14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment is supposed to be released on March 26, 2014. However, it appears that the entire release cycle might be delayed by approximately a week, because of the Wayland 1.5 release.
However, the bad news (for GNOME developers) is that all the GNOME 3.11.x milestones will be delayed as well in order to avoid longer freeze periods. As you might know, GNOME 3.12 will be the first ever release of the controversial GNOME desktop environment to fully support the modern Wayland display server.
“Hey distributors, writing to inform you that the GNOME release team is pondering moving the date for 3.12.0 out by approximately a week, to align the schedule with the Wayland release plans (a 1.4.91 release including all the xdg-shell API we need is planned for April 1). The latter 3.11.x milestones would be shifted as well, to avoid lengthening the freeze period unnecessarily.”
“If this would throw your own schedule into major disarray, please speak up now. With my Fedora contributor hat on, I can state that this will not cause problems for Fedora, since the f21 schedule is going to be longer than usual, anyway,” Matthias Clasen said in the email.
The GNOME 3.12 release cycle will continue with the 3.11.5 milestone, which should be officially announced by the end of this week, a first Beta release in mid-February, a second Beta release at the beginning of March, a Release Candidate (RC) version in mid-March, and the final release of GNOME 3.12 at end of March, or, most probably, the beginning of April.
We will write a blog article when the GNOME 3.12 release schedule is changed, to let you know the exact dates.