Fedora 7 is now available for download. One of the biggest improvements is the merging of core and extras into one repository open to all community members. In the next month or sooner I plan to start merging the OLPC changes and rebasing off of Fedora 7. Right now we base off of Fedora Core 6 with some code forks and new packages.

The idea is to merge the new packages, drop some of the packages we forked from extras and use the ones in 7. We still need to keep some of the forked packages, for instance gnome-vfs which picks up ORBit dependencies even if we use the GConf-dbus package. Those packages will be looked at for Fedora 8 to see if we can get runtime dependencies working or simply replace the offending code (in this case GConf).

What this means for OLPC developer is I can now give access to our packages so that they can add and hack on base system components such as TUBES or pyabiword without myself being a blocker for builds. Right now we stick these things in external repositories or someone has to ask someone else to kick off a package build. It also means others can help out on packaging , say if someone is on vacation or just busy, and keep things rolling. And the great thing is this is not all tied to OLPC as anything we get into Fedora can be used and tested for other purposes. For instance the AbiCollab stuff based on TUBES is something I want on my desktop. This will allow developers outside of OLPC to get premade packages to run and play around with and hopefully accelerate adoption of some of the cool technologies being pushed by OLPC.

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