On syncing freeze dates with other distributions
Hi,
I have been thinking a bit about the proposed syncing of the freeze date
with LTS recently.
I do not think it is a bad thing in general, but I do think a freeze
sync with a 10.04 LTS would be premature.
The other concern I have is lengthening our release cycle to 2 years - I
think this is quite a bit too long, I am very happy with the current
(rather informel) 1,5 years which is just between the 6-month release
cycle of the Fedora, OpenSuSE and Ubuntu community distributions and the
RHEL, SLES, LTS enterprise distributions.
So my proposal is the following:
We go for a freeze-sync together with Ubuntu 10.10; preferably (that is
up to Canonical to decide) that being the LTS instead of 10.04.
Furthermore, from then on, we will continue to freeze every 18 months,
and recommend to Ubuntu to freeze-sync every second Debian release as
LTS. That would mean (AFAIK) Ubuntu would have to lenghten their LTS
release cycle by a year, while Debian pledges to a time-based freeze in
sync with that.
The other option I came up with (and which Moritz just put on the table)
is further syncing with the enterprise releases of RedHat or Novell.
Ideally all the commercial enterprise releases would have a new major
version every 3 years and Debian would have one version in between every
1,5 years (while the community-supported projects of those enterprise
distributions continue at a 6 month release cycle).
Certainly this ideal world will not happen in the near future, but it
might be something (especially for the others as well) to converge upon
eventually.
If one of RedHat or SuSe are freezing their enterprise distribution
around the same time the squeeze/10.04 LTS freeze was initially
scheduled, that would be an argument for a short squeeze cycle; just
freezing in sync with Ubuntu (and adopting their release cycle) would
not be, in my opinion.
Michael
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