Approximately one month from today (November 2, 2010 at 10 AM EDT), the final release of Fedora 14 will be made available to the world.  And when it is, you can get it at http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.

We still have an opportunity to make Fedora 14 a “first.” First as in the first time we’ve shipped the final version of a release one week late (or less) since Fedora 8.  Want to be part of this success story? Read on to see where you can be involved.

There’s only six days until things start to really heat up as we accelerate to the finish line:

  • 12-Oct :: Test Compose–Release Engineering Creates a “test compose” for QA to run tests on. This is helps make to make sure the Release Candidate has a better chance of being in good shape on 19-Oct.
  • 12-Oct to 18-Oct :: QA tests the “Test Compose.”
  • 18-Oct (Monday) :: Final Change Deadline–No more new packages are pushed to stable unless they fix Fedora 14 blocker bugs.
  • 19-Oct to 21-Oct :: Compose Final Release Candidate (RC)–Cannot occur if there are open Fedora 14 blocker bugs.  Three days has been set aside for this task in Fedora 14 as a cushion to make sure Release Engineering can deliver a solid RC to Quality Assurance on 21-Oct.  If composing the RC is delayed by too long the final release could be delayed.
  • 21-Oct to 26-Oct :: QA tests the Final Release Candidate to validate that the Fedora 14 Final Release Criteria have been met.
  • 26-Oct :: “Go/No-Go Meeting“–QA, Development, and Release Engineering gather to evaluate any unmet release criteria in the form of Fedora 14 Blocker bugs or incomplete testing.
  • 28-Oct :: “Release Readiness Meeting“–At this meeting all of the teams involved in the Fedora release cycle gather to make sure everything is well coordinated and in order for launch day.
  • 28-Oct :: If there are no unresolved blocking issues from the “Go/No-Go” or “Release Readiness” meetings, Release Engineering will stage and start synchronizing the Fedora 14 Final Release to the mirrors. It takes a few days for all the mirrors to synchronize the release.
  • 02-Nov :: Fedora 14 Public Availability–At 10:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Release Engineering does the “bit flip” and all of the mirrors make the pre-staged release available to the world.

Now is the time to start digging deep and doing whatever we can to address the open Fedora 14 Blocker bugs.

See the Fedora wiki for more details about Fedora’s scheduling methodology. The full Fedora 14 release schedule is also on the wiki.

Not familiar with the Fedora Project?  Start at our home page.

Image by johnrush via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.