There Is Now A Proposal For Shifting Fedora To An Annual Release Cadence

Following the plan to cancel or significantly delay Fedora 31 to work on extensive tooling of the Linux distribution, there is a separate proposal that was volleyed suggesting Fedora move to an annual release cadence.

Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.

There was some immediate opposition to this proposal in that if "breaking" updates wouldn't be allowed into existing Fedora releases as updates, it could mean "outdated software not just for six months but one year."

Fedora does tend to send down new Linux kernel and Mesa components, among other new software versions, but generally does not ship major new versions of GNOME and other key components as stable release updates.

This new off-shoot proposal came from the mailing list discussion about the Fedora 31 release cycle delay/cancellation.

There is also some putting their weight behind shifting Fedora to more of a rolling-release distribution. But at present Fedora Rawhide isn't without its share of problems still making it really not suitable as a rolling-release platform, but after the F31 re-tooling and improvements around testing and automation, perhaps we'll see more stability driven into the development Rawhide repository.

No decision is set in stone yet, but it looks like 2019 will certainly be interesting for Fedora one way or another.