Fedora 18 Will Preview A New Package Manager

During today's FESCo meeting, the engineering and steering committee approved a number of new features for Fedora 18, a.k.a. the Spherical Cow.

Newly-approved features for this next Fedora Linux release due out in November include:

- An improved initial experience, such as for showing any EULA/licenses on first boot, improvements to getting on the network easier, setting the system time/location, setting up online accounts (e.g. G-Mail), and other enhancements to provide "an improved and smoother initial experience" for those trying out the Fedora desktop for the first time. Initial experience details are on this Wiki page.

- More packages to make Fedora 18 a more ideal development platform for Clojure. The Clojure language is a dialect of the Lisp programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, Common Language Runtime, and JavaScript engines.

- Fedora 18 will use DNF, which is a new package manager. DNF is considered a next-generation Yum package manager and uses the hawkey/libsolv back-end. DNF was forked from Yum 3.4 and aims to provide better performance while with a smaller memory footprint, a leaner code-base, a strict API definition for extending projects, strict API definition for plug-ins, and a SAT solver for dependency resolving. DNF and Yum can co-exist so for the Spherical Cow this is mainly meant as a preview item. Hawkey is the new package management API that is built atop libsolv. More information on the Wiki.

- The DragonEgg GCC-LLVM plug-in will be available in Fedora 18.

- The debug files in debuginfo packages will be compressed using the DWARF Compressor dwz in order to save space.

- The minimal debuginfo will be installed by default in an attempt to increase quality of bug reports and allows for easier profiling and user-space tracing.

- Support for offline updates using systemd and PackageKit. The updating of system components will be done in a minimal, controlled environment. Details here.

- SELinux booleans will be renamed.

- More SysVInit scripts will be ported to systemd unit files.

- New systemd documentation and systemd unit file clean-ups will happen.

These newly-approved Fedora 18 features were mentioned in the FESCo meeting notes.

Some of the other previously-approved Fedora 18 features were talked about in: Fedora 18 Approves Controversial Feature and Fedora 18 To Get User Mode Migration, Xfce 4.10.