Monthly Ubuntu Releases Proposed 284
An anonymous reader writes "Scott James Remnant, the former Ubuntu Developer Manager at Canonical and current Ubuntu Technical Board leader, has proposed a new monthly release process for Ubuntu Linux. He acknowledges that with the six month releases there are features that end up landing way too soon, leaving them in a sour state for users. With his monthly proposal, Remnant hopes to relieve this by handling alpha, beta, and normal releases concurrently. It's unknown whether Canonical will accept the policy at this time."
AWESOME! (Score:3, Insightful)
And each month, please change to a new window manager! And add some new wonderful default settings that are SO MUCH BETTER than whatever some idiot user like me might have customized to what he mistakenly thought fit his needs best! Particularly when it comes to the default internet applications, please reinstall the Evolution mailclient because the last three times I removed it I was obviously being STUPID.
Oh, and please make sure to break the WiFi and graphics drivers each time, because, you know, dist upgrades are BORING if everything just works out of the box. I really look forward to spending an entire weekend on fixing my broken system every month rather than twice a year!
Re:Asa got a new job? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, that was my first thought, too.
It seems to me that Canonical and Mozilla are off in their own little worlds. There's still hope for both of them, but they're so arrogant and far removed from their users that it seems like the slow slide into irrelevancy is almost assured. It's too bad, because both projects come up with decent enough ideas; the management and implementation leave me cold.
i know! (Score:4, Insightful)
i know what! let's go back to releasing "when it's ready"! that would be great! oh wait... that's what debian do.
And thus dies support, and corporate usage (Score:5, Insightful)
Because who is going to work on last month's version? "Oh, just upgrade you'll get all the new fixes." And all the new bugs.
Bleeding edge is fine for hobbyists, but grown ups? We need a version that's going to start solid and get steadily better.
Re:reinstall montly (Score:5, Insightful)
It's better to be warned by the name up front than learning it the hard way as with Ubuntu.
Re:Oh, it's clear something has to change! (Score:4, Insightful)
"What I fear, is that the proposed shorter release cycles are going to make Ubuntu break too often. That will turn off users, and they cannot afford to lose even more users after the 11.04 release."
That's not unreasonable or irrational.
If you folks will forgive a geezer, I was doing software release management, testing and version control long before most of you were born. I've watched with interest and occasional amusement while you kids have managed to relearn much of what we learned rather painfully in the 1960s. And I'll give you credit. PC software works better than I would have thought possible given the way you approach it. And by "you" I don't mean just Ubuntu, or just open source, Microsoft has quality problems also.
Nonetheless, I gave up on Ubuntu and its spawn years ago -- mostly because of quality issues. Apt-get is wonderful ... if the stuff that is apt-gotten works. Too often it didn't. It appears to me that the problem is that software gets captured, locked down, and released without adequate testing.
Anyway, three thoughts:
1. Rolling releases probably are not a good idea except for really critical fixes. My experience (which I agree may not apply to your world) is that you really, really need to consolidate a release, then test it thoroughly before inflicting it on users.
2. It is perfectly possible to do releases in parallel with several in different states of production. Developers don't like it. So what? What matters is user experience, not developer inconvenience. But there is a limit to how many parallel products you can keep straight. And it is not a large number.
3. In the world I worked in, there was a minimum time required to consolidate and test a release. For us, it was 8 weeks. We tried 6 weeks (once) and couldn't do it. Your world is quite different, but I'll bet you have a minimum time also, and it may well be longer than one month.
Re:Simple solution: Do not bundle the apps and OS (Score:4, Insightful)
I see two problems with that, both at the core of Linux.
- Closed source driver support.
- The Unix/X11 (and thus Linux) kernel model doesn't allow for a high enough level hardware abstraction. So the desktop environments and applications have to do a lot that should be in the core OS.
Than how does OSX do it? And Solaris? And HP-UX, AIX, and the others I'm too lazy to mention?
This is an open source problem, not a unix problem. Commercial UNIXes which also use X.org seem to have no problem what so ever.
It all comes down to who WANTS to do it. OSS will remain second class because no one wants to do the hard work, like testing and making things stable. Everyone wants to just do the new shiney feature.