Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 30th Jun 2008 11:34 UTC, submitted by matej
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.
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Member since:2006-02-05
Suppose one project is unquestionably ready on the date, and the other project is not,
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.
Member since:2005-07-06
Suppose one project is unquestionably ready on the date, and the other project is not, for example of the issues Fedora 9 has with KDE 4. Should Fedora have delayed however long it took for KDE 4.1 to be ready? or should KDE 4.1 have been "given" more resources by Mr. Shuttleworth (or someone at the Fedora project) in order to meet Fedora's deadline? What would serious coordination mean in this world?
KDE, in this case, should say, with plenty of warning, that they won't make the deadline and Fedora should then plan to make their next release without the latest KDE version.
Let's say that software projects chooses the 1st week of April and 1st week of October as their release dates and distors 3rd week of April and October (distros projects wouldn't need to release every 6 month of course and could skip a date if they felt the need) . Then all the distros would know by March and September what software they would be including. And they would also know that they will have at least two weeks for testing and integrating the final version of each project before release.
Member since:2005-11-10
I don't think that two weeks is enough time to do proper testing. Why not do a Ubuntu-style release schedule that closely follows GNOME about a month after the release of a new version of GNOME? GNOME release in March and September and then Ubuntu releases in April and October so I guess they already do what you are asking. Surely Ubuntu takes longer than two weeks for their release. I personally would prefer they wait for the 2.x.1 version in order to fix anything that may have been initially missed.
Currently KDE is on a January/July release schedule.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Suppose one project is unquestionably ready on the date, and the other project is not, for example of the issues Fedora 9 has with KDE 4. Should Fedora have delayed however long it took for KDE 4.1 to be ready? or should KDE 4.1 have been "given" more resources by Mr. Shuttleworth (or someone at the Fedora project) in order to meet Fedora's deadline? What would serious coordination mean in this world?
So this strikes me as a really bad idea. Maybe this is not what he is getting at, but artificial deadlines seem to be part of the problem with Windows; some wit on this website remarked a while back that at the time Vista was released, all of its promised major features was present in each major OS except Vista. Having rollouts may be fun and enjoyable and leave everyone with good feelings for a week or so, but in the long run the current model is much, much better.