Fedora Decides On Headless Java, Third-Party Repos

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee is back in the season of evaluating features for the next Fedora Linux release.

Approved at today's FESCo meeting is the "Headless Java" feature for Fedora 21. Basically, the OpenJDK packages in Fedora are going to be split up so that the open-source Java will no longer place dependencies on X11/X.Org and other graphics/sound-related packages.

The headless Java packages for Fedora 21 will have a smaller dependency chain and be more ideal for installing in server environments. The lighter Java packages that don't require a head/display should now depend upon "java-headless" within the Fedora world.

Additional details regarding the headless Java for Fedora can be found from the Fedora Project Wiki page.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee also approved for enabling of third-party package repositories with regards to searching Copr repositories for applications as long as the user is informed about using the third-party repository. FESCo is also okay with pointing to other free software repositories as long as they are approved by Fedora's legal department at Red Hat. FESCo will not, however, promote non-free/non-open-source package repositories.

The meeting minutes from today's FESCo IRC chat can be found on the Fedora devel list.