It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.
Final Objectives
The objective of the Final release is to:
- Provide a polished final release suitable for meeting the needs of our Target Audience
Final Release Requirements
In order to be released to the general public, the Final Candidate (RC) must meet all of the following criteria. This is intended to make the decision process as clear and straightforward as possible. Mostly met items are incomplete until they are met. Optional and nice to have items should not be included in this list.
There may be times where a requirement is unmet only in a particular configuration, such as with some keyboard layouts but not others, or if a particular character is used in a username, password or passphrase. In such cases, the release team should use their judgement and refer to precedent to determine whether or not the issue should be considered to block the release. They should consider the number of users likely to be affected by the issue, the severity of the case when the issue is encountered, and the ease or otherwise with which the issue can be avoided by both informed and uninformed users.
The term 'release-blocking desktops' should be understood to mean all the desktop environments in which bugs are currently considered capable of blocking a Fedora release. The current set of release-blocking desktops is XFCE. Note that bugs in desktops that are not part of this set which would infringe these criteria automatically qualify for nice-to-have status, according to the nice-to-have bug process.
Final Release Requirements
- All Fedora 18 Beta Release Criteria must be met
- All bugs blocking the F18Blocker tracker must be CLOSED
- All services in a default install must start properly
- All critical path actions on release-blocking desktop environments should correctly display all sufficiently complete translations available for use
- Menu sanity - the following criteria refer to both a live image and default installed system, and to all release-blocking desktops
- All Applications listed in the system menus (or equivalent) must have icons which have a consistent appearance and sufficiently high resolution to avoid appearing blurry
- All applications listed under the Applications menu or category must start successfully
- All applications listed under the Applications menu or category must withstand a basic functionality test and not crash after a few minutes of normal use. They must also have working Help and Help -> About menu items
- No application may unintentionally appear twice in the menus. In particular, items under System must not appear under Applications
- All elements of the default panel (or equivalent) configuration in all release-blocking desktops must function correctly in common use
- Saving passwords in the desktop default keyring (if the desktop implements one), and retrieving passwords from the keyring, must work for all release-blocking desktops
- The proposed final Fedora artwork must be included and enabled by default for the installer, graphical boot, firstboot, graphical login and desktop background. All Fedora artwork must be consistent with the proposed final theme, and if any artwork contains a graphical version number, the version number used must match the Fedora release number. Generic release artwork (e.g. Alpha, Beta, Development) must not be used for the final release
- No notices or alerts about pre-release status should be present
- The final branded release notes from the Documentation team must be present on media and the appropriately versioned generic release notes must be available in the online release repository
- A fedora-release package containing the correct names, information and repository configuration for a final Fedora release (as opposed to a pre-release) must be present on media while the appropriately versioned generic-release package must be available in the online release repository
Final Blocker Bugs
A bug is considered a Final blocker bug if any of the following criteria are met:
- A bug in a Critical Path package that:
- Cannot be fixed with a future stable update
- Has a severity rating of high or greater and no reasonable workaround (see definition of priority and severity)
- Bug hinders execution of required Final test plans or dramatically reduces test coverage
- Bug relates to an unmet Final Release Requirement
A Fedora feature being incomplete, in and of itself, does not constitute a blocker bug. The feature process is separate from this process. Features are required to meet certain standards at certain points of the release cycle, but this is part of the feature process and managed, tracked and enforced separately from this process. However, if a proposed feature being incomplete causes any of the above criteria to be met, then the bug is a release blocker.
Note: The Fedora-ARM group will consider only bugs that are specific to ARM, i.e., if the primary architecture version is considered acceptable for primary architecture, only an ARM-specific bug will block the ARM release.
Contingency Plan
- If all of the Final Release Requirements are not met by 20:00 UTC on Wednesday the week prior to release day, the release will be delayed by one week so that the Final Release Requirements can be met.
- One week will be added to all remaining tasks in the release schedule, including the final release date.
- This decision will be made during our weekly meeting on Freenode in #fedora-meeting-1 one week prior to the scheduled release.
Confirming Final Requirements
The Fedora-ARM group has the responsibility of determining whether the criteria for the release has been met (as outlined above) through discussion with Development and Release Engineering.