Fedora Makes Progress On Their New Modularity Concept
At Wednesday's Fedora Council meeting, the new Fedora modularization plan was approved. The goal outlined by "Objective: Fedora Modularization — The Release" is "Modularity will transform the all-in-one Fedora OS into an operating system plus a module repository, which will contain a wide selection of software easily maintained by packagers. This iteration of the Objective focuses on the second part — providing a wide selection software in various versions — while laying the groundwork for the first."
The new Fedora Modular plans no longer involve modularizing the entire distribution but rather "traditionally built packages" will remain and only components benefiting from modular features would be modularized. The components targeted are things like database servers, web servers, Node.js, etc, where users may prefer sticking to one particular version of a program and not upgrade until it's end-of-life or has other particular reasons to want to move on to a newer version.
By reducing the scope of their modularization, they hope this new plan will be easier to achieve. They are currently working on a demo over the next few weeks while for Fedora 28 in May they hope to have the first of the new optional "modular" repositories with working DNF support. They are also planning for module-to-Flatpak and module-to-Docker deployment abilities. Their new plans for Fedora 28 are outlined on this Wiki page.
By Fedora 29 late in 2018 is when they hope to have production-ready containers/Flatpaks and more software in a modularized manner. So with Fedora 28 it will be more of a tech preview / feedback state while by the end of the year we could see this modularity goal better realized for administrators and end-users.
See the aforelinked Fedora Modularization outline for more on their new plans as well as this mailing list thread.
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