Slashdot Mirror
Monthly Ubuntu Releases Proposed
An anonymous reader writes "Scott James Remnant, the former Ubuntu Developer Manager at Canonical and current Ubuntu Technical Board leader, has proposed a new monthly release process for Ubuntu Linux. He acknowledges that with the six month releases there are features that end up landing way too soon, leaving them in a sour state for users. With his monthly proposal, Remnant hopes to relieve this by handling alpha, beta, and normal releases concurrently. It's unknown whether Canonical will accept the policy at this time."
Previously there was a proposal for continuous releases and for me this monthly idea is about the same. Ubuntu releases continuously anyway. But they maintain different branches and repositories. Every six months you skip to a new branch. So if you had a monthly branch and updated that on every build I think there would be some sort of longer term configuration management anyway. There would have to be experimental branches lasting for more than a month because some things take more than a month to develop. Not saying that this would be a policy, just that the community would informally organize it that way in any case.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This would probably end up working more like a rolling release, staying up to date would mean you ARE using the latest distro.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Oh, it's clear something has to change! The question is more like: What exactly? I have no good answers to this, but as a user I equate the 11.04 release to "Vista of Canonical". I stick fervently to the last LTS release which seems to be good. Sure, I still have two years left on it, but by the end an LTS release loses love and does get stale.
On my own desktops (So, not the desktops I support for family and friends), I usually run the latest release of Ubuntu. The experience was so bad, I personally went back to the LTS. I hope 11.10 will be better, and I'll get back to normal releases if it is.
I've heard good things of Linux Mint, which is Ubuntu based. Thing is, for my family/friends users, I really don't want to switch distributions every few years, just because one has lost my favour. That's going to hurt my credibility.
I've been thinking of switching completely to Debian, but the amount of work to get that running right as a modern desktop is daunting. I can do it, I have done it, but for example, to have a modern browser you either have to manually install it bypassing the package management (bad!) or use backports to get modern compiles of iceweasel. Neither is optimal.
What I fear, is that the proposed shorter release cycles are going to make Ubuntu break too often. That will turn off users, and they cannot afford to lose even more users after the 11.04 release.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
They must be smoking the same crack cocaine that Mozilla is.
Well, for what it's worth, free drugs may incentivize people to switch to using Linux on the desktop sooner.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Rolling releases are great for devs because it lets you put your new feature into the release cycle when it's ready instead of locking it down in whatever state if you don't want to miss the 6 month cycle.
The trouble is that this is terrible for users. The 6 month cycle is already a little aggressive (but tolerable) on support forums. Monthly releases would cause so much confusion when you're searching for other people who have experienced your problem.
Also, how does the support cycle work? Are you going to provide parallel support for 24 releases for two years? If not, do I have to upgrade monthly? I support too many computers for that to be a realistic option.
If you need faster releases, just use Debian unstable.
Reminder: "unstable" doesn't mean "crashes often", it means that it's a moving target.
Oh, maybe you mean ... like SID? (see the rolling release BoF at the last Debconf 11 in Bosnia.)
...Gentoo? One of the reasons why I have switched from Gentoo to Debian were stable, more rounded-up releases, with more bugs fixed and issues straightened out between them. Constant upgrading means constant stress over what could have possibly break. I believe people can handle a few broken things on Ubuntu desktop at home, but for Ubuntu servers and for Ubuntu desktops in the enterprise, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
imp
SID
I prefer they just went to a rolling release. Why are there even versions, anyway? It amazes me that so few Linux distributions actually use rolling releases. Maybe rolling releases are seen as too "cutting edge" for mainstream, conservative distributions like Ubuntu and Debian. I guess I'm just a ricer at heart.
And each month, please change to a new window manager! And add some new wonderful default settings that are SO MUCH BETTER than whatever some idiot user like me might have customized to what he mistakenly thought fit his needs best! Particularly when it comes to the default internet applications, please reinstall the Evolution mailclient because the last three times I removed it I was obviously being STUPID.
Oh, and please make sure to break the WiFi and graphics drivers each time, because, you know, dist upgrades are BORING if everything just works out of the box. I really look forward to spending an entire weekend on fixing my broken system every month rather than twice a year!
If this means that they're going to fix Unity's usability, then I'm all for it. Otherwise, meh.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Yeah, that was my first thought, too.
It seems to me that Canonical and Mozilla are off in their own little worlds. There's still hope for both of them, but they're so arrogant and far removed from their users that it seems like the slow slide into irrelevancy is almost assured. It's too bad, because both projects come up with decent enough ideas; the management and implementation leave me cold.
i know what! let's go back to releasing "when it's ready"! that would be great! oh wait... that's what debian do.
