Fedora 16 reached its official end of life at the beginning of the week. This means that the release was maintained for 16 months as opposed to the usual 13 months. In most cases, Fedora discontinues support for a release when the next version over has been released for a month. The three-month delay in the release of Fedora 18 explains the longer support cycle in this case.

In the meantime, the Fedora developers have specified a release date for the upcoming Fedora 19. Initially, the developers had rather vaguely said the next version of the distribution would be released at the end of May, but the project has now specified 25 June to give the developers some breathing room after the Fedora 18 delays.

As part of the development of Fedora 19, the developers are discussing which features should be included in the release. A switch to MariaDB has already been decided on and the developers have also accepted a proposal to make Policy Kit solely responsible for privilege escalation in several use cases. Usermode/consolehelper, which was used for many of this tasks before, would be retired as part of the process.

(fab)