Red Hat Investing In Modularity And Will Support It Where It Makes Sense For RHEL 9

Written by Michael Larabel in Red Hat on 18 June 2020 at 11:40 AM EDT. 9 Comments
RED HAT
Red Hat continues to invest in the modularity concept for packaging and will be embracing it "where it most makes sense" for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

Red Hat's Josh Boyer writing with his hat on as one of the lead RHEL architects commented on RHEL9 and Modularity planning. Modularity is the long evolving effort as an alternative to traditional RPM packaging that is principally focused on allowing multiple versions of a given software component to be distributed for multiple versions of Fedora. Or moving forward, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora Modularity has been getting better, but it still has some criticism and open issues from both users and the developers/packagers. Red Hat though is continuing to invest in it and recently shifted the Modularity effort off to a new development team.

Red Hat will be working with the Fedora community in evolving Modularity so it fits their product needs. Red Hat 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."

More details within this mailing list post. Boyer also talked up Fedora's recent Enterprise Linux Next effort (ELN) as helping to vet Modularity changes and other improvements ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. There still is plenty of time to get the modularity concept into good shape for RHEL9 with that release likely not coming until 2023~2024.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week