Fedora 8 - RC3 vs. Final bits
Someone asked in my last post if RC3 was the final version.

The answer is: Nope - we had to do two respins after RC3.

Thursday night we found, filed, debugged, and fixed the fsck-at-boot / rhgb hang at first boot problems (see bugs #357401 and #362721 respectively), completed the fix for #357401 (dmraid+livecd) and then rebuilt all the install and Live images to create RC4 for Friday morning. Friday's rawhide report notes these changes.

During Friday we found and fixed a bug in selinux-policy-targeted where restorecon etc. would screw up at install time and leave you with SELinux non-functional. Once again Jesse rebuilt all install/Live images - creating RC5 - with this change included. This change is listed in Saturday's Rawhide Report.

Once the RC5 bits were built (mid-afternoon Friday) we desperately tried to smoketest them and get them rsync'd to the Raleigh office before 9pm so that we could hand them off to the internal IT guys. (After 9, it would be too late to get it done for Monday, and we'd have to delay the release.)

The bits landed at 8:45pm. All our testing showed that the bugs above were, indeed, fixed. Jesse made the call, got a response, and that was that.

There were heroic efforts from a lot of people in those last two days, and I raise my glass to one and all.