I'd say no support for rolling, support only LTS. With support meaning "backport bug/security fixes to the specific version you deployed" oh, and the actual corporate support of course... With true rolling, as soon as a fix is ready, there is a new version from upstream which would only need to pass the distro requirements (alpha/beta etc) to go in the official repos.
This might even relieve Canonical from supporting that many releases in a given 2 years time frame (1 instead of 4 + the previous LTS...)
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Shouldn't they use the Mandarin alphabet to start naming their releases, if they're going to do it so frequently? Or will they simply use MMYYYY?
Debian does have rolling releases, it's called Testing and Unstable.
Dilbert RSS feed
Because who is going to work on last month's version? "Oh, just upgrade you'll get all the new fixes." And all the new bugs.
Bleeding edge is fine for hobbyists, but grown ups? We need a version that's going to start solid and get steadily better.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Users can now be confident of always receiving a stable operating system, because of the multiple testing and QA passes each change continually receives. Updates come in monthly, two-weekly or dailyish batches depending where in the main series they chose to run.
I've heard this before, the alleged continuous testing and QA won't happen. Things that are in change aren't stable, that's why we end up in release cycles to begin with so we can have development periods where we're flexible and testing periods where we stabilize it. The "be everything, all the time" development method doesn't work.
In theory, this doesn't sound so bad - it sounds like Agile on a 4 week sprint. But in such a project you should have damn good control over your production environment. When you have tons of people using it on tons of configurations then you will break things this way.
In a distro, the whole thing about gradual changes is a lie anyway. Chances are that every month some package or the other will decide now's the time to make radical changes. It's completely unintuitive to the users what packages made major changes the last month, you just have to test everything each month instead of twice a year.
If this goes though, then I think by far most people will stick with the LTS releases. Which probably means they'll get too little testing and it'll all go crap. The only point I really agree with if true, is that Ubuntu developers should get a better way to run a project that's not for the next release, but for the one after that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Those names hardly inspire confidence for use in a production environment..
which is totally what she said
If you think your LTS starts getting stale, take a look at the various PPAs. For instance you could keep a current stable Firefox (v6 atm), by adding the firefox-stable ppa to your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
I personally switched to Xubuntu (XFCE) because i don't like gnome3/unity/kde4, had no problems using 11.04.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
It's better to be warned by the name up front than learning it the hard way as with Ubuntu.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The easiest / best approach would be to have alpha, beta and release candidate channels, offering various levels of recency and robustness.
These are all unversioned, and simply update to the latest set of packages available in the each. Then, every 6 / 12 / 18 / whatever months, make the current state of release candidate a versioned release.
If only it were possible to have the best of both worlds, a stable "base" and new/recent applications. I think e.g. PBI-9 from PC-BSD may have a chance of doing that, but none of the currently popular package systems offer anything like it. (Yeah, I read the paper, so kill me.)
Personally, I think it would be interesting if the base (kernel, glibc, that kind of thing) were updated every 6-12 months, but applications were rolling release.
Ubuntu is kind of close with PPAs, but it's a bit of a crapshoot if your particular application has a (high-quality) PPA.
HAND.
As long as everyone else copies the ideas and improves upon them, everything is good!
I'm really thankful for the work that Ubuntu has been doing the last few years, but I think they should have taken more time with Unity before pushing it out to their desktop distro. Why they didn't just make an extension for something like Docky or AWN, I don't know.. Unity is completely awful compared to them. It's not even as good as the Windows 7 taskbar.
which is totally what she said
Those names hardly inspire confidence for use in a production environment..
Quite. If they were a respectable company they'd call their test rolling release something like "Windows Update with Genuine Advantage"
Really, it's not a nice way to go. I switched from Windows to OSX to Ubuntu, and I wouldn't go back the way. If you like using open source software or development tools, it's a lot easier to install and maintain everything under Linux than OSX.
Try out Mint - it's what I used after they released 11.04 and it screwed up my workflow, and I like it even better than Ubuntu.
which is totally what she said
The developer of AWN actually works for Canonical in "Desktop Experience" http://njpatel.blogspot.com/
Except you don't want to boot up one day with an urgent task to perform only to discover that your user interface has completely changed. There are pros and cons to this.
If Ubuntu does this, I will finally be switching to straight up Debian. Cannonical seems obsessed with turning a great Linux platform with the highest visibility into nothing more than Apple Too.
