Last week the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) ratified the updated schedule proposed by the Release Engineering team.  This resulted in feature freeze for Fedora moving to 2008-09-09 and GA to 2008-11-18.  This three week change to the schedule was to accommodate the recent infrastructure outages.

Updated general milestones are here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Schedule

For all the project management junkies out there, detailed tasks and durations here: http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-10/f-10-all-tasks.html .  You can optionally filter tasks by team using the links at the top of each page.

I think it is great that we were willing to take such a big slip to the original schedule now.  In the past we’ve waited until the last minute to see if we could absorb slips at various milestones with the regular result of not being able to do so. With a 6 month release cycle the Fedora schedules are already compressed with very little cushion or room for things to go wrong built in.

From a project management perspective slipping releases at the last possible date is generally a bad idea because it doesn’t give other groups who depend on other tasks being completed first to respond or adjust expectations.  Examples in Fedora include artwork, documentation, infrastructure, and marketing.

UPDATE (2008-10-13): See post about upated schedule and Fedora 10 feature list here