The Morning After

[Patrick Barnes]

To start off, congratulations are in order for everyone who was involved in 
bringing Fedora Core 5 to fruition.  Fedora Core 5 is the most outstanding 
Fedora Core release to date, and we've seen a lot of progress since Fedora 
Core 4.  Thank you and congratulations to everyone!

Overall, I think the Fedora Core 5 release was a great success.  We had a few 
minor glitches, as will always happen on release day, but things really came 
together to deliver this awesome release in an awesome way.

While the excitement is still strong, let's look back over the events leading 
up to and immediately following the release, and see what we can do to make 
things better both for the lifetime of this release and for future releases.

Over the weekend, we saw quite a few leaked ISOs flying around.  This is to be 
expected, but we need to try to minimize this to avoid potential problems.  
We also saw a large number of users take advantage of BitTorrent, which 
greatly reduced demand on the main servers, but, as always, people are always 
looking for more bandwidth.  We've got plans in the works that will help, but 
there's always room for more improvement.  It is great that there is so much 
interest, so how can we best support that interest without failing our 
release goals?

A lot of switches and buttons had to be operated manually for this release.  
We could almost certainly add automation and scheduling, and we could 
streamline processes to make life easier on ourselves.

We had to update a lot of information on both fedora.redhat.com and 
fedoraproject.org.  We have some unnecessary duplication, and there are 
places where we can get things working a little more smoothly.  Jesse, and 
anyone else working on these things, what did you notice?  How can we improve 
the process?

It took a fair chunk of the day to get the latest release notes up on the 
website and working properly.  Surely, we can automate some of this.  I know 
a lot of work is going into getting the build tools working better, but what 
else can we do to simplify this for a prompt release reaction?

There were a few other technical errors or delays, such as those that prompted 
symlinking torrent URLs and the update to the release announcement, the lack 
of the planned instructions for CD-burning in the distribution directories, 
and a few known flaws in the final release.  These kinds of things are bound 
to happen, especially when internal issues arise just before the release, but 
that's no reason to ignore them.  What did we miss, and how can we make sure 
we get it right next time?

Finally, there has been a lot of buzz leading up to and following the release.  
We saw a refreshing surge even before the release hit.  That's great, but the 
buzz could still be bigger.  We saw a few reviews of the test releases, and 
many sites have published new information in the last 24 hours, but how can 
we generate more of this?  Did anybody notice particular areas that were 
undersold?

Now is the time for radical thoughts and ideas that can shape what we do to 
support Fedora Core 5 and prepare for Fedora Core 6.  Let's hear them!

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

http://www.n-man.com/

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