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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."
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)
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.
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!
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.
Mozilla isn't doing more releases, it's just calling them differently. You already had point releases on a regular basis.
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Debian does have rolling releases, it's called Testing and Unstable.
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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
They are already using YYMM...
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.
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.
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
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.
THAT'S IT!!! I'm moving to Gentoo!
May the Maths Be with you!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I see two problems with that, both at the core of Linux.
- Closed source driver support.
- The Unix/X11 (and thus Linux) kernel model doesn't allow for a high enough level hardware abstraction. So the desktop environments and applications have to do a lot that should be in the core OS.
Than how does OSX do it? And Solaris? And HP-UX, AIX, and the others I'm too lazy to mention?
This is an open source problem, not a unix problem. Commercial UNIXes which also use X.org seem to have no problem what so ever.
It all comes down to who WANTS to do it. OSS will remain second class because no one wants to do the hard work, like testing and making things stable. Everyone wants to just do the new shiney feature.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
>you're then stuck with whatever Ubuntu sends you for the next two years?
As if PPAs don't exist.
As if I can't compile my own with the 3 magic words of configure ; make ; checkinstall -D
As if the real version of 10.04 isn't 10.04.3 right now.
At this point 10.04 is damn near bulletproof. Enjoy your instability with 11.10 when it comes out.
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BMO