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Shuttleworth Calls For Coordinated Release Cycles
voodoosws points out on Mark Shuttleworth's blog Shuttleworth's call for synchronized publication of Linux distributions, excerpting: "There's one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu's short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I'll write more about this idea in due course, for now let's just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity."
While that sounds a bit snarky, there's a serious point.
Users often want to have access to the latest software. Many distributions provide updated packages over time, so that when a new official release comes out, many users already have a good portion of the changes. Gentoo takes this to the extreme, having eliminated the concept of release entirely (except for the installation system). So how does a synchronized release schedule help anyone when users will be upgrading various packages when they are updated?
I just don't see the value in synchronizing releases.
I think that's half the idea -- to provide an external motivator for packages to wrap things up and release something stable periodically.
The other half of the idea is that it provides a more uniform platform for software/hardware support -- the idea being that Adobe or NVidia could make a release that works with all the March 2019 distros, and support people could offer support for the March 2019 distros. It is, after all, one thing to be familiar with the package management of 5 different distros, and another thing entirely to be familiar with the specific point release quirks of the software packages on 5 different distros.
Of course reality would be nowhere near as elegant as this theory.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Dang it, logged in during preview and lost my post...
Anyway, the idea is to have MORE testers, since they would all be at one big bazaar instead of each at their own little one.
More patches would work across distros, and more time could be spent on other things.
The has its problems though. The agreement would force innovation to make people go to one distro over another, but that would only last a cycle or so as the other distros implement the idea (Since they all share in the end).
Maybe if Ubuntu decided to go desktop only, And Suse and Red Hat agreed to split up the server side, maybe, but that is unlikely. Debian will not not do it, they are the stable granddaddy, which can be a good thing.
I like having news on new distros throughout the year also, so it keeps people interested.
It's an interesting concept that might free up some coding time by solving a lot of problems faster and with less overlap, but I don't think it is likely to happen.
One of the strengths of Linux is its diversity (plus we geeks all like our pet projects). IT may help newcomers though, who are scared enough by the number of Vista versions, and are terrified of picking a distro, not to mention learning a new OS.
I read it on the Ubuntu site when 8.04 first came out that Firefox would be upgraded to 3.0 when it was released. I think their plan is to support Firefox 3 through the 8.04 lifecycle, as Mozilla will be supporting it for at least 18 months as well. But, I can't find anything to this effect now, so perhaps they changed their plans.