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When your product is being updated at break-neck speed, and each release is buggier than the last, there’s only one thing to do. Take out a critical release phase.
For Ubuntu 11.04 (why can’t they just round this off to 11?) Canonical has decided to forgo the Release Candidate, a phase when all features are locked and the software has a chance to stabilize. Instead, they’ll add a second beta, a phase in which the software is still in flux and major changes can still occur.
Why have they decided to do this? “a release candidate…showing up just before the Easter holiday would be a bit late.” Yeah, and it might actually be a bit stable too.
Comments
I am starting to think that Canonical is a double agent of Microsoft and Apple, purposed to take linux desktop down from the inside.
No sane open source company would impose to themselves an arbitary 6 month release schedule, something that not even the most well funded proprietary software companies can’t pull of. Instead, a sane open source company would adopt a “when it’s done” approach to releases, like Red Hat and MeeGo do.
Well done Microsoft and Apple, now linux on the desktop is dead for good! Your double agent really overdid himself with Karmic Coala, randomly swapping the close icon to the other side of the window, Unity and now with dropping the beta stage! Well done.
P.S.: I am joking
I can promise you, having gone through the alpha/beta/final/massive 2 week up date to final hullabaloo that is is ubuntu Necrotic Nutsack 11.04, it made absolutely NO difference at all by dropping the release candidate phase. It is still the same stinking pile of fail that any/all distros of linux add up to, just released a bit more often with a bit less care.
What difference does it make? They renamed the RC to Beta 2 because they knew it was too buggy to be called RC. The freeze schedules didn’t change like you imply. Besides, 11.04 was released back in April, so this is all moot now.
By the way, “11.04” refers to the month it was released: 2011 (11) April (04).
@ KURKOSDR
I know you said you’re joking, but I’m in the mood for explaining (in case someone reading it doesn’t get the joke). Many many other open source projects have the same 6-month release schedule. OpenBSD, Fedora, MeeGo, Glibc, GNOME, etc. Ubuntu is no different.
@ DIGITALATHEIST
Released more often? They’ve been on a strict 6-month release cycle ever since they started. The only exception was 6.06, which was back in 2006.
yes… ubuntu is released more often than other distros. although i’m sure that someone somewhere will decide that a 4 month schedule will be great.. somewhere down the line.
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you meant Ubuntu started being released more often starting from 11.04.
But still, there are other distros that get released every 6 months (most notably Fedora). But for the ultimate release speed, there are “rolling release” distros that are literally released every day.
Also remember, a new release updates not just the base operating system, but every single program, including Firefox, Open/Libre Office, and everything else. 6 months is even too long for some programs like Chromium (and Ubuntu actually added an exception to update it more often). No one wants to wait two years to update Firefox.
I’m not arguing if that’s a good thing or not, I’m just trying to put some perspective on the quick release schedules.
I’m personally not against a quick release scheduler, if the parts that were being released were worth being released. However, to often it seems that things are just being released for the sake of release just to maintain a schedule. 1.04 is such a release.
Exactly. Base your release schedule around a small subset of features or functionality, not an arbitrary date.
> Also remember, a new release updates not just the base operating system, but every single program, including Firefox, Open/Libre Office, and everything else
Because, you know, software generally couldn’t be updated without upgrading whole OS.
“Because, you know, software generally couldn’t be updated without upgrading whole OS.”
Upgrading software can brick your PC. So Ubuntu solves all issues by bricking your PC only twice a year instead on every update.
How come you’re not seeing it?
@Kurkos:
No sane open source company would impose to themselves an arbitary 6 month release schedule
You’re too young, kid. It’s what they all used to do — it’s called, for some reason, “Internet Time.” And it didn’t matter that Netscape crashed and burned trying to do the impossible.
Debian does it (in a slightly more sane way). As far as I am aware, Slackware does it. Basically anybody downstream does it.
Does it make sense? No. But then again, what is the point of downstream in the first place, if they are not proper tech consolidators and QA testers and customer facing and so on?
Six months. Crumbs. I could give birth to a perfectly healthy baby pig in that time.
And how could you possibly have missed out the TM which starts with, I’m not going to give you much of a clue here, but “bi..”?
@ DRLOSER
I believe he was being sarcastic, he even said “I am joking” at the end of the comment.
As for Debian, I think it’s a good example of why “when it’s ready” is not perfect either. Other than on servers, Most people run the testing version of Debian precisely because its release is so slow. The situation hasn’t changed much since they moved to a 2-year time-based release schedule. It’s still too slow.
The point is: Release management is not easy, and there is no silver bullet. Even Microsoft can’t always get it right. cough When Longhorn is ready cough
Eh?
Too slow?
2 years is too slow?!
———————
It’s interesting that Windows XP is now 10 years old and people still use it and have no need for a bleeding edge “new Windows” release.
Could it be that the lack of stable API/ABIs in Linux is not, in fact, a desirable feature after all?
@ REVERSECONTROLLERSE
A new release updates not just the base operating system, but every single program, including Firefox, Open/Libre Office, and everything else. 6 months is even too long for some programs like Chromium (and Ubuntu actually added an exception to update it more often). No one wants to wait two years to update Firefox.
I am not repeating myself, I am not repeating myself. Oh god, I’m repeating myself.
> Could it be that the lack of stable API/ABIs in Linux is not, in fact, a desirable feature after all?
I wish it was as simple as API/ABIs changing over time. The problem is that you can have two systems compile the same version of a package, using the same gcc version, yet still get incompatible binaries because of an option you chose when compiling glibc! This is why every single distribution has to have a repository of all Linux software that ever existed, and has to have a “release” update everything.
But let’s be charitable here, it doesn’t always happen, and most of the time a single executable can run on many different distributions. But the trouble of sorting out what works where and what doesn’t is too troublesome when you have the source and can just recompile.
Well then what about software that changes (updates, improves even) every month?
Should they just have monthly releases?
Weekly releases?
Daily?
...
Why wait six months for the inevitable deathmarch, when you can have it every day.
Security updates always find their way
into stable releases. Other “minor” updates vary depending on each distribution’s policy. Most only allow bug fixes, but not new features.
I have already mentioned them, but there are “rolling release” distributions that update whenever upstream releases something.
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