Rather than the full Five Things in Fedora This Week, I’ve just got one — as you may have seen by now, while we hoped to sign off on the Fedora 23 final release yesterday for availability next week, the quality assurance team found a number of issues that still needed to be addressed first. Fedora always releases on Tuesday (it makes the logistics a lot easier), so with the delay, the planned release date is now November 3rd, 2015.

This extra week will both give time to get fixes in place, and to make sure those are fully tested. (We wouldn’t want to give you a Fedora OS with rushed fixes which might be incomplete or even cause other problems.)

I know sometimes it feels like Fedora is always late, but this is really a misinterpretation of our process. Remember, rather than developing software entirely under our control, we integrate thousands of

components created and maintained in the wide open source world, and getting everything aligned and polished is a major feat. This makes a strict calendar-based release very difficult.

On the other hand, in order to keep Fedora moving fast (in line with our “First” foundation), we don’t want to entirely leave it to “we’ll release it when it’s ready” — with that approach, sometimes it’s never ready enough. So, we use a hybrid model. We have a target schedule, but at each milestone on the schedule, we evaluate based on release criteria, and adjust either the schedule or the feature set to match.

I’m as impatient as anyone to see Fedora 23 in your hands, but I am also very pleased with the Fedora Quality Assurance team’s commitment to giving you something we all can be completely proud of. The process we use helps ensure that — so, November release it is!

P..S. I’ll be back next week with an actual five things. See you then!