While Fedora 42 isn’t being released until later in the month, already a number of new features for Fedora 43 have been granted approval by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
Over the past week a number of new Fedora 43 features/changes were approved by FESCo, including:
Maven 4 – Offering Apache Maven 4 on F43 as a parallel-installable alternative to Maven 3. Apache Maven 4.0 is gearing up for release as a major update to this popular Java development tool with many changes over Maven 3.
JXL for the default wallpaper format – The default Fedora 43 wallpapers will be in JPEG-XL format. Switching from PNG to JPEG-XL is being done to save space while maintaining similar quality.
Deprecating the Gold linker – The GNU Gold linker is being deprecated via the “binutils-gold” sub-package due to the lack of upstream development on this linker. If Gold development doesn’t pick up, GNU Gold could be removed in a future Fedora release.
Migrating to lastlog2 – Switching from lastlog to lastlog2 for Year 2038 safety, a modern SQLite3 back-end, and other enhancements.
Retiring gtk3-rs, gtk-rs-core v0.18, and gtk4-rs v0.7 – These Rust bindings and other bits are no longer updated and the gtk3-rs packages were previously deprecated.
RPM 6.0 – Upgrading to the RPM 6.0 release for package management for better security and new features. This thouhg is not about changing to the v6 package format but still relying on the v4 package generation in Fedora 43. RPM 6.0 will enforce signature checking by default, OpenPGP integration improvements, support for multiple signatures per package, automatic signing on package builds, and other improvements.
These are just the early changes approved so far for Fedora 43. FESCo is also taking up the matter of the Java 25 change proposal and potentially moving away from having a system JDK, which will be discussed at today’s Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
Fedora 42 will be out later in April while Fedora 43 should come out around the end of October if all goes well. Stay tuned for more news on Fedora 43 features and other developments over the months ahead.
