The FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical part of the development of the Fedora distribution, implementation proposal (Enterprise Linux Next) aimed at providing an environment based on the Fedora Rawhide repository that can be used to test the functionality of future releases of the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) distribution. For ELN, a new buildroot will be prepared and to emulate the formation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux based on source packages from the Fedora repository. The project is slated for implementation as part of the Fedora 33 development cycle.
will provide a framework to build Fedora packages using methods used by CentOS and RHEL, and enable Fedora package maintainers to catch early on changes that could potentially affect RHEL development. ELN will also allow checking for intended changes to conditional blocks in spec files, i.e. build a conditional package with "%{rhel}" set to "9" ("%{fedora}" ELN will return "false"), simulating a build for a future RHEL branch.
The end goal is to rebuild the Fedora Rawhide repository as if it were RHEL. ELN plans to rebuild only a small part of the collection of Fedora packages required by CentOS Stream and RHEL. Successful rebuilds of ELN are planned to be synchronized with RHEL internal builds, adding additional changes to the packages that are not allowed in Fedora (for example, adding branding). At the same time, developers will try to minimize the differences between ELN and RHEL Next by separating them at the level of conditional blocks in spec files.
Another important use of ELN will be the ability to experiment with new ideas without affecting the core builds of Fedora. In particular, ELN will be useful for creating Fedora builds that reflect support for older hardware and enable additional CPU extensions by default. For example, in parallel, it will be possible to form a variant of Fedora, defining mandatory support for AVX2 instructions in the CPU requirements, and then test the performance impact of using AVX2 in packages and decide on the implementation of the change in the main distribution of Fedora.
Tests like this are relevant for validating Fedora packages in the face of changing hardware architecture requirements outlined in a future significant RHEL branch, without blocking the regular process of packaging and preparing Fedora releases.
Source: opennet.ru