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Mark Shuttleworth Proposes Delaying next Ubuntu
Beuno writes "Mark Shuttleworth has proposed on the ubuntu-art mailing list to postpone the 'Dapper Drake' release by 6 weeks. He lays out the reasons pretty clearly: the delay should make the release a more user-friendly distro. He has also called up a community meeting in April 14th on IRC for community input. Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?" Commentary on this also available from the Tectonic site.
Ubuntu's release philosophy is to take a snapshot of Debian every 6 months, and then stabilize it for two months. During this stabilization period, they import only minor fixes, leaving major ones behind. Often they will backport smaller fixes into their packages - but with limited resources they can't do this for everything.
The fatal flaw with this is that a lot of buggy software still gets in, with new releases with bugfixes coming out after the "Upstream Version Freeze" -- rejected because they have new "features" in addition to the bugfixes. And with a lot of important open source software being still immature, with versions less than 1.0, these few weeks of "stability" are a very long time.
Other major distributions, SuSE and Fedora, constantly release updated software, with new bugfixes and features. They don't just do constant snapshopts, and in my opinion this creates a better system. Ubuntu is even more conservative in their releases than Microsoft or Apple.