Things are coming together for yet another Fedora release.  Although this is the tenth Fedora release it is only the third iteration of the new feature process.  From my vantage point the process is getting better though the level of confusion and debate about whether something should be a feature or not continues for some folks.  For the curious, the guidelines are here.

Feature freeze for Fedora 10 is this coming Tuesday, August 19, 2008.  The current list for Fedora 10 is growing with more waiting to go through the acceptance process here.  At feature freeze all features must be significantly completed and testable or they will have to wait for Fedora 11.

During this release cycle I collaborated with Paul Frields who greatly improved the documentation explaining the process.  We also got help from the Fedora art folks to make the process diagram better.  We also changed the categories used to classify feature pages in an attempt to bring greater clarity there.

And like all the past releases if you still don’t like the process and want to do something (besides complaining) give us some constructive, practical suggestions on what can be better.

I am proposing that any changes for the Fedora 11 release be reviewed and voted on at FESCo‘s meeting on Wednesday, October 1, 2008.  This way we can get an earlier start on the Fedora 11 features compared to the late start we had for Fedora 10.

UPDATE (2008-08-29): Due to recent infrastructure outages the feature freeze date for Fedora 10 has moved to 2008-09-09. More details here