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.

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.

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.

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: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...