System Utilities

Vagrant 2.3

The vagrant package has been upgraded to version 2.3.4, which provides multiple bug fixes and enhancements. Notable changes include:

  • Isolate loading incompatible libraries to support end of life (EOL) platforms

  • Detect network type when not provided

  • Add fix for Powershell 7.3.0

  • Support VirtualBox 7.0

The following package dependencies for vagrant were also updated:

  • rubygem-net-ssh

  • rubygem-net-scp

  • rubygem-net-sftp

Due to the new rubygem-net-ssh, the updates for the packages above are built and delivered as one unit.

A full list of changes in Vagrant 2.3.4 is available in the upstream release notes.

createrepo_c rebased to version 1.0.0

The createrepo_c package has been upgraded to version 1.0.0, which provides multiple enhancements. Notable changes include:

  • Change the default compression method from gz to zstd to provide smaller metadata that is faster to decompress.

  • Stop generating metadata in SQLite database format by default. However, it is still possible to create the metadata using the --database option or using the sqliterepo_c utility.

  • Include just one variant of groups.xml file using the specified compression method and the repomd.xml type "group".

The pam_console module has been removed

The pam_console module is a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) for managing console-based access control. It gives users at the physical console additional capabilities when authenticating, and removes those capabilities when the user logs out.

On the other hand, pam_console has some limitations and flaws:

  • Only one user can have additional capabilities at the same time (no multi-seat).

  • Potential security problems of device file ownership if the PAM conversation ending is not executed.

  • Currently, the module is non-functional because one of the configuration files used for defining the permissions (50-default.perms) is not installed in Fedora Workstation.

Due to the shortcomings mentioned above, pam_console has been removed in this release, and the systemd-logind service will be managing and controlling console logins and user sessions instead.

Aspell deprecation

The aspell package provides the GNU Aspell spell checker for identification and correction of spelling errors in text.

With this update of Fedora Workstation, aspell is deprecated due to its inactive upstream community and existence of better-supported spell checker alternatives.

Allow full removal of the tzdata package in containers

Previously, you could not fully remove tzdata in a container due to the package dependencies inside the container. This practice left inconsistent package remnants, and resulted in a confusion about the expected timezone information. This update fixes the problem by making the packages that use tzdata at runtime switch from Require'ing tzdata to Recommend'ing tzdata. As a result, those packages will gracefully handle the instances where tzdata has been removed, and the container environment will default to the UTC standard. Note that removing tzdata in a container will reduce the container size.