Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 14:38 UTC (Wed) by xnox (guest, #63320)
Parent article: Fedora 13 release slips

When was the last time Fedora shipped on time?

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 15:06 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (12 responses)

But I don't think there's a problem -- it's not like the releases are vapor delayed forever. Rather, the release date is a target, and a thoughtful decision is made about whether the software is up to standards for that target.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 15:47 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (11 responses)

Actually, according to http://linuxkommando.com/?p=62 and other sources:"Fedora 10 will be further delayed. The new release date is now set at 25 November."

"Fedora 8 delayed" is the first I don't get google hits for. But the at least the previous Fedora Core 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 release were seemingly delayed. So maybe 8 was the only Fedora release ever which was not delayed?

It has seemed safe to assume that original schedule + 1 month is what one can wait for. I think it's maybe "too acceptable" to always have that delay, but if the community does not get frustrated with that, maybe it's not a problem.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 15:57 UTC (Wed) by xnox (guest, #63320) [Link] (2 responses)

Now that F13 branched off earlier, unfreezing RawHide before release maybe F14 will ship on time?
Although F14 cycle has Gnome3 release and I haven't heard Fedora's decision about that (e.g. will gnome-shell be dafault?).

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 19:28 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

Rawhide is now a permanent development branch and doesn't freeze at all. So perhaps you meant late branching for Fedora 14?

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 21:42 UTC (Wed) by xnox (guest, #63320) [Link]

Yes, I meant that =) struggling with words here a little bit =)

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 22:51 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] (7 responses)

if the community does not get frustrated with that, maybe it's not a problem.

Believe me, its .NOT. a problem. Remember the tempest brewed when Fedora tried changing their default Package Manager permission from admin to user? Turns out there are far far more Fedoras worn in production and semi-production environment than one would have guessed from all the "perpetual beta-ness" jokes. Anaconda gotta work. Grub gotta work. Yum gotta work. Xorg had better work or be readily made to work.

Apart from those, we're pretty tolerant. Take NetworkManager. (Or ParaVirt Xen.) Fedora used to be exemplary about having freshly-installed X come up at least in VESA. There have been some recent slips in that regard. As I recall it took F11 several months before it would work with ATi x700 cards, but at least there was plenty of warning here and on Phoronix. LiveCD's are nice.

I try to make a point of waiting at least a month before installing the latest Fedora on a production system, although a year ago I got semi-serious about beta-testing after installing a few more disks. (Having an IDE drive for testing is convenient, as one can easily disable production SATA drives in BIOS for testing. The problem is finding time to reboot a production box, a problem apparently not widely shared by our Windows brethren... )

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 13, 2010 1:18 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

> Believe me, its .NOT. a problem.

Known blockers gotta get fixed. That's the whole point of having release criteria.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 17, 2010 8:12 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Yes. I still think, being a bit outsider to Fedora community and therefore maybe can see how the outside world might view Fedora, that they should shift some other freeze deadline a bit earlier, so that it would be more probable not to have blocker bugs delaying the release?

I believe that practically the current system works very well, but having a schedule that never holds may indicate a need to shift something a bit.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 13, 2010 6:47 UTC (Thu) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

> I try to make a point of waiting at least a month before installing the latest Fedora on a production system, although a year ago I got semi-serious about beta-testing after installing a few more disks. (Having an IDE drive for testing is convenient, as one can easily disable production SATA drives in BIOS for testing. The problem is finding time to reboot a production box, a problem apparently not widely shared by our Windows brethren... )

A long time ago, I decided that as soon as a new version came out, I would upgrade to the previous one: when Fedora 13 ships, I will upgrade from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12; so far, no regrets.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 13, 2010 16:12 UTC (Thu) by compte (guest, #60316) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, delays are not a problem, I recently had to revert to FC10 because of a problem in FC12 gnome panel. I first used KDE to try and fix the problem, but to no avail.
I don't want to put anyone down but I don't know how certain people can use KDE. KDE has good apps but its desktop is a real struggle. I would not suggest for them to improve, because that would be like asking for the Pope to resign.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 14, 2010 17:41 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

When I have had problems with Gnome I switched to XFCE.

Disclaimer: I use X as a way of having a lot of terminals open at the same time, not too much more. I'm not a GUI person, far from it.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 16, 2010 12:17 UTC (Sun) by kraftman122 (guest, #65942) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know how some people can use Gnome? I don't want to put you down, but Gnome does have only few good apps and its desktop is a real struggle. There are many people asking them to improve (at ubuntu blue prints in example), but those people don't know it's like asking MS to start supporting Linux.

From Gnome 2.30 user experience "changes":

"Largely unchanged. One noteworthy change is that nautilus defaults to browser mode now."

Damn, what a change. No, they don't listen.

On topic, it's better to not follow release schedule strictly, because if there are some bugs that will affect the end user experience it will not be good for Fedora. Ubuntu 10.04 was released with few serious bugs open (like: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/524281) and now it's paying.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 16, 2010 12:42 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I prefer the model of incremental changes between releases unless it is a major new release like GNOME 3.0. Every major change is often disruptive and we need to have less of them in regular intervals.

Fedora's release criteria is published at

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Criteria

We have gotten more and more detailed about these sort of processes with each Fedora release and transparency does help quite a bit for the different organizational teams like release engineering and QA to evaluate the suitability of a release in terms that others can understand and participate in. Testers known what to expect for instance.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 12, 2010 17:45 UTC (Wed) by kmself (guest, #11565) [Link] (3 responses)

More relavantly, when is the last time it didn't slip on schedule?

Props to Jon.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 13, 2010 1:09 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

> More relavantly, when is the last time it didn't slip on schedule?

So what would you have done? Shipped the media with know installation problems? Please.

PS. So far, I have upgraded one of my systems to F-13 (a VM to be precise, located on another continent). This was the smoothest upgrade of Fedora ever. Zero issues. And, kudos to everyone that contributed to new Evolution - it is by far the best release of it - ever. IMAPX rocks, Exchange support over OWA is also working better.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 13, 2010 21:49 UTC (Thu) by kmself (guest, #11565) [Link] (1 responses)

I was commenting on the (as usual) dry, witty, and brilliant commentary of Our Editor.

Project slips happen. I'd very much prefer to see working code late than broken code early, for sufficient values of broken. Looks like the slip is brief to boot (to date).

Given my usual distro of choice (Debian) is notorious for late releases, and I'm dealing with a nontrivial value of broken on Ubuntu 9.04 -> 10.04 upgrade (keyboard/mouse frozen in X), I'm familiar with several sides of this debate.

Regards Exchange / OWA, I was looking into this recently and it appears that Mail.app (Mac) offers Exchange connectivity through <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204119.aspx">Exchange Web Services</a>, rather than kluging through OWA. But of course, all of Exchange is a kluge (I'm currently trying to clear some 11k bogus mail dupes from my mutt/IMAP connection). $WORK is headed to GMail (and a much cleaner IMAP/POP interface) Real Soon Now, and I can hardly wait.

Fedora 13 release slips

Posted May 13, 2010 23:13 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Exchange Web Services

Yeah, from what I know you need to have Exchange 2010 for that to work. Most folks are still on 2003 or 2007, I think. At least where I connect is.

BTW, Evo also has MAPI support.