With the recent slippage in the Fedora 10 Beta release phase, we’re at a November 25 release for the final Fedora 10 release.
Part of the slippage is obviously due to the August intrusion — we lost about three weeks due to all the infrastructure rebuilding that had to take place. As I’ve said before, the community working on those rebuilds did a magnificent job, and our release engineering team has come back up to speed as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re really only two weeks off a “normal” schedule, not counting that three week period of lost time. The actual lost time is not a reflection on anyone’s efforts — it’s phenomenal it wasn’t longer.
Here’s the tricky part, though. If we have any further slippage in the release cycle, we’re looking at a minimum of a two-week slip in GA, because of the USA Thanksgiving holiday on November 27. There simply wouldn’t be time enough to get composes done and shipped to mirrors for a December 2 release, so we’d then be at December 9. Obviously no one is aiming for this, since we like to make the dates when we can.
So why am I writing here about the slip? Well, in large part because it impacts on FUDCon planning, which is something I’m handling for the North American F11 powwow. Had we settled on December 5-7 for FUDCon F11 Boston already, we’d be looking at a very strange situation if the GA does slip to December 9. Having FUDCon for the next release before the current one’s out the door? Hm, that would be weird all right. Even a December 12-14 FUDCon might be optimistic. So for right now, we’re targeting January 9-11, 2009 for FUDCon F11 Boston.
To make things more complicated. I’m working with a few friends to make this FUDCon a little special. I don’t want to blow the horn quite yet, but it’s definitely timely and will excite a lot of people. But the coordination effort is definitely higher than your average event!
And on top of all this, we still have another strange issue to resolve — a Fedora 11 Alpha freeze of January 13, meaning FUDCon would come a little late in the cycle. I’ve raised this schedule conundrum on the rel-eng list, but wanted to give the wider community a chance to ponder it too. Cutting to the chase: we need to consider the schdule for Fedora 11 in the context of these other slips, and the time we need to accomplish some of the technical features and community enablers that won’t quite make it to F10.
so cambridge is being released near thanksgiving and cambridge is in new england, where the pilgrims settled.
perhaps, just this once, the artwork might reflect the capotain in lieu of the fedora?
Uh oh!! FOSS.IN became a bit more challenging 😀
Does the F11 schedule stay the same regardless of when F10 actually makes it out the door? ie: is F11 targetted for (I’m assuming) May 5 even if that means a 5 month release cycle?
@Max: That is precisely the question that needs discussion. Normally I’d say “yes,” for instance if we had slipped a total of 2-3 weeks off the schedule by GA. We can generally swallow a few weeks in the following release without tremendous strain. But we’re already 4 weeks off the original schedule, and it might — might — end up being 6 or more if something unforeseen pops up during the post-Beta timeframe. To me, the pressure of three test phases (Alpha, Beta, Preview) is going to inflict itself hard on any feature or collateral developers who want to achieve goals by F11. So it deserves some community discussion.
IMHO it was a mistake to allow for that much slipping in the first place. We should just have nixed the preview and gone straight from beta to release.