
The open source world is currently debating the merits - if any - of synchronising the release schedules of several of the bigger, key projects that make up a Linux distribution. The discussion was
started by Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, and continued as a
back and forth between the Ubuntu leader and KDE's Aaron Seigo, but of course other members of the community discussed right along on blogs and other venues. Sander, developer of
Coccinella (an open-source Jabber client)
provides some insights into the whole discussion.
Member since:
2006-02-05
This goes on now, and what happens is the first project takes what it has, applies some quick and dirty patches to get it more or less working, then shoves it out the door. Very common practice, what ends up happening is distro specific issues and bugs.
Slackware is one of the few that doesn't do this (note that pat still hasn't released slack with kde 4), and actually (gasp) waits until a project is ready for prime time before releasing it.
If projects at least aimed for a regular, synchronized release cycle, it would make the distros life easier. I mean, even if a project isn't ready, it could hardly be worse then the situation is now.