Fedora Devs Discuss Changing Their Release Scheduling, Maybe One Big Release Per Year

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has offered some statistics about the Fedora 25 launch to date and is proposing some possible changes to release scheduling for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, including the possibility of moving to doing one major release per calendar year.

Matthew began by sharing some statistics about the number of unique IPs hitting Fedora's mirror network as a way to gauge the release's popularity. Matthew believes "the F25 uptake is rapid" but that there may be some "stepping on the toes of the previous release" and if moving to just one big release per year may also maximize Fedora's PR/press exposure.

Given the work on Fedora.Next the past few releases with increasing the modularity of the OS and the generational core, Matthew is publicly proposing a change in their future release cadence. He explained, " What if, instead of two releases a year, we updated the Generational Core on a cycle aligned with the kernel — roughly every three months — and had one June release of Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server every year, with an optional ".1" update in November or December? Fedora Atomic would keep to two-week updates as a rolling release. And Spins could pick their own release dates, either with the Editions release or separately (to get their own chance to shine)."

Among the expressed benefits would be predictable dates for releases, maintaining higher levels of QA, including more time for QA and release engineering, maximum PR strength / user-growth, and more.

This is only a proposal right now and some developers/stakeholders have already been sharing their own opinions on the data and their thinking about future releases. More details on the proposal and the feedback so far can be found via this Fedora-devel thread.