Fedora Minimization Objective

Thousands of individual and corporate contributors collaborate in the Fedora community to explore new problems and to build a fast-moving modern OS with a rich ecosystem allowing them to experiment on modernising their infrastructure.

Helping open source developers, sysadmins, and Linux distribution maintainers to focus on what’s relevant for them.

Fedora is a popular platform because its ecosystem is both cutting-edge and well optimized for modern deployments such as IoT and containers. That makes many people use Fedora rather than to build and assemble their own artifacts directly from upstream projects. And that relieves the pressure on open source developers caused by users who would otherwise ask for their specific security and other issues to be fixed quickly.

So:

Specific use cases are defined in Fedora. The community then focuses on those use cases with development and maintenance, optimisation (like minimisation), and testing (like CI and gating). These use cases can be transparently prioritized for infrastructure resources based on community interests.

Feedback Pipeline actively monitors each use case and records the size and the dependencies required for it to run. Data history is kept and shown to see changes over time. And to keep things small over time, Feedback Pipeline also automatically detects size increases and potentially automatically opens Bugzilla bugs to track/fix/justify such increases transparently.

An active focus on minimization means that our maintainers produce size-optimised content with the same or lower amount of effort. Tooling, services, and data help them to make the right decision about dependencies easily, and to keep things smaller over time.

Identify relevant use cases and allow the community (meaning not just the Minimization Team) to define their own. We think of a use case as a set of packages installed in a specific context, having a specific purpouse — such as Apache HTTP Server Container. Define use cases at least for:

Also, consider looking at container-native use cases, such as:

Collect specific use cases by talking to people at tech events, internet forums, and any other viable venues.

Extend monitoring services (Feedback Pipeline) that:

Other than features, we also need to:

Being able to see what’s going on is a prerequisite of implementing any changes. Seeing all the relevant opportunities helps us to focus on the ones having the most impact, and a transparent tracking helps us prove the usefulnes of our work, and to further focus on the most impactful activities.

Minimize the installation size of the use cases by optimizing RPM dependencies, features, software architecture, and other factors. Specifically, look for:

Engage with upstream developers regarding bigger changes in packaging and architecture. An example is Systemd and splitting the systemd-sysuser package.

Implement process and policy changes reflecting bigger, more general changes. Again, a good example is using Systemd in containers, or the general issue of creating users in containers.

Provide guidance for the Fedora community in form of blog posts, videos, and conference talks. Even though we might have guidelines and policies in place, spreading the word is always important.

Cloud resources to prototype services. We are not going to change the existing Fedora infrastructure in any way before whatever we develop proves useful and worth the hustle of stabilization and changing production.

No existing Fedora Infra or Release Engineering resources are needed at the moment. However, we might need help with setting up (or getting access to) the cloud resources.

Active support from our maintainers, the FPC, and other community members is definitely needed. This is obviously not something we can "request", but it’s still a necessary input.

Usefulness over size: There is a balance between the usefulness and size. We take that in mind and will not implement drastic changes that would prevent our users from using Fedora. However, nothing prevents us from producing additional very specific and mininal artifacts.

Using RPM: We’re doing this with RPM. We’re not achieving minimization by deleting files after installation. This might be obvious, but still worth mentioning.