HI,

Some time ago when fedora 9 was about to be released speculations ran riot as to when RHEL 6 willbe launched and what version of fedora will it be based on. Well now Fedora had released 9 and 10 and in two months or so F11 will get released. But still no news from Red Hat about RHEL 6. Why Red Hat keeps RHEL 6 under the hat ??? Any body who has information related to this thread Please feel free to post their views....

Red Hat just released 4.8 Beta. So, I'm guessing that a beta for RHEL 6 is not that far behind. I'm just guessing though. RHEL is not known for rapid release cycles. Their standard is every 18 to 24 months.

Even then RHEL 6 beta quite a bit late.

Well, RHEL 5 was release exactly two years ago (the 14th of March). According to an article that I found online, RHEL 6 won't be release until the first quarter of 2010. No word on when a beta will be release. I'm looking forward to version 6, but I think this version is going to bring a lot of changes and may be the reason why for the longer than usual release.

RHEL 6 was to be based on F9(just as RHEL5 on FC6 and RHEL4 on FC3), the problem was that F9 was so buggy that RH knew their corporate customers would never accept it(their main income source). So they moved on to F10, and RH hired a bunch of programmers to work on Fedora(the most RH paid programmers that have ever worked on Fedora). Since the community took over Fedora (roughly half way through FC6 prep) there has been a far great emphasis on new features rather than fixing old (but still current) bugs. When F7 was released there were a ton of bugs introduced. Which would be expected since F7 was a MAJOR under the hood overhaul (a good thing) but rather than concentrating on clearing up all those bugs for F8, they added more new features(not good). We still have a lot of active bugs that go back to the F7 release (exist in F10), this is a far greater proportion of bugs than has ever survived multiple releases before. It LOOKs like RHEL6 will be based on F11. If you compare the features of FC6(RHEL5) to the features in F11, you will see that there will be a HUGE jump in the way things are done. If nothing else the replacement of hdX drive designations with sdX drive designations (for sata and pata) will be a big change.

Well this post (lazlow's) helps clearing up a lot of confusion especially the reason for delay releasing beta. Also as per earlier post by stormtracknole we have to wait till the middle of 2010 for RHEL 6. If fewer bugs and lot of new features are inorder then this wait will be worth it I am sure.

It looks to me like RHEL 6 may be delayed.

From LWN:

"This means that RHEL 6 will be a long time coming"

http://lwn.net/Articles/286885/

If you noted the date of the link you posted you will see it is from June 2008(not 2009). So far F11 is looking pretty clean and the extra help RH hired on has been doing a pretty good job on chewing through the legacy bug backlog (for instance the k3b burn verification problem, which showed up in all post .23 kernels,F8?). Unless something ugly pops up I would not be surprised to see a late 2009(Oct?) or and early 2010 release.

Well - they're up to something - I've been getting an increasing number of notifications of updates to various RHEL bugs I've posted (some are yearS old) in recent weeks.

As far as I know, RHEL 6 exists in alpha stage. Release should be presented at the end of the year 2010. Red Hat has employed a large number of developers to triage and fix existing Fedora bugs that started pile up after Fedora 7+ development was turned over to community to govern.

I was expecting Beta in Jun-2010 (RH Summit) followed by GA release 3 or 4 months later.

A general FYI: 5.5 came out recently http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-sour...-multicore-640

There was no way to release it if you look at the state of Fedora based bugs.

Also, GNOME just released the last 2.x version, 2.30, and they plan to release 3.0 (evolution of 2.30 with a lot of cleaning of obsolete code and libraries, replacement for GNOME Panel and Gconf, and minor changes) on last week of September. So I expect that GNOME 3.0 will be the GUI for RHEL 6, and in that perspective delay is even welcomed, at least from me.

According to a Redhat VP cited in serverwatch.com there will be a beta this month:

Hope not. And also don't think so. RHEL is conservative. And must be at least a bit conservative in this segment. So 2.30 seems to be a best solution.