Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 9.1 are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Here’s what that means for developers.
Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) is how we distribute the latest stable versions of various runtimes and languages through Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, with some components available in RHEL 6. RHSCL also contains the Red Hat Developer Toolset, which is the set of tools we curate for C/C++ and Fortran. These components are supported for up to five years, which helps you build apps that have a long lifecycle as well.
What changed?
Updated collections in RHSCL 3.5 include:
- Python 3.8, which introduces assignment expressions and several optimizations to make Python 3.8 run faster than previous versions, and with previous version compatibility to ease upgrade strategies.
- Ruby 2.7, which offers a large number of new features such as pattern matching, Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) improvements, and compaction garbage collection (GC) for fragmented memory spaces.
- Perl 5.30, which adds new features for developers such as the limited variable-length lookbehinds, Unicode 12.1, faster string interpolation, and other performance improvements.
- Apache httpd 2.4 (update), which fixes a number of bugs and includes an updated version of
mod_mdto support ACMEv2. - Varnish 6, which updates Varnish Cache to version 6.0.6, the latest bi-annual fresh release with numerous bug fixes and performance improvements.
- Java Mission Control 7.1, which updates JDK Mission Control to version 7.1.1 and fixes numerous bugs. It also adds key enhancements, including multiple rule optimizations, a new JOverflow view based on Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), a new flame graph view, and a new latency visualization using the High Dynamic Range (HDR) Histogram.
- HAProxy 1.8.24, which provides multiple bug and security fixes.
The last—but certainly not least—update to Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 is Red Hat Developer Toolset (DTS) version 9.1, which is the set of tools we curate for C/C++ and Fortran. For DTS, we updated the compilers, debuggers, and performance monitoring tools to ensure the best experience for software developers using these languages. At the center of DTS 9.1 is GCC 9.3, which brings a huge number of improvements including improved diagnostics and useability. The full list of tools that we updated in DTS 9.1 is available in the release notes, as always.
How do I get this great stuff?
With a Red Hat Developer Subscription, you have access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, where you can update these packages. If you have already enabled Red Hat Software Collections in the subscription manager, follow the instructions below for either a specific software collection or a container image. If you haven’t already enabled RHSCLs, please follow the instructions in our online documentation.
To install a specific software collection, type the following into your command line as root:
$ yum install software_collection…
Replace software_collection with a space-separated list of the software collections you want to install. For example, to install php54 and rh-mariadb100, type as root:
$ yum install rh-php72 rh-mariadb102
Doing this installs the main meta-package for the selected software collection and a set of required packages as its dependencies. For information on how to install other packages such as additional modules, see Section 2.2.2, “Installing Optional Packages.”
Another option, of course, is to start with our container images for these packages, which make it easier to build and deploy mission-critical applications that use these components for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift platforms.
The full release notes for Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 9.1 are available in the customer portal.
What about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8?
Software Collections are for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is managed in a different way through Application Streams, and you can find updated RHEL 8 packages in the RHEL8 appstream repository. The updates for these packages might not be the same for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Application Streams, so please check on the Application Streams Life Cycle page.