Fedora Modularity: Lessons Learned, Next Steps & Demo

One issue with Linux Distributions is that they operate as a *distribution* of both the OS and the applications. Fedora set out to disentangle the applications from each other and the OS. However, preserving the user experience Fedora has provided to its users for 10+ years is also important.

For Fedora 27, in the fall of 2017, we tried to deploy a fully modular Fedora Server Edition. Unfortunately, we realized that the design was fragile and difficult to maintain. As a result, we shipped a traditional version and revised the architecture. We now have a model that is less ambitious but also significantly more robust that we casually refer to as "Add On Modularity." We already have significant progress on shipping "Add On Modularity" for Fedora 28 (spring of 2018) and have a working alpha version. During this talk we will discuss what happened and why we made the choices we did including some thoughts on what it is like to be agile in a open source project.

For this talk, we will also be demonstrating how this “modular distro” works, the UX of using this new distribution, a discussion of how & why modules provide the flexibility we are looking for, and examples of creating and building modules. Finally, we will also demonstrate some cool features the module-aware distribution provides for the simplification of container development and maintenance.