Objective Review: It’s trivial to create and maintain a new Fedora Spin or Remix

Project Discussion
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We’re working on Fedora Strategy 2028 — our next five-year plan. We are now reviewing those Objectives and their associated Impact. Read this guide for details on the current planning phase.

This Objective is part of the Theme “We build on the success of Fedora.next” and the Focus Area Editions, Spins, and Interests. For general discussion of this focus area, please see the topic Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Editions, Spins, and Interests).

Objective and Impact

Objective: It’s trivial to create and maintain a new Fedora Spin or Remix.
Impact: Niche environments bring enthusiasm greater than their size — and allow experimentation which may power future growth.

Fedora has always been a great upstream distro — it’s made to make something from. This is how I got involved in the project in the first place: I used Fedora to make Boston University Linux. Over the years, some of our tools and process for doing this have gotten a bit rusty. We should sharpen them up.

People who want to show off a new idea for a desktop environment, a new way of configuring the OS, or some other specific innovation should be able to easily do that within the Fedora Project. No need to reinvent everything else needed for a successful distro: focus on the part that’s interesting to you.

Think that the default text editor should be joe? Want to replace all of the core utils with Rust versions? Make the desktop default to light mode? You should be able to make a Fedora Linux variant like that, and share it with others.

Or, if you want to do something more intrusive, something building on Fedora but taking it in another direction… that should be easy too. Mix in your own software. Make an OS designed for network routers. Make a new enterprise distro.

When people do these things, new ideas flow back to us — and new contributors. We should make it really easy.

Our goal now

For this Objective and related Impact, validate that:

  1. If the Impact is achieved, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in active Fedora contributors.
  2. Success in the Objective logically results in the intended Impact.
  3. That link is reasonably sufficient — that is, it represents everything needed to have the Impact.
  4. While there might be other ways to have similar Impact, the chosen Objective is the right one for Fedora right now.
  5. The wording is precise and clear. The Objective is concrete, and the Impact is (at least a little bit) inspirational. Together, they fit into this Focus Area.

Bonus. If you can improve the longer explanatory paragraphs at the top of this post, that’s helpful too!

As outlined in the roadmap, this post will close in one month.

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How does this objective not conflict with the “fewer images” goal of the SIG objective?

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Good question! Because they definitely do conflict as expressed now.

I’m imagining something imagebuilder-based akin to Copr, where we have fewer official images that are part of the compose but an easy way to make and share your own.

But … it’s also possible that the emphasis on install media implied here is misplaced.

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Ah, that makes sense. So this is focusing on making it easy to create user images without requiring help from Fedora rel-eng or knowing esoteric tooling. I like that.

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For me it sounds like: you shouldn’t need a SIG to build a custom image of Fedora.

SIGs should be focused on doing the actual interesting development work. Building and customizing images is not a work for a SIG, it is work for an image-building service (note the product placement… :slight_smile: ).

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I’m not sure I agree. Building images is a great job for a service, yes, but customizing? That’s a people job. A team (even a one-person team) decides what packages/configuration fits the use case they’re trying to serve. In some cases, that’s maintaining a comps group or something similar. In other cases, there’s a need to produce bootable images.

The Python Classroom Lab is a great example. It’s a curated set of packages that allow instructors to teach students from a live image. Or I might decide to make a meteorology spin. Either of those cases can be served from existing package sets without any development work (although both may benefit from some). But the curation work is interesting and valuable to our community, so let’s be careful to not disparage it.

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I think when I used words “build and customize” I had a much smaller and more technical interpretation of them, as in “writing the kickstart file and implementing the pungi config”.

Customizing as curating and maintaining the content is indeed the development work for me.

So I would definitely see the SIG for Python Lab maintaining Ansible roles and groups or whatever is needed to define the content and preferred configuration. And it can build a Live image as well.

But I would love to see all current Spins and Labs to be equally available for users of a regular Fedora Workstation image.

As well as the possibility for any Fedora user to easily get a custom build of Fedora for their specific needs without going through the process of establishing a SIG.

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That makes sense. I wondered if we were just mismatched on how we were using words.

I agree wholeheartedly. There may be some edge cases where a bootable image is the only reasonable output, but in general, it’s best if the curation is easily applied to whatever variant the user wants to use.

This is where this objective and the Objective Review: More (active) SIGs, fewer images are in seeming conflict, but I’d describe the relationship is “you shouldn’t need to create an image, but it’s easier when you do”.

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