As we draw close to the release of Podman 6, our developers have been working hard to get the features we committed to last year as part of our High Level Design ready and merged upstream. Unfortunately, it is taking longer than expected. In particular, several important features (including a rework of our configuration file handling that will have major benefits for Podman Desktop) are still being completed. 

Many of these are breaking changes and cannot be delayed to Podman 6.1. We were faced with the choice of delaying them for two years until Podman 7 or delaying the release of Podman 6. Given how close the remaining changes are to being finished, we have chosen the second option. 

Podman 6, originally scheduled to release the week of May 11 to 15, will be delayed to the week of May 25th to the 29th at the earliest. This will give us time to finish the remaining work and put out several release candidates for testing. Until then, we will keep working to bring you a stable, feature complete Podman 6.