More Fedora 19 Features Are Proposed

Just days after Fedora 19 saw a set of new features proposed, some additional proposed features for this major Fedora Linux release have been voiced.

Fedora 18 is finally being released later this month while Fedora 19 is planned for a late-May release. This next release of Red Hat's community distribution is codenamed Schrödinger's Cat.

Last week the voiced Fedora 19 features were Ruby 2.0, replacing Python's PIL with Pillow, better 3D printing support, and dual-stack networking for IPv4 and IPv6. The features this week now being talked about on the Fedora developers' list include:

- PHP 5.5. The alpha releases of PHP 5.5 are already out there now while the first beta of PHP 5.5 is expected in January. Among the new features to the PHP 5.5 language include support for generators with the yield keyword, try-catch blocks now support a finally block, the foreach control can now unpack nested arrays with the list construct, empty now supports arbitrary expressions, array and string literals can now be directly dereferenced, and there's a new password hashing API.

- Package Signature Checking During Installation. This package signature checking at install-time comes down to verifying RPM package signatures during the initial operating system installation, which has never been done up to this point in Fedora or Red Hat Linux. This package signature checking hasn't happened because, "there's no way to form any root of trust for the signatures in the repositories, and thus no reason they wouldn't have been modified along with whatever package would need to be re-signed after tampering." What's changed now is that UEFI SecureBoot comes into play... Fedora can extend SecureBoot keys as a root of trust by the hardware against which Fedora can now verify a signature of their own files.

- Node.js. Node.js may finally be making its way into Fedora. This feature also includes pushing the npm package manager.

- NetworkManagerCLIAddConnection. This feature comes down to adding in support in NetworkManager for being able to add new connections using the nmcli command-line tool. If this feature is approved it will be possible to create/activate/delete NetworkManager connections in a straight-forward manner from the CLI rather than just the NetworkManager user-interface or editing files by hand.

We'll see if these Fedora 19 features are approved plus whatever other features may be on the horizon for this cutting-edge Linux distribution.