas without affecting the core Fedora builds. In particular, ELN will be useful for creating Fedora builds that reflect support for older hardware and enabling additional CPU extensions by default. For instance, it will be possible to create a version of Fedora defining mandatory support for AVX2 instructions in CPU requirements, after which the performance impact of using AVX2 in packages can be tested and a decision made on whether to implement the change in the main Fedora distribution.
Such tests are relevant for verifying Fedora packages in the context of changing requirements for hardware architectures, as outlined in the upcoming significant RHEL branch, without blocking the standard package building process and release preparation for Fedora.
Source: opennet.ru
