Today we held our readiness meeting for the Alpha release of Fedora 14. As you may know, this is a meeting with representatives from the Development, Release Engineering, and Quality Assurance teams. In these meetings, we evaluate the list of blocker bugs and give a "go" or "no go" signal on the state of the Fedora release.

You can read the minutes of the meeting here[1], but in short the decision was made that the release has not passed its release criteria[2]. When this happens, the entire release schedule is slipped by a week, and we work to get things in better shape for the
next meeting. We'll get the schedule[3] updated in the next day or so, but in general this means that our general availability date for Fedora 14 has now gone from October 26th to November 2nd.

During composition of any further release candidates, the Fedora Release Engineering and Quality Assurance teams plan to be quite conservative in the updates they pull into the release candidates, so that we don't inadvertently create more blocker bugs. I'd also like to thank those who have really pushed hard to try to get the Alpha into shape. In particular, the Release Engineering team put in a lot of extra hours to compose our release candidates, and the QA team did a fantastic job of testing the release candidates and knocking out as many blocker bugs as possible.

While I regret the fact that the schedule has slipped, I'm confident it was the right decision to ensure that Fedora 14 is a rock-solid release.

[1] http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-08-12/gonogo.2010-08-12-00.00.html
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_Alpha_Release_Criteria
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/Schedule

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Jared Smith
Fedora Project Leader