Fedora 14 goes gold

So we just got done signing off on the gold images for Fedora 14. I'm amazingly proud of the whole little release management group - development (especially Anaconda team, who were awesome), release engineering, and QA teams: we had an unbelievably smooth ride through the Final validation testing stage. Unprecedented in the annals of Fedora history, we span one publicly-announced Test Compose (TC) build (there were five unannounced ones, but they were just to test small fixes which we needed an image compose to verify) and exactly one Release Candidate (RC) build, which was the build signed off as Gold today. We have never needed just one candidate build to get a release right before. Both the composes happened right on time (thank you release engineering and development groups!) and then the QA group swung into action for testing. You can see the results of the extensive RC1 validation testing in the installation test matrix and the desktop test matrix, confirming that the RC1 build passes all of our critical validation testing. We have test results not just from Red Hat employees and interns in the Fedora QA department, but from RH employees in other departments (shout out to jreznik for KDE/Plasma Desktop testing!) and, most importantly, from multiple community volunteers: huge thanks to Andre Robatino, James Cassell, Robert Spanton, David Ramsey, John Watzke, Timothy Davis, A.J. Werkman, Sandro Mathys, Garrett Holmstrom, G. Wolfe Woodbury, Juan Pablo Daza P., Masami Ichikawa, "kevmif", and "Adams" (Wiki username is all I have for those two :>) for contributing to the TC and/or RC testing matrices. Special thanks to Andre and Ichikawa-san for the huge amount of testing they both did across TC and RC composes. Also thanks to everyone who posted feedback on the composes to the test mailing list or the Fedora forums. For me personally, one of the coolest things about the Fedora 14 cycle was sitting back and watching the results roll in to the RC1 desktop testing matrix: I didn't run a single RC1 desktop test myself and that was really awesome, after having to do almost all the tests for the first few runs of that matrix myself. Of course, Murphy will do his best to make sure it turns out we've all somehow overlooked some major issue that the hyenas^H^H^H^H^H^H tenacious reporters of the Linux press will leap on gleefully, but I'm really happy with the way we've taken advantage of the awesome Fedora community to try as hard as possible to catch all the big ones. I'm sure F14 will be a release to be proud of. Finally, huge thanks to John Poelstra who worked really hard this cycle to try and drive the entire release process, across the entire Fedora community, to make everything happen on time. He's a big reason why everything ran so smoothly.