Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OpenSUSE Team Reworking Dev Model, Delays 12.2 Release

Posted by timothy on from the when-big-turns-make-sense dept.

LinuxScribe writes "The upcoming 12.2 RC1 release of openSUSE has been delayed, and the final 12.2 release 'won't see the light of day on July 11th,' as developers within the openSUSE community struggles to fix their release efforts, Community Manager Jos Poortvliet said today." Says the article: "Among [openSUSE Release Manager Stephan] Kulow's suggestions? Dumping the current release cycle schedule for openSUSE and moving to an annual or even unscheduled release system."

1 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. It's harder than it looks by laffer1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wish the OpenSUSE project luck getting this figured out.

    Maintaining packages in this manner is a lot of work. At the end of the day, most contributors only work on a handful of packages and don't consider the possible breakage of other packages. One or two people end up doing all the cleanup work. This happens in the BSD community all the time. For instance, if you look at the recent issues in FreeBSD when PNG was updated or the new debate about X.org 7.7 coming into the tree. FreeBSD's approach to ports is great when you want up-to-date software, but the maturity found in NetBSD's pkg-src or even OpenBSD's model sounds a bit more like what OpenSUSE is looking for.

    I'm not trying to pick on FreeBSD. I use a similar process for MidnightBSD due to limited developer resources. In my case, it usually means I personally have to update packages. That's why we have such outdated versions of Firefox (unbranded of course) and Chrome. Not only do all the other dependancies have to be the right magic versions, but someone has to take the effort to port a rather complex piece of software. Luckily, the Linux folks don't have nearly the trouble as they're a tier 1 platform for most software these days. Still, there are many different choices in linux for near everything and getting your combination to work can be tiresome. Next time you download packages from any open source OS, consider how much work went into that easy experience. Saying thank you can't hurt either. :)

    --
    MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone