Alpha is a go, and so is a short break for me

I just wanted to write a quick blog post to publicly thank our Fedora QA team for their awesome work on getting our Fedora 16 Alpha release candidate image tested and validated before yesterday’s Go/No-Go meeting. To everyone who contributed (QA team members, bug reporters, and developers who all went above and beyond the call of duty to get the release candidate in shape), I tip my hat to you.

The result of the Go/No-Go meeting is that the latest Fedora 16 Alpha release candidate was declared “GOLD”. That means we’ll be shipping the Fedora 16 Alpha on Tuesday, August 23rd.

I’m going to take this opportunity to take a short break for a couple of days. I’ll be taking off work tomorrow (Friday) and at least part of the day on Monday to make a long weekend to relax and spend time with some friends. I’ll leave my contact information with the members of the Fedora Board in case something urgent comes up while I’m away.

One day remaining for Fedora 16 name suggestions!

One of the most light-hearted parts of the Fedora release process (and the one that often gets complaints) is picking the release name for the next version of Fedora.  For example, Fedora 14 had a release name of “Laughlin” and Fedora 15 has a release name of “Lovelock”.  I need your help coming up with plenty of suggestions so that we have an adequate pool to vote from after the names have been vetted.

You have until the end of the day tomorrow (March 10th) to submit your most creative entries for the release name.  Please follow the instructions at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Name_suggestions_for_Fedora_16 to ensure that you follow the naming guidelines.  The name cannot be picked at random, but must follow a simple set of rules.

For example, Laughlin is the name of a city in Nevada, USA, and so is Lovelock.  Lovelock is also a [new link here], and <your name suggestion here> is also a [new link here].  The new link should be original, and not something already used (cities in Nevada, physicists, kings, names of ships, etc.).  You can find the entire set of rules on the wiki page linked above, and the history of Fedora release names at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Names.

Please take a moment and post your most creative suggestion on the wiki at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Name_suggestions_for_Fedora_16.  We’ll open up voting on the release names from March 23th through March 29th.

[update]

I updated the links to actually work — sorry about the links not working last time.