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jeremy 02-27-2017 08:44 AM

The state of Mageia 6 and details about the past issues that caused delays
 
Quote:

There is no mystery about it, we are totally off schedule. The last preview we published for Mageia 6 was Stabilization Snapshot 1 in June 2016, and Stabilization Snapshot 2 still hasn’t been published, although we have been saying “soon” for weeks, or even months! So what’s going on? Is Mageia dead? Fortunately not. But it’s good that you worry about it because it shows you like your Linux distribution. We need to communicate about the state of things so that you can stop worrying, so here we are.

For months we’ve been saying “the next ISO images will be published within a few weeks”… And that’s still how we see it… And actually lots of ISO images have been made, each one improving over the previous one, and Mageia 6 Stabilization Snapshot 2 will be very different from Stabilization Snapshot 1, because during all this time development has been going on, bugs have been fixed, packages have been updated, artwork has been integrated, etc. The good news is: Mageia 6 is really going to be good. And actually it already is, for all those who already run the packages from cauldron, the development branch. So why not release it now? Well, let’s try to give you some insight.
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Quote:

2017

In early 2017, the state of the distribution looked solid and QA was almost ready to let the Stabilization Snapshot 2 ISOs be released, thus putting an end to a looooooooong wait. Well, that was before they found a partitioning bug in the installer that was able to break your partition table. A broken partition table sadly means a more or less broken computer, unless you’re technically savvy enough to rebuild it correctly. Most of the time the easiest solution would be to wipe the entire disk (and lose data) and start again. The potential frequency of the bug was too high for us to allow the snapshot to be released to the wider public, even with Erratas and prominent warnings. You could be forgiven for thinking that fixing just one bug would be quick but since we’re all contributing over our free time, it actually takes time to 1) identify the issues 2) write patches 3) have the patches reviewed by another developer 4) build ISO images with the patches integrated 5) test them in various situations and on various hardware 6) find a regression related to the patch 7) write a new patch, etc.

It is not an agreeable situation and one of our priorities for Mageia 7 will be to work on critical paths so that we can solve problems faster without delaying the whole release process. Some of our contributors already kind of specialized in being the oil on the wheels for the rest of the teams, but we can do better (maybe with you?).
Disclaimer

The above history is incomplete, probably subjective (you can probably tell that it’s been written by someone who loves and believes in Mageia’s community), and can’t summarize everything that has been done by all the contributors in all the different teams. The author of this blog post thanks them all and is confident that most of you as readers are probably grateful to them too in spite of our lateness.
The current situation

The current situation is that we have a relatively good patchset to fix a number of installer issues, which have been committed to a testing branch and were successfully tested in pre-testing Live ISOs. Now we are deploying them on the full set of Live ISOs and classical installer ISOs for the QA team to test, which should hopefully be the final build for the Stabilization Snapshot 2.

As soon as we reach a satisfying solution for the partitioning bug, you will be able to resume testing the future Mageia 6. Then we will work as fast as we can to fix the last release-blocker bugs and release Mageia 6 to everybody.
Official Blog Post...

Are any LQ members waiting on Mageia 6?

--jeremy


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