The reason why Ubuntu would modify its release schedule
May 13th, 2008
Mark Shuttleworth presented an interesting idea on his blog yesterday that I would love to see adopted. I think this would be a great benefit to the FOSS world, not just Ubuntu, and I hope that there is some interest among the Red Hat, Novell and Debian crowd, all of whom I respect very highly. The benefits of synchronization would be huge. For what it is worth, I vote a huge +1.
There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.
Entry Filed under: Linux / Ubuntu
3 Comments Add your own
1. Lynoure Braakman | May 13th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Could you go into detail on the benefits, both to the developers and to users? I feel that to users sychronicity, some kernel version, same kde/gnome, openoffice versions would make the whole Linux landscape more homogenous, thus there would be less to choose from.
The distros/devs would however save lots of effort in their releases.
2. matthew | May 13th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Currently, a lot of effort and work is duplicated. Doing this would enable differing distributions to use one another’s work in an easier way, thereby allowing much of the energy that is currently spent by each one doing the same thing as the others, to instead be spent on further innovation. Currently, each distribution benefits from work done and released by others, but it takes longer and ofter requires adjustments because of differing software and toolkit versions. With this change, those benefits would pass around more quickly.
I don’t think this should cause too great of a concern about homogenization. Instead, my gut feeling is that the opposite would be likely, that more free time for developers would end up being used in divergent and creative ways that would likely allow each distro to focus even better on its core audience.
3. 6r00k14n | May 14th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I agree with you. To see one distro use the latest package, simply because of the number of programmers available to it and see another one lag behind on the same package is a waste to the entire community.
I’m sure that even the one man distro’s would benefit greatly from having the same version of whatever package, regardless of which distro they are based on.
Obviously, Debian will still be on a very slow release cycle, but those that are looking to release often would benefit from having the latest packages available at a certain time, which would allow them to integrate those packages (i.e. Redhat and Ubuntu would both have to same Gnome packages, if they both released in the same month and the Gnome developers released about one month prior).
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