Fedora 21 a GO after Another RC, New Development Tick-Tock

The big news today is that a fifth release candidate for Fedora 21 was needed, but Fedora 21 was given a GO for the December 9 release. Fedora folks are also talking about a '"Tick-tock" release cadence' for future versions, which would alternate feature releases with "release engineering and QA process and tooling."

A few hours after yesterday's release candidate was announced it was determined that yet another attempt was needed. RC5 was made available in the wee hours this morning. The only real changes between RC4 and RC5 were the versions of python-blivet and pyparted, which were downgraded due to serious bugs.

Jaroslav Reznik today announced the GO of Fedora 21 for release on December 9, 2014. During today's Go/No-Go meeting it was determined that no "unaddressed" blocker bugs remain and it was agreed that "Fedora 21 Final status is go by Release Engineering, QA and Development." Virtual champagne corks followed although Reznik later said, "And now, let's back to work on to the next Next Fedora release."

On that subject, Matthew Miller today posted on a new release process being discussed by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee dubbed '"Tick-tock" release cadence." This is process in which one aspect of development is the focus one cycle and another the next. In Fedora's case they're discussing using one cycle for new feature development (tick) and then the next on release engineering and tooling (tock). Miller says this will reduce cycle time and avoid some collisions made by doing both together every release. He even threw in the possibility of a third focus being a "polish" release where they concentrate just on bug fixes. The Fedora project has been discussing release cycle improvements for a while trying to improve their delay record.