Fedora 27 Approves More Features: Flatpaks, NSS, RPM 4.14, Installer

At Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) there were yet more features approved for the current Fedora Linux development cycle.

There is already a lot of work building for Fedora 27 while a number of additional features have received the green light from FESCo:

- Packaging more graphical applications as Flatpaks.

- The discussion about dropping i686 kernels from F27+ is still ongoing. There is also still pending about creating an i686 special interest group for those that don't want to let Fedora's x86 32-bit support be reduced. To reiterate, Fedora currently has no plans on eliminating the 32-bit packages/user-space, but they want to do away with the 32-bit kernel and in effect then the installation media.

- The NSS library will be changed to use SQLite-based data storage when not overriden by an application's preferred storage file format.

- An effort to reduce the initial setup redundancy between the Anaconda installer and GNOME-Initial-Setup. With Fedora 27 they hope to have a more streamlined initial user experience for Fedora Workstation on GNOME.

- Allow for packaging Rust applications and libraries.

- RPM 4.14 should be used by Fedora 27. RPM 4.14 will feature several rewritten components, an SSD conservation mode, improved support for reproducible builds, improvements to its Python dependency generator, header digests use SHA256 by default, support for OpenSSL as one of the crypto libraries, support for rich dependencies, and other changes.

More details via the FESCo meeting minutes.