Re: On syncing freeze dates with other distributions

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@ubuntu.com>]

Manoj Srivastava wrote:

On Mon, Aug 03 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:

  

Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org> writes:

    

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.
      

Amen.  I think two years is a little too long and 18 months would be much
better.
    

        We never actually have managed the 18 month release, have we? We
 freeze approximatly 18 months after the last release, and then release
 about 2 years or so after the last release.

        So, in steady state, freezing/releasing roughly two years apart
 will be close to what we do, no?
  

Yes, in practice, a two year cadence is more achievable for Debian, based on past performance, and that is a significant contributor to my feeling that the broader free software ecosystem could align around a two year cadence. Debian reflects many of the underlying patterns in the whole ecosystem.

I think that's even more true if it were part of a broader collaboration with many distributions (not just Ubuntu). In other words, if we make the commitment, it becomes easier to achieve. On the other hand, if we demonstrate a spectacular inability to make a commitment, it gets much harder :-)

Manoj, I would strongly support your call to have more distributions involved. This is not, to my mind, about Debian-Ubuntu, as much as it's about coaxing the whole ecosystem to embrace a cadence that in turn makes collaboration so much easier. I've already reached out to Novell SUSE, and had a blog scheduled for this week which would make an open call for others to participate in the summit that was envisaged for December where we look for opportunities to share common base versions. I've put that on hold, given the debate unfolding here, but still believe it's both achievable and beneficial not just to us (Debian and Ubuntu) but to many other groups in free software too.

Mark