Red Hat Investing In Modularity And Will Support It Where It Makes Sense For RHEL 9
Red Hat's Josh Boyer writing with his hat on as one of the lead RHEL architects commented on RHEL9 and Modularity planning. Modularity is the long evolving effort as an alternative to traditional RPM packaging that is principally focused on allowing multiple versions of a given software component to be distributed for multiple versions of Fedora. Or moving forward, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Fedora Modularity has been getting better, but it still has some criticism and open issues from both users and the developers/packagers. Red Hat though is continuing to invest in it and recently shifted the Modularity effort off to a new development team.
Red Hat will be working with the Fedora community in evolving Modularity so it fits their product needs. Red Hat will be "leveraging modularity in RHEL 9 where it most makes sense. This is primarily centered around our Application Streams concept, which has been well received by our customer base. Providing a consistent but improved experience is the base requirement, which allows us to have continuity from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 and lowers the hurdle for our customers when upgrading from one major version to another."
More details within this mailing list post. Boyer also talked up Fedora's recent Enterprise Linux Next effort (ELN) as helping to vet Modularity changes and other improvements ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. There still is plenty of time to get the modularity concept into good shape for RHEL9 with that release likely not coming until 2023~2024.
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