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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RE: Comment by moleskine
by binarycrusader on Mon 30th Jun 2008 19:54
in reply to "Comment by moleskine"
Member since:2005-07-06
In what sense would synchronizing development releases be helpful? And helpful to whom?
Helpful to users and projects.
Synchronised release cycles allow people to plan.
Users can plan upgrades. Users can plan on having certain hardware support or other functionality available.
Businesses can plan rollout and release cycles. They can plan for training, etc.
Other developers can plan on depending on certain functionality being available because they know X is available in Y on Z date.
I don't know why the "open source" world thinks they are somehow exempt from the last 50 years or so of software engineering and release principles.
Every major commercial successful product launch involves a lot of planning.
Given Ubuntu's success, it should be obvious how great of a benefit release planning can bring.
Member since:
2005-11-05
In what sense would synchronizing development releases be helpful? And helpful to whom?
There is a risk here that it would be most helpful to the marketing department, which would naturally like to take a fairly complex product and reduce it to "The Blingtastic Latest and Greatest". Because that's easy to sell and failures of the strategy can be blamed on upstream - we can only sell what the devs give us by date x, etc.
I'm not arguing against synchronization, just pointing out that there are commercial pressures here that aren't all that healthy. Thus do marketing folks get further and further through the door of what developers actually develop.
As someone has wisely already said, "ready for release" and ready for prime time are not the same thing at all. The first can easily be twisted into a marketing call. The second means sticking your rep and judgement on the line. It also means sticking up for your users. It's quite hard to say, with some recent distros, that inflicting, say, Pulse Audio in its present state on your users is really giving them something that's ready for prime time rather than going with marketing and "ready for release".