Fedora 21 Picks Up More Features, KDE Plasma To Be A Product In F22

There were more features approved for inclusion into Fedora 21 and already talk of making a KDE Plasma Fedora product for the Fedora 22 release given its popularity.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering committee convened today for talking about another round of Fedora 21 features. One week after approving a bunch of features for this Fedora Linux update due out in late 2014, there's more features added to the list:

- Modular kernel packaging for the cloud. This would be similar to Ubuntu's kernel-image and kernel-image-extra with separating out some non-critical kernel modules so they can be removed from the system if running in the cloud / virtualized environment and don't require all of the Linux kernel modules to be present. This saves space and reduces overhead. Within the Fedora world there will be a new "core" kernel package with just enough kernel support to run in a virtualized environment and then an extra package containing the rest, plus a meta package depending upon both components.

- Javadocs becomes optional. The Javadoc sub-packages of Java will become optional. This change is being mainly driven by ARM now being a primary Fedora architecture.

- Ruby on Rails 4.1 will be added to the Fedora 21 repository.

- Fedora Plasma Product. Given the increase of KDE's desktop popularity, KDE fans and developers are looking at making Fedora KDE an official "product" rather than just a Fedora KDE spin. For Fedora 21 it will still be just another spin, but for Fedora 22 it's looking like it will become a product. More details on the Fedora KDE work via this Wiki page.