Fedora Stakeholders Have Been Debating Whether To Retire GlusterFS

A discussion that originally started last summer has been reignited: whether it’s time to retire GlusterFS within Fedora Linux. But following discussions in recent days, there may be a new packager willing to take over but it doesn’t change the fact of declining upstream activity around GlusterFS.

GlusterFS is the scalable network filesystem focused on scale-out cloud storage. Red Hat acquired Gluster as the company behind GlusterFS back in 2011 and took over maintaining it. But Red Hat Gluster Storage ended its commercial support life-cycle at the end of the calendar year 2024. Red Hat also disbanded the Red Hat Gluster Storage engineering team and is no longer contributing to the development of GlusterFS. There still is the open-source community but upstream work to GlusterFS has been minimal since Red Hat withdrew their development muscle. Similarly, the CentOS Storage SIG decided to not build GlusterFS packages for CentOS Stream 10. And thus a discussion originally started back in June around retiring GlusterFS packages for Fedora 42.

In recent days the discussion over whether to retire GlusterFS in Fedora started back up. It was pointed out in 2023 there were just 78 commits to GlusterFS and only 31 commits in 2024… Well down from GlusterFS seeing more than a thousand commits per year last decade when it was actively developed or even pre-2023 when it still saw hundreds of commits per year. There’s little arguing that it’s on the decline.

But as some reprieve, this weekend Fedora packager Benson Muite has volunteered to maintain the GlusterFS packages “while there is activity upstream.” So at leas for now the GlusterFS packages may stick around in Fedora while the overall project is on life support. Those interested can see the discussion within this Fedora devel thread.