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.'"

Comments

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.

Re:That's a relief

[Chrisq]

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.

I agree. Rolling releases works for beta but the idea that substantial changes could be rolled out in a daily update (as opposed to security updates) would kill any corporate use. They don't want changes that could involve the users seeing something different appearing without testing, training, etc. Many people like the LTS releases for this reason.

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:That's a relief

[MonsterTrimble]

Just for me, the biggie was the new Xorg 1.9 which broke almost every nvidia-produced driver out there. Mine (nvidia 96) was the last to get fixed. I had to put off upgrading for about a month until it was fixed.

I realize bitching about waiting a month extra for a new release makes me sound like a douchebag, but when it's something as high profile as display drivers I must take offense.

Re:That's a relief

[asvravi]

How about the broken lirc/IR ecosystem? Stock hauppauge IR controls stopped working because the 10.10 userland did not jive well with a premature backport to the kernel version used.

Re:That's a relief

[Fri13]

+1

+ It is very easy to roll back to state before upgrade if the upgrade did not work. And especially if user use btrfs the snapshotting comes very very handy. Just take a snapshopt, upgrade and if there comes problems, rever to snapshot.

I have found that rolling release distributions (like Arch Linux) being more stable and more pleasant to use than 6 months release scheduled distributions and definitely nicer than Debian's Stable and Canonicals LTS based to Debian testing branch. On servers the situation is different but on desktops the rolling release is nicer.

And this makes the development and testing much nicer when developers gets bug reports from the newest code what they itself can use, without solving so much possible problems caused by depencies to code what is older.

Well it must say that Canonical had it glory few years ago and now it is going down. Other distributors are already packaging their distributions in such manner they meed more casual and basic users needs than Canonical's Ubuntu does. But it does not make Ubuntu bad distribution, just not best one.

(this all after maintaining 15 computers with rolling release and all with custom upgrade schedules on different houses)

Re:That's a relief

[Knuckles]

Sounds like something to complain to Nvidia for.

Re:That's a relief

[kthreadd]

Rolling releases probably work just fine when you're only running it on your personal laptop or desktop. It's a very different matter when you have a site installation on a large number of machines where installations and upgrades are a bit more complex than to insert the CD and click next a few times. It is in those environments you appreciate that you can come in one day and things still work consistently with what they did yesterday.

Re:That's a relief

[junglee_iitk]

I wanted to install Kubuntu using USB. Guess what, installer segfaults after creating new partition. I had to waste 2 days getting anything installed on my laptop.

And this problem was known at launchpad.

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.

If you catch yourself saying "FLOSS ecosystem"

[Rogerborg]

Please take it as a sign that you need to spend more time with your compiler and less with the Director of Buzzword Bingo.

Re:If you catch yourself saying "FLOSS ecosystem"

[Anrego]

The whole OSS -> FOSS -> FLOSS thing has always bugged me.

It's not enough to say it's open source.. we have to emphasize that it's FREE open source.. and now even that's not enough.. we have to describe the specific _kind_ of free that it is.

And yeah, using the word ecosystem in a non-biology context is _so_ management.

Re:If you catch yourself saying "FLOSS ecosystem"

[blai]

FLOSS ecosystem is nowhere near EcoFLOSS Cloud 2.0.

Rick Spencer says no rolling releases?

[Samantha Wright]

Man, there goes a good Astley moment.

Re:Faked Story?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Or the Engineering Director didn't get the memo...

Like Arch Linux

[Bryan Ischo]

My distribution of choice, Arch Linux, uses a rolling release schedule, which has its good and bad points. I suppose the worst part of it is that with Arch Linux, old versions of software are not retained in the repositories and the package management tools don't make it easy to go back to a prior version of the software in the event of a problem. As a result, upgrading is a bit of a 'cross your fingers' endeavor and more often than not, I've regretted a full system upgrade.

I think that rolling release can work well but only if the package management system is designed to, and the repositories are set up to, allow easy rolling forward and backward on software versions as necessary. It's my number one wish for Arch Linux, which otherwise is the best distribution I've used.

Re:Like Arch Linux

[Fri13]

How big is your Pacman cache? I have 12Gb and since installation (over 11 months) I have only used 5.5 GB from it. I could even roll back to the base level what I had after installation. It is not as "press this button", but easier than doing a fresh install with Ubuntu install image.

And do you know what you would gain with the snapshot features from the filesystems and joined it with LVM?

I upgrade system now and then (usually 2-3 weeks) if I can not find otherwise bugs. And so far I have not yet needed to do a roll back system upgrade. Once I have got bug what did not allow me to enter one application settings panel. But it was fixed in 2 hours and I got it updated.

It is very nice to go to pacman cache to check what was the earlier version of the software and downgrade it to that version. As Arch tools really gives the nice function for it.

You are only gaining problems if you do not have enough space for pacman cache or you clear it too often.

Re:Like Arch Linux

[Bryan Ischo]

I use SSDs exclusively (will never buy a spinner platter drive again) and I would prefer if the old packages were hosted on a server somewhere instead of having to be cached on my drive. Seems more efficient to me for 12 GB on a server to serve hundreds of thousands of users than for each of those users to have to spend 12 GB to cache their own packages.

That being said, I have never deleted anything from my pacman package cache so I could probably use the technique that you described. There are cases where even that is not sufficient (for example, if I want to install on a new computer and want to use an older package version because I know that I have a problem with a newer version) but those are less frequent problems. To be honest, I never even realized that using pacman to downgrade via the local package cache was an encouraged, or reliable, option, but if you're saying it is, then I believe you.

Already possible

[paugq]

Do you want rolling releases in Ubuntu? It's always been there, really

You only need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and every file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d and replace "maverick" with "natty". Now apt-get update && apt-get full-upgrade.

When Natty is out, repeat only this time replacing "natty" by the natty+1 name.

Same thing works for Debian: replace "stable" or "lenny" with "testing" (or "unstable", if you are brave).

IMHO, Ubuntu should provide a "next" name, like the "testing" and "unstable" release version names in Debian, for people who want rolling releases.

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.

Re:Already possible

[choongiri]

Debian unstable is not, usually, the latest unstable GIT/SVN from upstream.

If I understand correctly, debian unstable is usually the most recently *released* version from upstream. So, if you want the latest *stable* version from upstream, you need debian / ubuntu *unstable*. I use this in practice on a debian (stable) web server, with a few select web apps such as wordpress pegged to unstable. It's the only way to ensure wordpress / drupal etc are up to date without installing by hand. (In theory, debian pack-ports security fixes to the stable version, but in practice, users typically demand the latest and greatest as soon as it's out, so we go with that.)

Re:Faked Story?

[shish]

So is this just another completley fabricated story to get page hits?

From what I can see, Mark is basically saying "backports might be something worth looking into"; then the media, being the media, blow it out of all proportion into "Mark Shuttleworth declares that every Ubuntu package will be bleeding edge tomorrow".

I wonder what it's like for the poor guy, any time he mentions anything, in any context, people take it to the extreme then claim that that is what Ubuntu will do next...

Half-rolling releases anyone??

[RogerC]

In my personal opinion, a half-rolling release model would be a great idea. I want my base system(xorg/kernel/gnome or kde) to be as stable as possible. But why would anyone need to wait 6 month or use some PPA to get the latest version of Firefox/Chrome/GIMP/Whatever? I was taking a look at Chakra (a KDE-oriented distro with Archlinux roots) a few days ago and found their half rolling-release model idea to be extremely good. I hope to see something similar in other distros in the future.