Fedora 18 Isn't Looking Too Good, Anaconda Problems

The release of Fedora 18 has already been delayed five times and it's still uncertain when this next Fedora Linux release will actually ship.

The current plan is to ship Fedora 18 on the 11th of December, but that's far from certain and it's also not yet decided whether the Fedora 18 Beta due out next week will actually ship on time or end up being delayed a sixth time.

Delays within the Fedora release schedule are very common each time and for Fedora 14 it was even attempted to be a feature to ship on time, but it didn't even end up being delivered timely for that release. These delays are commonly happening as a result of outstanding bugs that are deemed showstoppers.

One of the latest troubles for delivering Fedora 18 on time are major changes to the Anaconda installer that are taking longer than expected to come together. Even though we're past the Fedora 18 beta change deadline with the "100% feature complete" deadline too, new Anaconda development is continuing.

Red Hat's Time Lane has now started a new mailing list thread about Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule. "It appears to me that anaconda is months away from being shippable. It's still got major features that are incomplete (one example above, but there are more), and I don't seem to be able to do anything at all with it without hitting serious bugs. How is it that we're even considering shipping this version for F18? For any other package, we'd be telling the maintainer to hold off till F19. The rest of us don't get to be doing major feature development post-beta-freeze."

This mailing list thread has been very active with a variety of responses. David Airlie even asked, "Should we just skip F18? (like seriously)." There's also a long message by Adam Williamson about learning from the Fedora 18 problems.

At least when Fedora 18 finally manages to ship, it will have some interesting features.