Fedora 13 Alpha release delayed Fedora Project developers said they will push back the first alpha release for Fedora 13 by one week. In a Thursday mailing list post by Jesse Keating, Red Hat release engineer for Fedora Core, said the first alpha will be delayed to "verify blocker bug fixes and validate new builds of software necessary to fix those bugs." …
For any of you who aren't familiar, Fedora is a bleeding-edge testbed for RedHat. There's a new version out every six to nine months, with only the two most recent supported or updated. For those of us who like such a thing, having this release delayed is actually Good News. Not all releases have really been Ready For Prime Time, and I, for one, would not like to see F 13 be an unlucky release.
From what I can remember, pretty well every schedule of a Fedora release has had its alpha, beta or final verison delayed by one or more weeks at some point. What I don't understand is why they don't apply the delays from one release (e.g. F12) to the schedule of the next one (F13) - that way, future releases would have less and less delays (OK, but with a gradually longer release schedule) and slow news day postings like this one wouldn't be needed...
My personal opinion is that Fedora have indeed speeded up their release schedule too much. It was nicely averaging 8-9 months per release (I'd personally like to see an annual release, with a 6-monthly ".5" version as a respin with all the updates rolled in) and then someone decided that wasn't often enough and ramped up the schedule to near breaking point, hence the regular delays at various stages because it's simply too rapid a schedule IMHO.
So I did a bit of Googling:
"Tuesdays are the designated release day because they are good days for news coverage and the established day we synchronize our content with the mirrors that carry our releases."[1]
Which would suggest that the whole release process (the synchronisation of the servers probably being done on Tuesdays, because that is when releases are made) is coordinated primarily to maximize publicity.
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Schedule
Basically, the types of bugs that are 'acceptable' get smaller and smaller as the releases get closer to final. But there are some bugs that aren't acceptable even for an Alpha.
You can read the criteria, if you're interested:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Alpha_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Beta_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Final_Release_Criteria
as you can see, they get tighter and tighter as the releases go along.
That was interesting to read - not all the way through, I hope you don't mind ;-)
"The objectives of the Alpha release are to publicly release installable media versions of a feature complete test release" as well as testing for bugs. And with bugs that you know about, and intend to fix, why inflict them on the early-adopter testers first? And have them re-reported backsto you?
So this makes sense.
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