No more releases!

[Tommy Trussell]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Christopher Chan
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/23/darily_ubuntu_updates/
>
> Do I see sense taking over? Canonical is going in the right direction to
> make Ubuntu relevant. Will there be a colossal war between Ubuntu and
> Windows?

I don't understand how this has anything to do with Windows. You can
get daily updates with Ubuntu TODAY just by activating some more
repositories.

I think people don't appreciate what it means to "support" a
configuration. Since some large fraction (99.9+%?) of us are using and
contributing to Ubuntu for "free," it doesn't come up much, but if you
are a paying Canonical customer it matters to Canonical exactly which
configuration you have. If you are running a particular configuration,
the people you are paying to support you can know what you have on
your system to a fairly high level of specificity without quite as
much ambiguity as on a typical Windows installation.

However, for most of us, the six-month release schedule just means the
ground shifts beneath us our own personal systems on a predictable
schedule. We're doing our own support and we infer from our fellow
Ubuntu users what happens with the packages in a particular release.
When we need to run a particular package that has been updated outside
that schedule, there ARE several ways to benefit from the updates,
just by activating some other kind of repository.

I think the Register article bypassed or glossed over some important
details that explain better what Shuttleworth wants to accomplish. Is
he saying that there has been no benefit to packaging and testing
releases biennially? Or is he just saying there's a PERCEPTION that
the biennial releases are always outdated?

Putting my own perspective on this, I think he's talking about
separating the support of the core operating system components from
the application-level items. This would make people's PERCEPTION of
Ubuntu better match people's PERCEPTION of the way an Operating System
works as they have been trained under Windows or the Mac OS. A new
release of LibreOffice comes out, and you can install it, as long as
you're using something we might call "Ubuntu 10.10.78" or later. Under
the hood, the software center would keep track of the complexities
involved in managing the software in that way.