This week brought two interesting updates from the Fedora camp. As we mentioned back in early March, there was a proposal to include the still-in-development RPM 6 package manager in the upcoming Fedora 43 release, scheduled for release in early November.
Well, it’s now official—RPM 6 will be part of Fedora 43. The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), a key governing body within the Fedora Project that oversees various technical decisions related to the distro’s development, unanimously approved the proposal, with six votes in favor, none against, and no abstentions.
RPM 6 is going to be a major upgrade for this package manager, and Fedora 43 users can look forward to several key improvements, including:
- Enhanced security: RPM 6 comes with signature checking turned on by default, ensuring that only positively verified packages can be installed.
- Streamlined key management: Instead of relying on collision-prone short key IDs, RPM 6 references OpenPGP keys by fingerprint or full key ID.
- Support of the v6 package format: While Fedora 43 will remain on v4 package generation, early adopters and third-party developers can experiment with the new format.
On a separate and even more significant note, it was announced that Matthew Miller is stepping down as Fedora Project Leader after more than 10 years in the role. He’ll be passing the torch to Jef Spaleta.
Jef, who once served on the Fedora Board between July 2007 and late 2008, was involved with Fedora before Red Hat’s involvement, back in the early days of fedora.us.
According to Miller, Jef will join Red Hat as a full-time Fedora Project Leader in May, with an official handover set to take place at Flock, Fedora’s annual contributor conference, which is scheduled for June 5–8 in Prague. For more on this, see the official announcement.
