No Core, No Extra

If you are Fedora Core's fans, get ready for surprises in FC7, since there won't be any Core and Extra version of Fedora, just Fedora. That's the surprise from Bill Nottingham in his email to Fedora Development Mailing list. Some snippet of his email about the schedule of this release:

The current schedule is:

23 January 2007  | F7 Test1 development freeze
  
30 January 2007  | F7 Test1 Release
   

20 February 2007 | F7 FEATURE Freeze
   | F7 string freeze
   | F7 Test2 development freeze
    
27 February 2007 | F7 Test2 release

19 March 2007  | F7 translation freeze
   | F7 Test3 development freeze

26 March 2007  | F7 Test3 release

... Continual freeze. Only critical bugs fixed ...
           
5 April 2007  | Final devel freeze.

26 April 2007  | F7 General Availability

And, what would a release be without features. We've identified
28 features that we'd like to include in the release, available
at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Features:

- Modify the build system to support this new paradigm
- Merge Core and Extras in source control
- Use the new pungi tool to spin all releases
- A Fedora Desktop spin
- A Fedora Server spin
- A Fedora KDE spin
- Make LiveCDs as a part of the distribution release process
- Ability to customize non-packaging distrubution parameters
- Switch to libata drivers for PATA support
- Speedup of bootup and shutdown
- Make wireless rock-solid
- Add wireless firmware for all the chipsets we can
- CodecBuddy
- Fixing the proliferation of dictionary packages
- Support encrypted filesystems
- Fast user switching in the desktop
- Fix the firewire stack
- Switch to a tickless kernel by default
- Fix unnecessary wakeups across the distribution
- Add KVM virtualization support to our tools
- Investigate (but probably don't switch to) new init technologies
- Add the nouveau drivers for nVidia cards
- Speed up Yum and RPM
- Add support for RandR 1.2
- Switch to syslog-ng
- Make the update system useable by all

FC7 release does bring major changes, but it still needs more help from YOU. Give your best to help Fedora 7 release if you are trully Fedora's Fans.