A tale of fixed release schedules

[John]

Sasha Tsykin wrote:

>> As for Dapper, I said I haven't followed the reasons for its delay; I 
>> always thought though that while the fixed-length release cycle was an 
>> interesting, even a good, idea, that the challenge might prove too much.
>>
>> Perhaps the plan for the next long-life release might better be to 
>> release the base on time, then the Long Life version maybe two months 
>> later, being basically the base plus fixes plus polish to ensure it's 
>> something you can live with for however long. No new Gnome or KDE or 
>> libc, but updates to Ubuntu's own toolset for configuration, 
>> management and such.
>>
> I think that the reason to the dapper delay was that they thought it 
> lacked polish. The feature freeze seems to ahve been observed, more or 
> less, although unrar has been added since the feature freeze.

unrar's probably not going to affect much:-)
> 
>> You could also consider technology updates: again, no new KDE or Gnome 
>> - those are too intrusive, but OpenOffice.org, the Mozilla suite and 
>> maybe some other packages could be made available to those who want them.
>>
> When would they be updated? How would yu deal with the early bugs? I 
> think that it is better at the moment to just keep Dapper as it is.

Dapper Long Life is supposed to be around for some years; likely in that 
time OOo will release a significant new version and folk will want it 
for Dapper Long Life.

Ditto for Mozilla suite.

When to do it? I guess when it's passed into mainline Ubuntu and passed 
as "stable." I'd not rush into it the day it's released, but when the 
rate of new bug reports slows and important ones are fixed.

And, make sure the versions can cohabit the system and/or the change is 
easy to reverse.

There will always be some risk, but users should still be given the 
opportunity to enjoy the perceived benefits without needing to change 
everything.