Fedora ELN project

ELN

Summary

ELN is a new buildroot and compose process for Fedora that takes Fedora Rawhide dist-git sources and emulate a Red Hat Enterprise Linux compose. Feedback from this build, compose and integration testing will be provided to Fedora packagers so that they can see the potential impact of their changes on RHEL development.

ELN allows us to explore new ideas like a higher baseline for CPU architectures in a way that will not disrupt the rest of Fedora. It also aids us in future-proofing some of the spec file conditionals today that assume RHEL ≤ 8.

ELN sources come from the Rawhide branch in dist-git. There is not a separate branch for ELN.

ELN is run by the ELN Special Interest Group.

If you are trying to resolve an ELN build failure, start here.

Purpose

  • Create infrastructure and tooling, which allows experiments with the build process of Fedora distribution.

  • Use this infrastructure to build Fedora packages in the way which resembles the CentOS and RHEL process and provide feedback loop for Fedora maintainers.

  • Some other features (like CPU update) can be incorporated into the same build process if they can be tested in parallel. New feature requests will be approved by ELN SIG under general supervision of FESCo and Fedora Council.

Name

Originally the project was named EL Niño.

The name of the project was suggested by Stephen Gallagher. It contains "enterprisy" reference but also highlights the fact that it is a place for permanent work in progress for experimenting and development, rather than a finished product.

But the interpretation of the name evolved, and now you can think about it as Enterprise Linux Next if you like.

Explanation of the puns

  • The "EL" is a reference to the distribution tag for RHEL/CentOS: "EL" stands for Enterprise Linux.

  • The Niño portion is the Spanish word for "child (male)". The implication of this reference is that the project should always represent the "immature" version of what will "grow up" into Enterprise Linux.

  • Collectively, "El Niño" is also the name of a type of weather pattern that occurs every three or four years and often brings storms with it. The meaning here should therefore be fairly obvious!

Scope

While originally we named this project as "Alternative buildroot", its scope includes the entire process of how the Fedora sources are built and composed into the shippable artifact.

This includes:

  • buildroot configuration, rpm macro and compile flags,

  • comps files and the compose content,

  • compose itself and the pipeline which builds it.

Stakeholders

Who benefits from the ELN project:

  • Fedora Infrastructure

    • As we are going to try and test new infrastructure for composes.

  • Fedora Minimization

    • As we are going to modify the compose content according to minimization goals.

  • CentOS Stream, EPEL and RHEL

    • As we are going to try to build Fedora packages into the multi-repo structure of the compose similar to the one from CentOS and RHEL.

  • Fedora Community

    • The feedback pipelines build for the project will allow downstream developers to open up their work and bring it closer to Fedora. **

    • The tooling developed for this project will allow development of the changes in Fedora Infrastructure without blocking the regular Fedora packaging and release process.

Links

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