OpenSUSE Team Reworking Dev Model, Delays 12.2 Release 38
LinuxScribe writes "The upcoming 12.2 RC1 release of openSUSE has been delayed, and the final 12.2 release 'won't see the light of day on July 11th,' as developers within the openSUSE community struggles to fix their release efforts, Community Manager Jos Poortvliet said today." Says the article: "Among [openSUSE Release Manager Stephan] Kulow's suggestions? Dumping the current release cycle schedule for openSUSE and moving to an annual or even unscheduled release system."
It's harder than it looks (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish the OpenSUSE project luck getting this figured out.
Maintaining packages in this manner is a lot of work. At the end of the day, most contributors only work on a handful of packages and don't consider the possible breakage of other packages. One or two people end up doing all the cleanup work. This happens in the BSD community all the time. For instance, if you look at the recent issues in FreeBSD when PNG was updated or the new debate about X.org 7.7 coming into the tree. FreeBSD's approach to ports is great when you want up-to-date software, but the maturity found in NetBSD's pkg-src or even OpenBSD's model sounds a bit more like what OpenSUSE is looking for.
I'm not trying to pick on FreeBSD. I use a similar process for MidnightBSD due to limited developer resources. In my case, it usually means I personally have to update packages. That's why we have such outdated versions of Firefox (unbranded of course) and Chrome. Not only do all the other dependancies have to be the right magic versions, but someone has to take the effort to port a rather complex piece of software. Luckily, the Linux folks don't have nearly the trouble as they're a tier 1 platform for most software these days. Still, there are many different choices in linux for near everything and getting your combination to work can be tiresome. Next time you download packages from any open source OS, consider how much work went into that easy experience. Saying thank you can't hurt either. :)
I hasn't got worse (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a lot easier to use - 10 years ago if for example you double clicked on an AV link you'd just be met with a "Huh?" prompt from the window manager and would have to go find an app that could read it. Similarly most MS Office file formats were a game of chance with the free software around at the time.
Having said that , there does seem to be a tendancy for distro devs to pack in the the latest stuff into a release simply because its available , rather than going for stablity and interoperability with maybe slightly older versions of software.
Re:Improvements (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not disappointed in a slower release cycle. It should improve the quality of each release.
I think so too. I've been using openSUSE since it was SuSE Linux Professional and, before that, just S.u.S.E. Linux. They had an approximately annual release schedule for the newer, pre-Novell, versions and didn't try to stuff in every single newest thing going. I like to think this gave them the time to make sure that the vast majority of what they did ship worked well.
Unfortunately, a combination of changing to the "me-too" scheduling of releases (IIRC, the original discussion of the release schedule was calling for 6-month releases so they could be just like Fedora; after an attempt or two to maintain that, they switched to the schedule they're on now) and turning it into a beta-test for unfinished and premature software (systemd, pulseaudio, KDE 4.0, and the disaster that was online updates starting in the 10.x versions) have really degraded the distribution from what it once was.
From what I can see this moved the emphasis from shipping a distribution with what I'd call good "fit and finish", a good selection of software almost all of which worked correctly, no nasty surprises in the base functionality of the OS, etc., to trying to ship to a schedule, ready or not and ignoring anything that didn't get them there. I know the majority of bug reports I've made in newer versions got marked "wont fix"; not "can't duplicate" or "working as designed", but "won't fix", i.e. "yes, we know about it and know that it's broken but won't do anything about it". Not a good sign for a distribution that had been previously known for its functionality and stability.
I'm hoping that this serves as a wake-up call to the developers and that the suggestions coolo and others in the discussion are making will get them back toward shipping a distribution that's closer to what the old SuSE Linux was known for. What I'm seeing in the discussion is looking good so far.