středa 8. ledna 2014

Where's Fedora 21 schedule?

I got this question several times last few days - "hey, you're the schedule wrangler, you have to know" - as usually this time, we are working pretty hard on the next Fedora. And Heisenbug was finished almost month ago - EOL is nearing. But this time we are in a bit different situation - there are several working groups trying to redefine, how Fedora should look like in the future and it does not make sense to create schedule. We need resolution from this effort. It's planned for January.

Is Fedora 21 going to be released in the old model way, or new one? Hard to answer right now. But there's one date - F21 is not going to be released earlier than in August (and I'd say late August). See FESCo ticket. What's the reason? As otherwise we would try to hit May timeframe? Short answe: we want to give the opportunity to the teams that are smashed by release windmills to work on tooling. Especially as the Fedora.next proposal stands on more automation to be able to deliver more products. Especially for QA and release engineering. Of course this time could be used by anyone! Also there was FESCo decision to steer release cycle and cadance at least for short term upcoming release to stick together. In the future, we can end with different release schedules for different products but automation and lot of preparation is prerequisite for it.

Other note - somehow connected to Fedora 21 release cycle, raised by Sirko. What will be the code name for Fedora 21. And again short answer: null. Not null as null string but null. Fedora Board decided to end release names process. It does not mean "no more release names" but it's up to community or working groups, if anyone wants to step into the role of Name Wrangler and helps running this process. Or reform it in any way.

January is going to be very interesting month from the point of future Fedora releases - stay tuned!

Btw. I can see a lot of people and teams missing information on what's going on, it's really hard for anyone to follow all working groups and what they are proposing, what FESCo decides, where's the schedule etc. Too much happening and I'd really like to see better coordination. As Base WG member I came with the idea of broader project meeting - WGs and other teams representatives to brief on status, work on coordination. Unfortunately, one more meeting during F20 release cycle would mean divorce :), so let me take a look on it again.