Some news of what’s boiling in the Cauldron

For those of you who are most familiar with Mageia and its development, you are starting to know the drill: Cauldron is the place where we break stuff by upgrading everything that we tried to keep stable during the previous release cycle, and then we work on making it stable again. We are now in this stabilization phase and we were aiming internally for a first development snapshot of Mageia 6 as a set of ISO images, but there are still a number of factors that make it difficult right now.

The current state of Cauldron is still relatively unstable, with major updates to the key base system components and to the major desktops. This has led to both the generated classical and live ISOs not being of a quality that we are willing to release.

Therefore, we plan to release the first ISOs within the first weeks of 2016, and then continue with the regular schedule from there. The first testing done on an internal set of ISOs was not in vain though, as it helped us to better assess the current state of Cauldron and how it behaves with the installer, and our packagers are already hard at work fixing the identified issues.

With the development of Mageia 6, we are looking at restructuring what images we release, as we noticed that the purpose of the English-only 32-bit LiveCDs and the limited dual-arch DVD was often misunderstood (and therefore badly impacted on Mageia’s image for users of those ISOs). We want to create a set of media that fit better with the use cases to make Mageia even more accessible.  Furthermore, we are renaming the pre-release ISOs to development and stabilization snapshots, as we feel it gives a better indication of what can be expected from them.

If you would like to get involved now, information on testing and running Cauldron can be found here.

We will soon publish an indicative development roadmap so that you know more precisely when to expect the future releases.