...Already I don't keep any files on my ubuntu machine. Re-installing an OS every 6 months can make it difficult to actually use. Monthly releases will just cause a huge fragmentation issue. I would prefer a yearly release, with other substantial updates throughout the year that can just be downloaded. We could call them service pack's or something. The proposer's proposal actually makes sense though...it's not so much the release schedule that needs to change, but the way that canonical's developers have to get their not truely stable code into a release before its ready so that they can get paid. If the dev's need more time, then canonical should give it to them. After all, isn't the point to build a great working OS and not a semi-working one?
Yes, firefox release schedule = fail. As an admin I said "this is a PITA" (from a testing and deployment standpoint). My users said "wait, I just updated firefox, why do I have to do it again"
If they start doing this at the OS level end users are going to get pissed at the "time to update" icon or popup or whatnot and the admins are going to move to something that is stable. The only thing I want to have installed in my production environment is a well tested security patch - no UI changes, no new "features" that could compromise systems or break compatibility.
Get a web developer
No, carrier pigeons do not count as wifi.
Currently wifi is the make or break of many a linux install. Laptop builders love to add the latest for no very good reason that barely works under windows, let alone linux.
Often by the time a new piece of hardware makes it to the consumer a driver will be out there but getting it involves going cutting edge... and then a 8 week test window starts to look bloody long.
There really is no middle ground unless you want to spend an absolute fortune on release management.
Wait till everything you want to put into a release is stable and tested and you will be obsolete and unable to add patches some users need NOW.
Doing a rolling release and you are a tester and will just have to rely on people not breaking things on purpose like Gnome 3 or KDE4.
For Ubuntu, 11.04 was a mistake, they released new projects that were in an early beta state at the best as critical packages for any desktop. You can make available a beta package as an optional replacement for an established package but to go Unity Gnome3 full hog when neither was or is ready... no.
Why they wanted it 11.04 and no say in 99.10 when it might be functional (it isn't right now) I don't know. Why other distro's copied them, I understand even less.
Sometimes you need the cutting edge and sometimes you don't. But going cutting edge on a critical piece... that is just silly.
There were gnome 3 packages for the fans in 10.10. They should have kept it that way.
Mint so far seems to be only distro with the sense to keep the basics that work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This makes it harder to hold back a release because the decided to axe a stable Gnome. Also makes it hard to hold back a week for the final beta testing.
THAT'S IT!!! I'm moving to Gentoo!
May the Maths Be with you!
Here here... The number of people on 10.04LTS and 10.10 just to avoid Unity should tell them that "more updates" is not what we are looking for.
Perhaps they could give them useful names, like, stable, unstable and testing. Nobody has thought of that before
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They need to separate the applications from the OS the way every other operation system does (eg. BSD, OSX, Windows, etc).
So you have a core system which is just the most basic requirements to run the OS. Kernel, utilities, display, web browser, etc. I would do it like the BSD's where you have a kernel core, x-windows core, etc. No large apps like OpenOffice and all the other crap. Those can and should be installed separately by the user like they do on every other system.
Then you just maintain and have releases of the core like everyone else does. This is much less work and allows for more focus and higher quality.
The general applications can be done as a rolling release or whatever the user wants. Separate from the core.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Granted the firefox releases are a PITA.
Why don't you have a local mirror of the repository? Several advantages I can think of off the bat:
1) You take control of the release schedule - you get to decide what's in the repository, and available to your users.
2) Your bandwidth to the net doesn't hammered every time there's a major update
just use Debian Sid.
And if you have a clue, that makes sense and is why you don't want 'rolling releases' in general.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Gnome Shell now available in Ubuntu 11.10 repositories. This might make a difference, if only they would keep Gnome 2...
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/05/gnome-shell-is-finally-available-in.html
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
I guess breaking your system twice a year just isn't enough?
The Internet has given stupid people the resources of intelligent people.
Why don't they just switch to a rolling release?
Or, better yet, have a rolling release, with major changes (e.g, desktop environment changes, like from GNOME to Unity) every 2 years, when they are doing LTS releases now. That way, we can keep the cute alliterations.
The Internet has given stupid people the resources of intelligent people.
Those names hardly inspire confidence for use in a production environment.
Good. At least you have been warned. Now consider a rolling release where this month the distro decided that everyone should use Unity.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Why don't you have a local mirror of the repository? Several advantages I can think of off the bat:
Because its easier and cheaper to just go with someone else without such a retarded release program?
You're also ignoring the fact that it indicates they do not actually care about their users wishes and are in fact following the exact same track as the previous netscape administration.
