At today's regularly scheduled meeting, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) decided that Fedora 9 release will be slipping by exactly two weeks.

Because of other slippage, coupled with some technical difficulties during this previous week, our Preview Release was unexpectedly stalled. The Preview Release is where we expect to catch all manner of last-minute bugs, do very heavy QA, and otherwise perform all the final spit-and-polish. There needs to be sufficient time between the PR and the release for testers to find and report issues.

There are less than two weeks remaining until the original target date of April 29th. About a week before that date we have to have everything locked and loaded for distribution by our mirrors. That small a timeframe would then make the Preview Release -- normally a very important part of our release schedule -- nearly useless.

This slip is not intended to make room for more changes, it is only intended to make room for fixing the things we already know about, and allowing new things to be found, and evaluated as release blocking, and fixed. There are also a fair number of bugs we think we've already fixed, but need wider audience testing to be sure.

The current blocker list is viewable at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=235706&hide_resolved=1 however since there is nothing preventing people from adding bugs to this list it will get culled from time to time from things that aren't actually blockers. A (rather longer) list of things we'd like to see fixes for can be seen https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=235705&hide_resolved=1 although this list does get less attention than the blocker list.

We deeply appreciate the value we get from our community in using our development tree and testing our release attempts. Without your input, our releases couldn't possibly be as good as they have been. Please help us use these extra couple of weeks to make the already awesome Fedora 9 even better!