The Fedora Project is preparing some interesting changes

Jan 30, 2014 08:46 GMT  ·  By

The Fedora Project developers are considering the fate of the Fedora Spins, which might cease to exist in the way they can be found right now.

A while ago, a decision had been made to structure the future of the Fedora Project into a different kind of concept, called NEXT. This would ensure a better focus for the development teams, but it also leaves the Fedora Spins on the outside.

After the nameless Fedora 21 is released, possibly in the summer, the following Fedoras will be launched under the NEXT umbrella and in three different flavors: Workstation, Cloud, and Server.

“During today's FESCo meeting, there was the start of a discussion on how to approve new Products into the Fedora family. As part of this, it naturally strayed into discussion of what we do about Spins as they currently exist. Several ideas were raised (which I'll go through below), but we didn't feel that this was something that FESCo should answer on its own. We'd prefer community input on how to handle spins going forward,” said Red Hat's Stephen Gallagher.

A few ideas have been proposed as solutions, but the developers have to answer the following questions: “Are Spins useful as they currently exist?”, “Should Spins be eliminated entirely in favor of Fedora Remixes?”, “Should Spins be considered Products-in-development?”

The worst of the outcomes stems from the first question, which is the one that would practically eliminate all other Fedora versions.

“There are many problems that have been noted in the Spins process, most notably that it is very difficult to get a Spin approved and then has no ongoing maintenance requiring it to remain functional. We've had Spins at times go through entire Fedora release cycles without ever being functional,” said Red Hat's Stephen Gallagher.

Whatever the solution to this conundrum, Fedora is changing and won't be the same a year from now.