After five previous slips of the release date and a shortening of the beta cycle, the Fedora developers have had to now push the Fedora 18 release into January 2013. The revised schedule currently sees a beta release planned for 27 November and a final release on 8 January 2013. The original planned final release date was 6 November.

The current list of blocking bugs includes many for the Anaconda installer and fedup, the installation upgrader, which have been reworked extensively, but are still not functioning sufficiently well. The issues with Anaconda have provoked heated discussions on the developer mailing lists.

The minutes of the FESCo meeting sees similar concerns discussed. Matthew Garrett noted that, at this point, "we have more people setting flags on fedup bugs than we have doing any development work on fedup". Discussions about features and schedules for Fedora 19 are being deferred until after the Fedora 18 beta has shipped.

Although delays to the original schedules are not unusual in the Fedora project, they have traditionally only been a few weeks. The current delay amounts to just over two months compared to the original plans and there is no certainty that even this schedule will be kept to.

(djwm)