Fedora 18 Release Slips Another Week 68
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."
rngd? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's odd that rngd is an 'ambitious new feature. It's been around for years and has never been deployed right.
Three things are wrong
1 - It's not on by default
2 - When you turn it on, the command line options are wrong, so it silently fails.
3 - When you fix the command line options, it barely feeds in entropy during boot time because the wakeup threshold in the kernel is set too low, so you get the boot time entropy starvation problem, even though you have an entropy source and rngd running.
Also, if they don't pick up the RdRand extensions to rngd to support Ivy Bridge's fast/secure RNG, then that is a big fail.
I have low expectations.
systemd (Score:2, Interesting)
Porting from sysVinit init scripts to systemd unit files.
It is not just the new installer, the conversion to systemd is also only at 70% complete. From their Release 18 Feature List. [fedoraproject.org] I am still using Fedora 16 at home as I had no real reason to move to 17 yet and will probably skip it. I am not entirely sure I want systemd instead of sys v init though and might do a review of the choices out there such as arch. I have used Fedora exclusively on the machine since early 2010 ever since the open source ATI drivers came along. Over all it has been a nice eco system.
Re:I feel like Fedora 18 is a bust (Score:4, Interesting)
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" [fedoraproject.org] 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. (Score:4, Interesting)
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...