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."

Comments

Re:Translation?

[NMerriam]

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.