It shows they don't want to put actual effort into testing and release management, they just want to play with shiney new code.
Basically, it paints them as idiots who are throwing out literally hundreds (if not thousands) of years of basic engineering principle because they simply don't want to do it and it takes work.
It shows they want YOU to do THEIR WORK for THEM, and thats where I get off to bus.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Could be time to jump ship and switch to another distro.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
If you like using open source software or development tools, it's a lot easier to install and maintain everything under Linux than OSX.
I'm sorry, what exactly are you doing differently under Linux for OSS tools than you were in OSX? apt-get isn't exactly different under OSX.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I've found that the best way to manage Firefox updates on Linux now is using the Mozillateam stable release repo.
for Ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-stable
for Debian:
http://mozilla.debian.net/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
After using Ubuntu for a year, and abandoning it because of their questionable decisions, I just don't see how they could manage doing a rolling release, without having it become a huge pile of interlocking bugs.
If you want a rolling release that shows how it's done, use Arch Linux...
Sounds like you want Debian, Redhat/Centos, or SuSE. In other words, you want an enterprise release. Ubuntu (no matter how good the disguise they don) is not an enterprise release.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
At this rate, they will soon need to release Ubuntu 69: Zealous Zuckerburg!
Admins like you need to quit being lazy shits and let go of the moldy dead corpses of outdated software.
I no longer update except for the key, supported updates, every two years. Instead of going to monthly updates, it needs to cut the updates back to once a year, or once every two years.
11.04 Still includes gnome 2 as an option or compile one of it's forks. And hell, this is still Linux, if you disagree with a design choice of your distro you are free to reach in a change it, or go get a distro that better agrees with what your looking for. It could help for a more sane stable releases. Force any new features to sit in beta or alpha, and only merge when they are mature.
"Hear, hear!" is the expression.
Um, macs don't play all that nice with thrid-party package managers especially across updates. There are a few ports tools that pull out ports in a prefix (chroot), but after a certain point it's just not worth it.
Keeping up with security patches is a major concern. Part of the reason Canonical has been considering a more rapid release cycle is the need to keep pace with security patches for Web browsers.
Because its easier and cheaper to just go with someone else without such a retarded release program?
That depends on the size of your install base. Unless your install base is smaller than 5 people, it's probably a good strategy to have a mirror server anyway. One of the complaints I've seen here over and again is that canonical keep changing things like the desktop. This is how you change that in a central way.
Basically, it paints them as idiots who are throwing out literally hundreds (if not thousands) of years of basic engineering principle because they simply don't want to do it and it takes work.
It shows they want YOU to do THEIR WORK for THEM, and that's where I get off to bus.
Depends on which philosophy of free software you follow. ESR argues for release early, and release often. If you don't like FLOSS, your free to go pay Microsoft or Apple.
I remember having issues with CPAN modules, probably because the version of Perl on OSX wasn't very up to date. I saw a guy here complaining about the version of Ruby on OSX a couple of days ago too, and how it was impossible to upgrade because the updater itself was written in a newer version of Ruby that couldn't run on his system.
I wasn't aware that apt-get was available for OSX. It was 2007 or 2008 that I was using it myself though, so it maybe wasn't available back then.
which is totally what she said
IMHO, Yearly releases would be ok, if it means they're actually stable. Above all, please keep developers working on fixing problems AFTER the release, or keep it longer in RC if necessary. Above all, don't uphold freezes, if it renders related components unusable or severely broken.
One of my personal examples was the QBzr package in Jaunty. The Bzr-package were upgraded since the previous release, but the QBzr package wasn't, leaving it at a broken API. When I noticed it, the freeze were already in place, and the end-result was that QBzr were mostly unusable during Jaunty. (Better having unusable packages than making an exception)
Seriously, what's stopping users from sticking with an LTS?
I've stuck with 10.04 and I couldn't be happier.
This fake outrage about having to update every month is FUD pure and simple.
--
BMO
Why not just use Debian Testing? It uses 2 week minimum cycles to put software in there from unstable, doesn't it? I use it at home, and it STILL breaks way less than any Ubuntu release I've used.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I switched to Debian from Ubuntu awhile back b/c I didn't liie the way that Ubuntu was going with Unity and all the other Ubuntu-specific stuff they added lately. I want to use plain vanilla GNU/Linux, period. If Ubuntu won't give me that I'll find something else that will.
The only problem with Debian Stable is that some of the packages are old as hell even in the latest release. For instance, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" still has Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5.16, which is absolutely ancient. Just today, Gmail started showing me notifications that my Firefox is so old that it isn't properly supported any more and that some things might not work right b/c of it.
