Before each Fedora milestone release (Alpha, Beta, Final) there is at least one Go/No-Go meeting. As the name suggests this is the meeting where folks from QA, FESCo, Release engineering, Program Management and others gather to see if the release is ready to go out the following week. The meetings are held on IRC and open to everyone (Although go/no-go votes may only be taken from representatives of specific groups). You can see the logs of the last one (last week to decide if Fedora 25 Beta was ready to release this week) this meetbot.fedoraproject.org log link

In the event the decision is “No-go” then the Milestone release slips a week and a new Go/No-Go meeting is scheduled a week out. This allows whatever issues were blocking the release to (hopefully) be solved.

If the decision is “Go”, then the release happens the following week. Why so long between the decision to release and the actual release? Well, there are a number of things that need to happen to get things ready for release, including, but not limited to:

  • The release has to be put in the correct place on master mirrors (moved from the alt/stage directory to releases/test or releases) and time is needed for all our mirrors to pick up this content and sync it.
  • Common bugs need to be identified and written up: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F25_bugs
  • The websites team needs to land any changes they need for the release and get them ready to go live on release morning.
  • Torrents need to be synced and setup, ready to live for release morning.
  • In the buildsystem, the release needs to be tagged so we know exactly what packages were in that release and so alternative arches can build the exact same set for their releases.
  • Checksum files and so forth need to be verified and signed by release engineering.

I hope everyone is looking forward to the Fedora 25 Beta release tomorrow!