Fedora’s Six-Month Cycle

Fedora’s Six-Month Cycle

Fedora balances cutting-edge upstream innovation with production stability by maintaining a disciplined six-month time-based release schedule (releasing every April and October).

+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|                   Fedora Six-Month Rhythm                 |
|                                                           |
| Month 1-3: Rawhide (Rolling development trunk)            |
|            - Feature development, mass rebuilds, compiler |
|              upgrades (e.g. GCC 14, Python 3.13)          |
|                                                           |
| Month 4:   Branching & Bodhi Updates                      |
|            - Branch f41 from Rawhide                      |
|            - Bodhi update feedback system activated       |
|                                                           |
| Month 5:   Beta Freeze & openQA Automation                |
|            - Release Beta ISOs for public testing         |
|            - Automated openQA test matrix execution       |
|                                                           |
| Month 6:   Final GA (General Availability) Release        |
|            - Supported for ~13 months (N to N+2)          |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

Rawhide: The Unrestricted Proving Ground

Rawhide is Fedora’s rolling development branch: - Package maintainers continuously upload the latest upstream versions. - If an update breaks Rawhide, it affects only developers and testers who opt in. - Approximately 7 weeks before GA, Rawhide is branched into the versioned release candidate (e.g., f41), and development on the next version begins immediately in Rawhide.

Bodhi: Community Feedback and Karma Gatekeeping

Fedora does not push package updates directly to users. All updates pass through Bodhi: - An update enters updates-testing. - Users and automated CI systems run tests and cast positive (+1) or negative (-1) karma. - Once an update achieves a threshold of positive karma (typically +3) or remains in testing without negative feedback for 14 days, Bodhi automatically signs the RPM with the official release key and publishes it to global mirrors.