I like stability as much as anyone, but stable shouldn't be synonymous with obsolete.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
"Admins like you need to quit being lazy shits and let go of the moldy dead corpses of outdated software.
"
Do you have any idea what the demands are for being an Admin?
I can tell you I have seen Lan admins fired first hand, by going with the latest greatest software like Novel Netware 5. 1 week later it crashes causing a 6 hour outage while a major client came over and a $12 million deal fell through because the file server to show the documents was down! Ouch ...
(l)user is a term, for our cranky users. If they see a big change like Firefox 4 from Firerox 3, when logging in they will do a double take and go WTF! They will start calling your phone and whinning for you to fix your mistake and making your life hell. (Notice I said yours and not Mozilla's?) May God help you if it is an executive whining about the change who can go 3 levels above you and file a complaint due to this weirdish Foxfire thingie where his options are missing etc .... If you do not get noticed, you keep your job.
It is more customer service than technical.
This is why WindowsXP is still around. I laugh at slashdotters who whine about IE 9, USB 3, or the Kinetix SDK not working in a 10 year old kernel, but that is extreme. It is gradually being replaced as I type this at most fortune 500 companies. But 6 months releases being too old? Get real. Several year old software works well and is not that out of date. If you support users this shit can't break as they blame you and not Ubuntu. One out of 5 users in the US still uses 10 year old operating systems and 1 out of 15 still use the 5 year old IE 7.
http://saveie6.com/
It's better to be warned by the name up front than learning it the hard way as with Ubuntu.
Yup. I've used Ubuntu since Hoary (quickly replaced by a beta of Breezy), and suffered on two of the upgrades since. In fact, shortly after Dapper failed to upgrade to Edgy on one laptop, I began to realize how much safer it is to stick to the LTS releases. Nowadays, I don't upgrade any of our PCs to a new LTS release until a few months after it comes out.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm running Mint Debian Edition. I'd forgotten that I'd even chosen that version rather than the Ubuntu based one. It's a rolling distribution based on Debian Testing, but I've had no problems with it apart from having to get the wireless drivers working when I first installed it.
I'd recommend switching to the Testing branch of Debian, or adding in repositories for the latest builds of Firefox or Chrome's stable versions to your current setup. When you install the .deb for Chrome, the appropriate repository is added automatically to keep you up to date - not sure if it's any more awkward for Firefox.
I stopped using Firefox a couple of years ago, but I still try it out from time to time. Bog standard Firefox isn't very responsive on my wheezy little netbook, but Chrome with adblock is running great!
which is totally what she said
That's what Backports are for ;)
Having said that, I use Unstable, but that's because 1) I keep daily backups and 2) I'm prepared to lose two hours of sleep restoring them if it breaks.
Dilbert RSS feed
Debian Testing is a tricky beast. Sometimes it can stay broken for longer than Unstable, at least that was my experience (I moved from Stable to Testing, then to Unstable).
Dilbert RSS feed
You act like there is only one true way for FLOSS software/ It doesn't make sense for stuff like firefox to be tested in the wild. It might for other products,
Are you going to backport firefox every 6 weeks???
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Us RPM users can blow it, eh? Thanks for nothing.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
If you're using a distro with RPM package management at home I'd assume you're a masochist, and I wouldn't want to ruin the fun :-P
But, SPOILERS:
Unofficial Firefox Stable yum repo:
http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2011/install-firefox-6-on-fedora/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm not familiar with how Ubuntu package and push their software. Do you get everything inc the kitchen sink with each crank of the wheel whether you want it or not? Red Hat, in between major/minor releases bundle up new RPMs into errata. An errata may contain one or more RPM packages that are tested/required to be installed together, and they're delineated into three types, prefixed with:
RHBA - Red Hat Bugfix Advisory
RHSA - Red Hat Security Advisory
RHEA - Red Hat Enhancement Advisory
In our production environment, we avoid anything that's an enhancement (too risky) and consider each bugfix and security errata to see if it's application to our builds, and whether we want to install them or not, and whether the fixes would warrant a new QA effort (time consuming and costly). We're not forced to, nor are we forced to take each point release in turn if we don't want either. That's the way it should be done.
SEGFAULT
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
RPM hell is right up there with DLL hell, FYI. IOW, get with the new, gramps, I've had less pkg mngr issues with fedora than crashbuntu, or debian (no wireless drivers, not even open source ones, and no auto conf - on the desktop release - really?).
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.