Fedora 42 isn’t even releasing until next month but a number of early change proposals have been filed for the upcoming Fedora 43 development cycle that will be released this autumn.
Most notable of the early pull requests so far for Fedora 43 is updating RPM against the upcoming RPM 6.0 major release. RPM 6.0 will enhance package security by enforcing signature checking by default, OpenPGP key handling improvements, support for multiple signatures per package, automatic signing on package build, and support for signing with Sequoia-sq as a GnuPG alternative. RPM 4.x will be oging into maintenance mode with the RPM 6.0 release. Yes, it’s jumping ahead to RPM 6.0 to avoid the RPM5 confusion.
The change proposal does make clear that this proposal isn’t about changing to the v6 package format:
“Update RPM to the upcoming 6.0 release for several security improvements.
Note: adopting Fedora to the new v6 package package format is explicitly NOT IN SCOPE for this change. RPM 6.0 in Fedora 43 will ship with v4 package generation as default, regardless of the upstream default.”
Some of the other early change proposals for Fedora 43 include deprecating the GNU Gold linker, migrating to lastlog2, and retiring gtk3-rs and other associated libraries for these GTK3 Rust bindings.
There is also a Fedora 43 change proposal for switching to using JPEG-XL for the default wallpaper format rather than PNG images. JPEG-XL is argued the preferred desktop wallpaper format for reducing the file size compared to PNG images.
