development cycle (Was: Re: What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2 (LWN): Some comments)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Am Montag, den 30.01.2006, 10:14 -0800 schrieb Jesse Keating:
> On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 10:25 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > 
> > While we are at the topic already: This fact was badly communicated.
> > There seems to be a whole lot of confusion about the current Fedora
> > release cycle in the community -- for example the german
> > wikipedia-writers have a long discussion about it and nowhere can find a
> > *official* statement [*1] that the nine month cycle for FC5 was only a
> > exception:
> > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Fedora_Core#6_Monate
> 
> I'm confused.  Wasn't our original and still official release schedule
> every 6-9 months? 

Now I'm confused. Wasn't the original and still official release
schedule "Fedora Core is released two or tree times a year"? (that would
be 4-6 months)

Seems it still is:
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
Release Interval Fedora: 4-6 months

http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
10. Produce robust releases approximately 2-3 times per year [...]

>  Hasn't every release thus far fallen in that time
> frame?

Up to FC3 is was round about in the time frame:

FC1: 5 November 2003
 195 days till
FC2: 18 May 2004
 174 days till
FC3: 8 November 2004
 217 days till 
FC4: 13 June 2005
 275 days till
FC5: planed for 15 March 2006

6 Months: ~182 days

>   Won't FC5 fall in that time frame (albeit on the far side)?

No.

> Where is the confusion coming from?

Because nobody ever officially wrote down that the nine months time
frame of FC5 was a exception. And because we have no long term plan for
FC6 and FC7. I know that Suse and Ubuntu always release around March
(+/-1 some weeks) and September (+/- some weeks). Fedora is
unpredictable.

Say you are a journalist and want to tests distributions. You'll do it
in April and November, when Ubuntu and Suse are new -- that fedora then
maybe is already some months old and has an older Gnome is not your
fault. 

BTW, I know some people that switched to Ubuntu or openSuse because they
had Gnome 2.12 (FC4 has 2.10). Ridiculous IMHO, but some people are like
this. ;-) 

BTW, I have no problem when a release slips 2 or 4 weeks due to some
issues. But later releases shouldn't be effected due to this. So a
"Fedora releases normally at the end of March and End of September"
would be a really good idea IMHO.

-- 
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info>