Ubuntu's Engineering Director Debunks Rolling Release Rumours

Responding to yesterday's post indicating that Ubuntu might move to a rolling release schedule, reader ddfall writes "This is wrong! Engineering Director of Ubuntu Rick Spencer says 'Ubuntu is not changing to a rolling release.' He goes on to say, 'We are confident that our customers, partners, and the FLOSS ecosystem are well served by our current release cadence. What the article was probably referring to was the possibility of making it easier for developers to use cutting edge versions of certain software packages on Ubuntu. This is a wide-ranging project that we will continue to pursue through our normal planning processes.'"

That's a relief

[onionman]

I personally like the idea of scheduled releases which have been somewhat reasonably tested. Giving developers a mechanism to deal with the cutting edge versions of each package is nice, but I'd rather not have those in the releases on my servers.

Mark Shuttleworth about Cadence

[geschild]

Last year in his speech at the Open World Forum in Paris, Mark was trying to convince people that more open source projects should get in lockstep with the Ubuntu six-month release cycle. I would be surprised if he had changed his mind so soon.

Re:Mark Shuttleworth about Cadence

[Anonymous Coward]

He wasn't saying the world should revolve around Ubuntu, but rather that everyone should work together. A little different, don't you think? If everyone agreed to work in cadence to a different cycle than ubuntu's, I think he would have still called it a success.

Re:That's a relief

[Chrisq]

Many people like the LTS releases for this reason.

Unlike the half-baked release of 10.10, where it was obvious that there was still a lot of critical stuff unfinished?

I don't know what "critical stuff" you mean. I downloaded it on release day and it worked. There were a lot of big updates in the following week, so maybe it was stuff that broke other configurations.

Re:If you catch yourself saying "FLOSS ecosystem"

[blai]

FLOSS ecosystem is nowhere near EcoFLOSS Cloud 2.0.

Re:Already possible

[paugq]

Clearly you have not tried what I said and you have no idea how Debian and Ubuntu repositories work.

It's more or less like this:

• Maverick is released
• The day after maverick was released, the natty repository was created. It contained an exact copy of maverick
• New packages are imported from Debian and added to the Natty repository. These packages show up in the repository as they are added: 5 new packages today, 20 new versions tomorrow, a new kernel in 2 months, etc

• By replacing 'maverick' with 'natty' in your sources.list, you get updates daily, not just when natty is finally released (in fact the day natty is released you will not get any new update if you have been updating every day since the maverick release).

Re:Already possible

[Fri13]

Do you understand that that is not rolling release but that is developing and testing?

In Rolling Release you do not put alpha/beta/RC software there. you keep latest stable versions from the software there. You get upgrades all the time. Usually just fixes when the upstream adds them and now and then newest versions when the upstream release new version.

Then there is totally different [testing] and [unstable] in rolling release schedules as well. From there you get the GIT/SVN versions from the upstream. The software what you otherwise in next version of Ubuntu would need to compile by hands.

Closer the next Ubuntu release is, slower the update comes. Only few packages gets anymore updated and they start to get behind a lot from the upstream and that can be for months.

In rolling release, the distribution lives right behind the upstream, still not by default giving alpha/beta/rc versions from the software but always the latest stable. Something what Ubuntu development release does not include.