The days of summer may be hot, but they’re anything but lazy in Fedora. The Fedora 12 release, as many community members already know, is a somewhat tighter schedule overall. We had so many features in the Fedora 11 release, some of them particularly extensive and complex, that we drove a slightly longer release cycle. To make up for that longer cycle, the Fedora 12 cycle is somewhat shorter. That truncation returns us to release dates close to the May Day/Halloween calendar we originally set up back around the Fedora 7 time frame. As a result, the feature freeze for Fedora 12 is occurring on July 28, or approximately three weeks from now. That’s the date by which new features and major changes in existing packages have to be entered. Probably a good date to inscribe on your calendar (and maybe tattoo on your forearm)!
You’ll see that the release after that freeze is called “Alpha” in this release, because we really have only two test phase releases before our release candidate in Fedora 12. For Fedora 11 and previous releases, there were three. So there’s limited time left to get your features in gear for the F12 release, if you want the practical upshot. To me, Fedora 12 is going to be very much a tightening of a lot of screws and bolts, ensuring this release is even more solid than Fedora 11, which itself premiered many new technologies but yet is racking up overwhelmingly solid reviews and praise. Our hope is to release Fedora 12 on November 3, 2009, as listed in the F12 release schedule on the wiki.
The Feature List page on the wiki shows a number of line items that need to be updated by their maintainers to be retained for the current release. If you own one of these, please visit the page and update your status so your feature can be managed correctly. If you are hoping to get a new feature into the process, then now is the time to build your page and get it entered into the appropriate category on the wiki. This process will help people elsewhere in the project work on targeted testing, publicity, and other noteworthy bits that go into each release. Thanks for being a part of it!
So what happened to the MinimalPlatform that was on the F11 feature list? It didn’t appear to make it into F11 (and the F11 install was even more bloated than previous versions), despite being marked as 100% complete before F11 was frozen, yet it doesn’t seem to be on the F12 feature list. I’ve had enough of Fedora’s ever increasing bloat. Gimme my minimal platform, damnit!
This is particularly important as isn’t F12 going to be the base for RHEL6? Or has that cutoff been and gone, and we’re likely to be stuck with an F11 based RHEL? I very much hope not, as for me, F11 is the worst Fedora for a very long time.
The feature page indicates you should try the kickstart file that lets you install the minimal platform. The design of the feature has nothing to do with the default installation from DVD; it is a slimming down of dependencies in the “@core” package group used in Anaconda, to provide a minimal set of packages for basic installation via Kickstart. It doesn’t put a “minimal” option in the general users’ GUI installer. This might be something you could ask nicely of the feature owner. I’ve asked FESCo to determine the status of the feature, which is unclear from the page, I agree.
Regardless of where RHEL bases the next version, their final product has the potential to differ, trivially or significantly, from a release of Fedora. A great deal of time, development, and QE processes happen in Red Hat before a RHEL release. So it’s not expected that RHEL would behave exactly like the specific Fedora release from which it was branched.