Announcing Fedora Activity Day - Fedora Development Cycle 2009

[Kevin Kofler]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> Now it seems more that we have to make that decision within enough time to
> spin up (or down) the marketing machine, which looks to require more
> leadtime than the mirrors do.
[snip]
> The marketing machine has very strongly requested that we only do
> releases on Tuesdays.

I think it's a bad idea to delay the releases more than necessary for
marketing reasons. IMHO we should release as soon as technically feasible.

> You'll have to enumerate why that is.  One reason I've avoided this is
> added confusion as to when the "release" happens.  If we created that
> directory and put content in there, would we have then released Fedora
> 12?  When does it become "released" and thus trusted?

It means people can go from Rawhide to the release without service
interruption. The way it is now, once the release is finalized, the mirror
list redirect of the release tree to Rawhide gets turned off (because
Rawhide moves on to the next release), but the Everything directory gets
opened up only a few days later, on the official release day. That means
people cannot install packages from the Everything repository (which can
also affect updates because they can add dependencies) for a few days.

It also seems natural that, if Rawhide moves on to F13 early, the F12 branch
will get put directly into releases/12/Everything so the mirrors won't have
to sync everything again once the release becomes official.

It shall also be noted that a certain distribution with a 'U' even opens up
the repository for the next release right after releasing the previous one,
they don't call their development repository "development", "rawhide" or
something like that, but with the release name of the next release.

        Kevin Kofler