Time time time, see what’s become of me?

As you may or may not know, we are scheduled to release the first beta for Mageia 5 on September 30th. Well… it looks like we’re not going to make it.

Here at Mageia HQ, we try to provide a balance between tried-and-tested software and cutting edge developments. That means that we try to ship Mageia releases with the newest software that we are comfortable using. We take into account all sorts of things, from stability to security and passing through usability on the way.

The practical upshot is that we are planning to release Mageia 5 with the new 4.12 version of RPM. RPM is Mageia’s package manager, that we share with other major distros such as Fedora and openSUSE. This new version brings in a lot of interesting features, so we decided to include it in Cauldron as soon as it was released, so that we can fine tune our usage of it before Mageia 5’s release. The new version was included just before the mass rebuild, an important phase of the release cycle where we rebuild all packages of Mageia 5 to make sure they compile properly against the new development stack.

Technobabble aside, the RPM version update is a good thing. It makes it easier for the packagers to find common errors and fix them, thus allowing for more reliability of our packages. That means that more time can be devoted to adding more packages for you, the user.

The problem is, well… the new RPM version broke some stuff. Not much, just a few packages needed to be rebuilt. Something like 7000 packages (now down to about 2000).
But have no fear! Our development and packagers teams are on it! They just need a little more time. So we are postponing the Mageia 5 Beta 1 release by two weeks. That means October 14th.

Let’s recap: we try to make the best Linux distribution that we can, and sometimes things don’t go according to plan. But we are flexible enough to handle it! So if you were counting down the days to Mageia 5 Beta 1, just move your clock back by 14 days.

And, as always, we welcome volunteers. So if you want to help, have a look here and start contributing today!