Ten day countdown to Fedora 31 General Availability

["Robert G (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

Greetings fellow SILUGers.

Fur is flying in the developers' den as they bear down on the usual
final week's pile of blocker bugs. Unless they hook a real snaggletooth
this week, they should be on track to release F31 GA on October 22 at
10am CST. Otherwise they'll delay GA release until October 29.

This may be the last development round based on the classic repository
model used for years. RHEL has really jammed sticks in the spokes of
the package builders by switching over to GitHub, adding "modular" rpm
packaging support, weak dependencies, and all sorts of other options.
This not only affects the mainstream, it opens up new streams for
CentOS, Fedora, and Rawhide, pretty much all at once. The poor folks at
EPEL and RPM-Fusion must be tearing out what little hair they had left.

You'll almost certainly be able to do an on-the-fly upgrade from F30 to
F31. For those of you who are still mucking about in F28 or F29, you
will probably be able to do full major upgrades all the way to F31 as
long as you don't skip any.

These major upgrades are teasers for the downstream products like RHEL
and CentOS. Red Hat has announced that they'll support an in-place
upgrade from RHEL 7.7 to 8.0, but not 7.6 to 8.0. Curiously, CentOS
does not offer the counterpart upgrade script. The CentOS developers
are rather adamant about it, claiming the CentOS community doesn't want
it. I'm afraid they didn't ask me.

During Fedora 31's six month period of prime operation, several key
components will go EOL. Most notable will be the already depricated
Python v2.7. Its loss will affect the MATE v1.16 desktop and other
major utilities that don't yet work with Python 3. Expect quite a bit
of fur to fly over Python dependencies.

I'm attaching my bash shell scripts that will allow you to pull down
copies of the entire beta and general availability releaes. Edit the
local user and destination variables to meet your needs. The scripts
without "-g" in their names are pulling from Red Hat repositories.
Those with a "-g" are pulling from the Georgia Tech mirror. The Red Hat
mirrors are off-line a lot these days. Put these scripts in
/usr/local/bin, chown them to root:root, and chmod them to 755. Do the
same to Steve's de-duping Perl script linkdups.

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL

rsync-31release-g

rsync-31release

rsync-31beta-g

rsync-31beta

linkdups

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