What is the path for promoting latest to stable to gts?

Hello,

I had been running on latest, and then switched to stable more recently as soon as the kernel/graphics stack became stable for my (hybrid nvidia) laptop. With the Fedora 41 release coming up, I am assuming that latest will soon switch to that, with stable following a week later and gts migrating to a Fedora 40 build.

But what is the process of promoting a new version from latest to stable and (more importantly) to gts? Will I reboot on a Wednesday (currently I am on stable) and find myself running Fedora 41?

And if I run into any issues, would I be able to switch to gts and will that already point to Fedora 40?

In fact, if I want to stay on 40, for some time, when do I switch to gts?

It seems to me that in this case, it makes more sense to:

  • Announce a gts switch to 40 (current stable), a week before anything flips to 41, giving people time to switch to gts if they want to avoid 41
  • Point latest to 41 a week later so that early adopters can start switching
  • Let stable follow latest to 41 another week later for anyone who simply wants to avoid the first wave of upgrades

Yes, latest will get updated very soon like a day after Fedora 41 is released.

Both of this will not switch over night it will take some time, because stable & gts are not based on the same kernel. It will take like a month, if I remember correctly. EDIT: See j0ge’s answer bellow.

Following documentation, the easiest way is to use: ujust rebase-helper then select “rebase” and “gts” and after process is finished, this can take some time, because new image has to be downloaded, like mine case it took like 10 min, you have to reboot and you are in new gts image.

You can rebase as many times as you like. This rebase only affects system level applications. Everything else like user level flatpak application, distrobox containers etc are fully independent.

This process of migrating from one version to another has never happened for Blufin before, but I am sure it will be published on forum.

You can always rebase when ever you want and how many times you want. If you want to stay on Fedora 40, then the best thing is to rebase now on stable and later.

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Ok let’s go over it!:

On Fedora release day:
bluefin:gts will move from F39 to F40.
bluefin:latest will move from F40 to F41.

Both of these things happen at the same time and is usually almost always day of, but the images are usually prepped well ahead of time, so people can manually choose bluefin:41 if they want.

(One of the reasons we publish numbers is so that you can also manually move between major versions if you want and ignore the rolling tags.)

Stable releases differently, this will depend on when Fedora CoreOS rebases to F41.

As an example Fedora 40 released on April 23rd, and CoreOS rebased to F40 on May 6th. That’s the delay we would have had, but bluefin:stable didn’t exist back then, so now that it exists this is the cadence we’re expecting.

Sticking on bluefin:stable sounds like it’s what you want, that’s how I roll.

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Currently blufin:latest is on Fedora 40.
Currently bluefin:stable is on Fedora 40.
Currently bluefin:gts is on Fedora 39.

I see there is also tag bluefin:40. Which one is this “40” currently referring to: “latest” or “stable” or something else?

It’s the other way around, both latest and stable point to 40. Think of it like symlinks. Then when the new releases come out we’re updating the links to point to the right version.

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Thanks for clarifying, the timeline for stable seems reasonable.

Also, this seems to give your users plenty of time to switch to bluefin:gts or bluefin:40 after the announcement is made, but before stable is switched (if for whatever reason they want to stick to 40).