New Features Approved For Fedora 17

There was a FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) meeting held today where several new features were approved for the Fedora 17 feature list.

The features that were approved today for Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, include:

- D2 programming language support. D2 is an updated version of the D programming language that adds support for items like closures and support for functional and concurrent programming paradigms.

- Thin provisioning support. This feature includes providing a thin provisioning Device Mapper with supportive user-space utilities. Most of the pieces for this feature are already in place.

- Password quality checking. Fedora 17 strives to have a library with a simple API for checking the quality of passwords for new system accounts. Other applications would also be able to tap into this library for password quality checking. Part of this library is also to support generating "a random pronounceable password that fulfils the password quality requirements."

The notes from today's FESCo meeting can be found in this development mailing list message. Below are some of the other Fedora 17 features that were already approved, with the complete list being available from the Fedora Project Wiki.

- Btrfs as the default file-system. This has been worked on as a feature for several Fedora release cycles now, but ultimately has been postponed each time with EXT4 remaining the default. We'll see if the Beefy Miracle is the magical release that manages the migration to Btrfs.

- Improved session and seat handling.

- LLVMpipe support for handling the GNOME Shell in software. (See the Phoronix tests.)

- Moving everything to /usr.

- Finish porting sysVinit scripts over to systemd unit files.

- Shipping Fedora 17 only with DRI2 graphics drivers.