Building Fedora Futures

For the past six months, beginning in January 2013, the Fedora Futures team began development on the next major release of Fedora, Fedora 4. Development of Fedora 4 focuses on three principal objectives:

to preserve the strengths of the current Fedora architecture and community
to address the needs for robust and full-featured repository services (that are now mature and well-understood, compared to six or twelve years ago)
to provide a successful platform for our common use for the next 5-10 years

Specific technical goals are driven by new demands to support research data management and for increased scalability and performance. Just as significantly, the development is also driven by the demand to build healthy ecosystem of developers and users that will sustain Fedora’s growth in the years to come.

Here we report on the current development status of Fedora 4, its architecture, APIs and services as well as our process and methodology for ongoing development and engagement with the Fedora community.