14 DAY TRIAL // The Fedora 21 developers have announced that the upcoming Alpha release will be delayed by another week, which means that the date has slipped into September.
All Fedora distributions have a very turbulent development schedule and it's not all that unusual for the distribution to get quite a few delays that push the release date by weeks at a time. This time it's just a week, but at least the reason doesn't have anything to do with Fedora itself.
A few weeks ago, Linus Torvalds trashed the GCC 4.9.0 compiler and compared it with a turd, which is just a mellow replacement word for what he actually used. The problems with the compiler almost caused the delay of a Linux kernel release, so Linus was not happy, to say the least.
“Adding Jakub to the cc, because gcc-4.9.0 seems to be terminally broken. Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant*. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking ‘sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby’ level retardation levels here.”
“This is your compiler creating completely broken code. We may need to add a warning to make sure nobody compiles with gcc-4.9.0, and the Debian people should probably downgrade their shiny new compiler,” said Linus Torvalds a few weeks ago.
Now the problem has actually affected the Fedora development and the developers need to recompile their packages with another version of GCC, because it's likely that the compiler spit broken code.
The new schedule for Fedora 21 now puts the Alpha release on September 2, the Beta release on October 7, and the final version on November 11. You have to keep in mind that this is not the first delay in the current development cycle and that other delays might occur.
Fedora 21 is expected to be one of the most interesting releases in a long while. The developers have made some very important changes and improvements to the distribution, like the adoption of the latest GNOME release (possibly 3.14), the adoption of Wayland as the default display server, the upgrade to Java 8, the upgrade to Mono 3.4, and that's just naming a few of the upcoming features.
One of these features also included an upgrade to GCC 4.9.x, but that might not be taken into consideration, in the light of recent events.