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Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks

From:  Jesse Keating <jkeating-AT-redhat.com>
To:  fedora-devel-announce-AT-redhat.com, fedora-announce-list-AT-redhat.com
Subject:  Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks (new date, May 13)
Date:  Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:28:28 -0400
Message-ID:  <1208464108.3235.69.camel@localhost.localdomain>

At today's regularly scheduled meeting, the Fedora Engineering
Steering Committee (FESCo) decided that Fedora 9 release will be
slipping by exactly two weeks.

Because of other slippage, coupled with some technical difficulties
during this previous week, our Preview Release was unexpectedly
stalled.  The Preview Release is where we expect to catch all manner
of last-minute bugs, do very heavy QA, and otherwise perform all the
final spit-and-polish.  There needs to be sufficient time between the
PR and the release for testers to find and report issues.

There are less than two weeks remaining until the original target date
of April 29th.  About a week before that date we have to have
everything locked and loaded for distribution by our mirrors.  That
small a timeframe would then make the Preview Release -- normally a
very important part of our release schedule -- nearly useless.

This slip is not intended to make room for more changes, it is only
intended to make room for fixing the things we already know about, and
allowing new things to be found, and evaluated as release blocking, and
fixed.  There are also a fair number of bugs we think we've already
fixed, but need wider audience testing to be sure.

The current blocker list is viewable at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=235... however since there is
nothing preventing people from adding bugs to this list it will get culled from time to time from
things that aren't actually blockers.  A (rather longer) list of things we'd like to see fixes for
can be seen https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=235... although
this list does get less attention than the blocker list.

We deeply appreciate the value we get from our community in using our
development tree and testing our release attempts.  Without your input,
our releases couldn't possibly be as good as they have been.  Please
help us use these extra couple of weeks to make the already awesome
Fedora 9 even better!

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- All my bits are free, are yours?

-- 
fedora-announce-list mailing list
fedora-announce-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list


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actually very impressive

Posted Apr 17, 2008 23:59 UTC (Thu) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

Comparing two weeks to things I did and places I worked at I think a two week delay is very
impressive. Linux has come a long long way if a two week splip of some distro is worth a
mention in the news.

Whee, go Fedora :-)!

actually very impressive

Posted Apr 18, 2008 1:55 UTC (Fri) by jhs (subscriber, #12429) [Link]

Yes, I was just going to say exactly the same thing.  It's so awesome that a two week slip is
newsworthy when you have other operating systems slipping years and slashing features.

actually very impressive

Posted Apr 18, 2008 2:15 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Release time is a judgement call.  I've been bitten enough times by brain-dead bugs (like gdm
only supporting 16 sessions no matter what you change in the config files in F8) that I'm
waiting until at least 4 months after release to deploy anywhere other than my own personal
desktop.  Don't get me wrong; I like Fedora or I wouldn't be deploying it at all.  But if it's
been delayed by 2 weeks, you can bet that it needs some real work.  I sincerely wish that
there was a RedHat-related distro with a 1 year release cycle.  Something between the
stodginess of RHEL/CentOS and the "eat your brane" of Fedora.  It would be perfect for my
professional needs. 

actually very impressive

Posted Apr 18, 2008 6:40 UTC (Fri) by DG (subscriber, #16978) [Link]

Well, it could always be like Gutsy where a bug in gdm means XDMCP doesn't work. At least it
sounds like you get 16 sessions!


actually very impressive

Posted Apr 18, 2008 17:55 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

I'm not familiar with that incident.  But I'll bet they did not leave it that way for 5 months
(and counting).  Fedora 8 was released with the gdm problem and still has it to this day.

actually very impressive

Posted Apr 20, 2008 7:16 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Unfortunately I believe the XDMCP problem is still in Feisty and Gutsy (i.e. the one where GDM
listens only on udp6 socket, not on IPv4, so XDMCP doesn't work at all).

I really like Ubuntu and use it as my main OS on a couple of systems, but there's a tendency
for some quite serious bugs to not get fixed - probably because they are focusing on bugs that
really stop mainstream desktop users from adopting Ubunutu, but can be annoying.  However,
unfixed bugs are generally the exception, and every release does improve on earlier ones.

actually very impressive

Posted Apr 20, 2008 19:26 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

"""
Unfortunately I believe the XDMCP problem is still in Feisty and Gutsy (i.e. the one where GDM
listens only on udp6 socket, not on IPv4, so XDMCP doesn't work at all).
"""

No.  It works fine in both current Gutsy and Hardy.  I have no Feisty with which to test.

Fedora's is still broken in F8.  Haven't tested F9.  What is particularly irritating about
that is that it is not the sort of bug which only occurs  on specific hardware and is hard for
the devs to reproduce.  Someone rewrote a major part of gdm and forgot to have it read in
values from the config files.  Any dev who cared enough could quite easily fire up some XDMCP
vnc sessions and reproduce the problem.  Though I'm sure that if I complained too much,
someone would tell me that the devs can't fix it unless I help them more.  In fact, the bug I
filed is still sitting as "unconfirmed" and "need more info".  With that kind of developer
attitude to such a serious problem I prefer not to waste my time spoon feeding them "more
info" regarding a trivially reproduceable snafu that I have already hard coded and recompiled
around for my customers bitten by it.  And the upstream bug report has not done any better
than the Fedora one.

So all this "actually very impressive" stuff regarding the 2 week slip does not really impress
me at all.

Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks

Posted Apr 18, 2008 1:04 UTC (Fri) by lax (guest, #51587) [Link]

I have found in Fedora Rawhide a WOW! felling. May a delay give it new chance to do the best.

Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks

Posted Apr 18, 2008 2:43 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

The first sentence of the parent post should be made into a T-shirt as soon as possible
(modulus the speling of course.)  :)

Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks

Posted Apr 18, 2008 14:36 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216) [Link]

You can even make it shorter, e.g.:

Fedora Rawhide: Find your WOW!

or

Find your WOW! feeling
   Fedora Rawhide


Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks

Posted Apr 18, 2008 15:08 UTC (Fri) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link]

  
Fedora Rawhide: Find your WOW!  
  
or  
  
Find your WOW! feeling  
   Fedora Rawhide  

Or perhaps
Where's the WOW?
Fefora Rawhide

Fedora 9 Release date slipping by two weeks

Posted Apr 18, 2008 17:16 UTC (Fri) by geek (subscriber, #45074) [Link]

hmmmmmm..... Fefora rules!!

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