As A Feature, Fedora 14 May Actually Ship On Time

Red Hat's John Poelstra who is the Program Manager for Fedora and its "feature wrangler" has proposed an interesting feature today for Fedora 14: to actually ship it on time. The goal would be to not only ship Fedora 14 final according to their release schedule, but the alpha and beta releases too.

Red Hat hasn't been able to ship Fedora on-time for a couple years (Poelstra says it's been the past five releases) as it always gets hit by a major delay or two for technical reasons. With Fedora 14, John hopes it will make it out according to their release schedule while not sacrificing quality. "I'm not advocating cutting any corners or lowering our standards. I expect them to remain the same. What I would like to see is more discipline and fortitude about what changes get committed and when. And where necessary, start a tiny bit earlier than we might have in the past."

This proposal for Fedora 14 can be read on John Poelstra's blog. Fedora 14 is planned for release on the 26th of October while the alpha release is planned for the 27th of August and the beta release is on the 21st of September. The release candidate on their compose system is supposed to happen on the 12th of October.

Among the other feature proposals for Fedora 14 are replacing SysVint with systemd, support for multi-path installations via Anaconda, MeeGo Netbook UX 1.0 experience support, using LZMA compression for the Fedora Live spins, and providing an easy-to-use IPMI server management utility.

It would be good to see Fedora release on schedule again as in the old "Fedora Core" days where there were many "Test" releases each cycle they managed to usually be on time but as of late their track record has been sloppy even as they cut down the number of development releases.