Yesterday we released openFATE, a new webclient that enables the community to track the development process of upcoming openSUSE releases (official announcement). All you need to participate is an openSUSE account (same as Bugzilla, wiki, ...) to login to the site. You can browse the feature requests to get a picture what will be implemented in the next release, add comments to existing features and contribute to them.

Bugzilla is used to track and fix bugs in released products, whereas FATE tracks the implementation of new features and thus is oriented towards the future, which is certainly more fun from a developers perspective. :-)

For example, this query gives the list of features for openSUSE 11.2, wich are currently mostly in evaluation state.

Adding of new feature requests is currently limited to openSUSE members so we don't get swamped with requests that we cannot afford to get done. However, we plan to improve the process and open the feature creation for all users.

Got interested? We will show the system on FOSDEM, the free open source conference on 7th and 8th february in Brussels.