Fedora 18 Release Slips Another Week

An anonymous reader writes "The next major release of the Fedora Project's GNU/Linux distribution (named Spherical Cow) was originally scheduled for November 16th. However, an ambitious set of new features has resulted in the project slipping way past its scheduled release. It had fallen three weeks behind before even producing an alpha release and nine weeks behind by the time the beta release was produced. A major redesign in the distribution installer seems to have resulted in the largest percentage of bugs blocking its release. The set-back marks the first time since 2005 in which there was only one major Fedora release during a calendar year instead of two. Currently, the distribution is scheduled for release on January 15th."

Comments

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Ignacio]

And no one (sane) hates you for that. Fedora isn't a one-size-fits-all distro, nor do they ever want to be one.

I feel like Fedora 18 is a bust

[Omnifarious]

They should never have merged in the new Anaconda in the state its in. It is not production ready. It is basically impossible to create a new LV or btrfs subvolume and install into it. So you are left with installing into a real partition. And on most of my computers I'm using btrfs or LVM and I've given them the whole HD, so that's not really an option.

Additionally, the UI for selecting where to install into is so confusing that I cannot say with confidence that the install isn't going to wipe out any existing partitions.

The old UI was kind of fiddly, and perhaps it was a bit opaque to newer users since it required some detailed knowledge of what a partition was and how it relates to a physical hard-drive, and LVM volume group or a btrfs volume. But at least it worked and you could make it do what you wanted.

Perhaps this new UI will be a lot better in the end. All I know is that merging the work into mainline Anaconda at this stage of its development was a huge mistake. It means that it will be much harder to go back to the old one should the new UI not be ready in time, or prove to be not-constructible.

I consider it basic software engineer to never count on a given feature that isn't done (to the point of having had at least some testing) to be available on release. You don't let your salespeople sell it. And you don't announce it. This is something I've always had a lot of respect for Google for. They rarely announce things until they're actually done. Software engineering is too unpredictable to do it any other way.

Re:I feel like Fedora 18 is a bust

[bill_mcgonigle]

They should never have merged in the new Anaconda in the state its in.

This looks to me like a failure of release management. Look at the "Contingency Plan" for the new anaconda UI. They basically said, "we don't have one" and the feature got accepted anyway. So, here we are today.

I don't blame the anaconda guys for finding out that the problem was harder than they thought. That happens.

But process is an important part of what makes Fedora Fedora - if anaconda is "too big to fail" then the process is broken, and Fedora is broken.

I hope the management team has realized that next time somebody says, "we can't have a contingency plan because of X," they respond, "we then you need to re-factor X so you can have a contingency plan."

Re:It doesn't matter.

[FireFury03]

if you want to be able to use anaconda when cent7 comes out, you'll need to start practicing with fedora 18 asap.

Judging by how well Centos tend to do with updates, I wouldn't expect to see Centos 7 for a good few years. This is why we switched to using Scientific Linux some time ago...

Re:It doesn't matter.

[gulikoza]

Centos reworked the build process significantly after the 6.0 release. The 6.2 and 6.3 releases were out 14 and 18 days after the upstream release. SL was somewhat behind after that (72d and 48 days respectively). Source: Wikipedia