Fedora 13 Beta delay, ABRT Test Day tomorrow

QA's contribution to this year's outbreak of April Fool's japery is the hilarious announcement that Fedora 13 Beta will be delayed by a week. No, wait - it's not a joke, it's sad, soul-crushing reality! Wasn't that fun?

Unfortunately we were behind the curve with the generation of candidate builds throughout the Beta cycle (the Test Compose and first release candidate were both several days late) and so did not manage to identify all blocker issues in time for them to be properly resolved and all the validation tests successfully run. We're left with at least one known release criteria-breaking issue - a bug preventing unlocking of encrypted partitions when booting in text mode - and a Giant Void O' Uncertainty where we haven't completed the installation and desktop validation tests, so we can't say with confidence there are no other blocker issues lurking. So today's go/no-go meeting made the relatively easy decision to slip the Beta - and, now, the final release - by one week. We're sorry for the delay, which could possibly have been avoided with a harder effort, but we'll do our best to make sure the Beta does go out according to the new schedule, and that it meets all quality expectations.

In other news, tomorrow (apologies for the short notice!) is ABRT Test Day. Excuse the WikiMess, we're still working on the page and the test cases, but they should be fully finished in time for the event (well, in favourable time zones!) ABRT is every user's favourite, and every developer's least favourite, Fedora 12 feature - it's the tool that makes it dead easy to file an automated bug report when some application crashes. For Fedora 13 we'd like to make sure all the enhancements since the last Test Day are working correctly, and check that all the basics are still working right as well. You don't need any special equipment to take part in this Test Day, so please do come along and help out! The event runs all day on Thursday 2010-04-01 (there's that date again...) in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC.

Comments

pfrields.id.fedoraproject.org wrote on 2010-04-01 12:56:
It seems like, given the time squeeze experienced by the QA team, we might have benefited from simply taking the one week slip of the Alpha, and echoing that down through the schedule for the other releases. Then there would have been a normal (or at least the same, expected) amount of time between Alpha and Beta for composes and testing. That would likely also help other groups in Fedora that are trying to time their work to the phased releases.
adamw wrote on 2010-04-01 14:42:
It's possible. I don't actually know yet what caused the delay of the delivery of the candidate builds; we'll be doing a retrospective, and it will come out then.
[...] of Adam, his blog post today pointed out two things: the F13 release date has slipped by a week, and today is ABRT Test Day. The [...]
[...] of Adam, his blog post today pointed out two things: the F13 release date has slipped by a week, and today is ABRT Test Day. The [...]
jlaska.id.fedoraproject.org wrote on 2010-04-06 19:59:
We'd like to track issues as the happen, so we don't forget them when the official retrospective occurs. Please feel free to record your feedback (good, bad or otherwise) at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_QA_Retrospective
[...] adequately retest them and stage the content for the coming Tuesday release day–articulated recently by Adam.  The QA team is doing a great job tracking our experiences for Fedora 13 in living retrospective [...]