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

[Knuckles]

Sounds like something to complain to Nvidia for.

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.

Rick Spencer says no rolling releases?

[Samantha Wright]

Man, there goes a good Astley moment.

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: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...

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.