Fedora 17 to come with Gimp 2.8, KDE 4.8, oVirt and GCC 4.7

In the last two IRC meetings, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) approved a number of features (1, 2) that developers for the project are trying to implement in Fedora 17. The technical directors for the Linux distribution authorised, for example, the switch to version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), which is expected to be released in the next few weeks; this change has already been mostly implemented, since the developers integrated a release candidate of this version of GCC a few days ago and used it to compile the bulk of the packages.

They also approved the use of GNOME 3.4, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.8 and Gimp 2.8; all these versions are currently in development and are expected to be released in the next few weeks. Other features announced for the distribution planned for early May include NoSQL database Riak, cloud computing toolkit OpenNebula and the most important components of the oVirt Project; the oVirt features provide the basis for many components used in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 which was released today. The plan for PHP is to update to version 5.4.

Fedora 17 will most likely also include all components needed to operate as an iSCSI server with the target framework LIO, whose kernel components have been in Linux since version 2.6.38. In the coming months it will be seen whether the Fedora developers really manage to implement these and other features, since they sometimes retract announced improvements if they are concerned about not meeting the quality requirements they have set for themselves. For example, the switch to Btrfs as the standard file system, which has long been planned for Fedora 17, could be pushed back even further, as it was for Fedora 16.

(djwm)