Fedora 17 Alpha released!

As a note - I know I've been blogging less recently. I'm finding that being the QA team lead kind of changes my approach to things and I just wind up blogging about stuff less. I keep meaning to make an effort to do it more but it never quite comes together. So sorry about that! I'll keep trying. In more exciting news - yep, we released Fedora 17 Alpha today. F17 is going to be a pretty cool release with a bunch of interesting new features, and since there aren't any gigantic changes to anaconda or grub this time, I'm hoping it will actually be fairly solid. As it happens, though, the Alpha is not terribly solid. It's natural that there's quite a wide 'natural' range of variety in the quality of Alpha and Beta releases, because our minimum standards for the quality of Beta and especially Alpha releases are quite low; often it's the case that we happen to exceed them, but there's no guarantee that will be the case for any particular release. It just so happens that the F17 Alpha doesn't exceed the Alpha quality requirements by much, and it's palpably an Alpha - it has some rather large and obvious bugs you'd never expect to see in a final release. This isn't any kind of huge emergency, though, and it doesn't imply anything about the quality of the final release. So I'd recommend that if you're going to try out the Alpha, do listen to the usual boilerplate and think really hard before you do so on your production machine...and whether you do that or install it on a test system / partition, read the common bugs page, because it provides a lot of useful information on the most severe and obvious bugs in the Alpha, including workarounds or fixes in a lot of cases. You're really going to want to check it out before you go ahead and install the Alpha. Once you've read that - go ahead and download away! And remember, if you hit a bug - first check that it hasn't been reported already, of course, but then please do go ahead and file a report. The main purpose of pre-releases is to help us catch bugs and fix them before the final release happens, so please do your bit to help us do that. Thanks, everyone! (random note: Ryan Seacrest, put your damn tie on.)