Fedora 17 Continues In The Tradition Of Delays

Another go/no-go meeting was held today within Red Hat's Fedora camp and they have decided to push back the beta release of the Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" by another week, which is now pushing back all other F17 milestone targets by an additional week, including the final release.

Release delays have been an unfortunately common experience within the Fedora camp going back to the early Fedora Core days. Fedora release delays are so notorious is that a Fedora 14 feature was to actually ship on time, but that feature failed as they missed their original target. There's many other examples such as with Fedora 13 Suffers Last Minute Delay Of One Week, Fedora 11 Plagued With Another Delay, and Fedora 7 - Delayed One Month, among their other releases over the years.

Robyn Bergeron was the bearer of today's bad news on the mailing list. The reasoning for this latest Fedora Linux delay is the pre-upgrade functionality being up to expectations.

At the Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip the Beta by an additional week[1]. Minutes follow below.

Though the QA team was able to get through all validation testing, it was found that preupgrade was not functioning at an acceptable level, thus becoming an additional blocker which prevents us from shipping RC3, and necessitating the creation of an RC4.

As a result, ALL MAJOR MILESTONES, and their dependent tasks, will be pushed out by one week. Beta will now be looking at an expected release of 2012-04-17, and F17 GA is now scheduled for 2012-05-22. This is the second one-week slip of beta.

Adjustments to the full F17 schedule have been completed and now reflect the above Beta and GA dates, and high-level milestones have been updated as well on the Schedule wiki page[3].

We will be meeting again next Wednesday for another Go/No-Go meeting (2012-04-11.) All hail our QA pals and the anacondanistas for their dedication (and many, many others as well).

We'll see in another week if everything is all good, in which case Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" will arrive at the end of May, but otherwise could be at risk of being delayed into June.

While release delays are unfortunate -- especially when they become all too common -- at least it's fairly justifiable with all of the upstream open-source work done by the Fedora / Red Hat developers and all of the ambitious work they try to push into every six-month release.

A Beefy Miracle lunch (Sauerbraten) today during the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit.

There is a whole lot of new features to get excited about with F17 as talked about in many other articles: GCC 4.7 and oVirt, the latest Sugar, OpenJDK7, a unified file-system, and a heck of a lot more. Sans the delays, I'm quite looking forward to Fedora 17 and its plethora of new features. Canonical's Jono Bacon is also fond of the Beefy Miracle.