Fedora 19 status is ALIVE, GA on July 02, 2013

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 07:34:06PM -0400, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> At the Fedora 19 Final Go/No-Go Meeting that just occurred, it was
> agreed to Go with the Fedora 19 by Fedora QA, development, release
> engineering and FPM.

979205 got filed yesterday, which makes it incredibly difficult to 
install F19 on Macs while keeping OS X. This is rather frustrating, 
since Fedora's the only distribution with any significant support for 
running on Apple hardware. There's two problems here:

1) QA apparently don't have any Macs, so it's difficult to test this 
case
2) Policy says that once the go decision has been made, there's no way 
to revoke it

(1) is something that we really need to solve, because it's clearly 
unreasonable to expect community members to have a test Mac to install 
every RC.

(2) is stranger. Obviously once an image is released, we're not going to 
be able to recall it, and we have no history of producing updated 
install images. But right now we're in a window where we haven't 
officially shipped anything and are saying we can't fix this issue 
purely because we've written a policy that says we can't.

There are workarounds - users can either perform custom partitioning, 
wipe their disk entirely or install using beta and then upgrade to 
final. It's not an utter disaster. However, if it had been caught 12 
hours earlier, we'd probably have been willing to delay the release to 
fix it.

I don't know that there's a good answer here. It's unfortunate to ship 
with somewhat broken support for a widespread class of hardware, 
especially when Fedora's compatibility with that hardware is a unique 
selling point. But I don't know that it's worth going through the misery 
of trying to delay things at this point, especially since the US 
holidays next week seem to be the kind of thing designed to turn any 
small slip into weeks.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org