Hello Fedora Community! I am a long-time Fedora Community member, and may be familiar to many through previous FESCo or devel list discussions and passionate debates. However I write to you today with a different community hat on, as a lead Architect for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The RHEL organization has been following the modularity discussions within Fedora, particularly around ELN, and often the question of what plans we have for modularity in RHEL 9 has come up. Our Fedora Project Lead and a number of FESCo members have reached out and asked if we can provide some perspective here, and I am both happy and excited to have that opportunity. As the Fedora Council has pointed out [1], we certainly acknowledge there are improvements to be made and have a team already working on them. They recently outlined their plans in conjunction with our Product Management team in a Fedora Council call as well [2]. We’re continuing to invest time and effort in this packaging solution and are confident that the team can deliver against their plan. It is somewhat of a new experience for all of us when Red Hat is direct with our product intentions, but we discussed the larger gaps we see with usage in RHEL and are putting our efforts towards solving those gaps with this plan. Modularity is important to RHEL and those efforts are already underway. We 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. It is always good to push the boundaries and search for better ideas and improvements, and that is part of what makes Fedora great. We are doing this in the context of the RHEL 9 release as well, so our near term timeline and requirements mean we are working on evolving modularity, not a revolution or a replacement. We are excited by ELN, as it presents a possible space to allow those that want to continue to iterate on modules a place to do so without necessarily impacting the broader Fedora distribution in its entirety. It is my personal hope that we can use that opportunity to improve modules and modularity in the open source, Fedora-first way we’d prefer. Our near term effort to improve the existing modularity implementation ahead of RHEL 9 needs to occur, and we’d like to do that work in Fedora, rather than in closed product development. Longer term, we are open to contributing to a better replacement that meets many of the same goals. This is what makes our distribution ecosystem work well, and not having that upstream lessens the value we all get from such experimentation in the open. Hopefully that provides some context and helps FESCo and the wider community understand where Red Hat is headed with modularity on the Enterprise side. josh [1] https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-council-and-the-future-of-modularity/ [2] https://bluejeans.com/s/W_P0D _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
