Proposal to Release Ubuntu 10.10 on 10.10.10

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 01:15:09PM +0200, Robbie Williamson wrote:
> I have been approached with a proposal to move the release date up by 3
> weeks to 10/10/10, to take advantage of a "unique marketing
> opportunity".  As Platform lead for Canonical, I don't feel it's a
> decision I nor the Canonical Platform managers should make alone, as it
> affects *all* developers/contributors to Ubuntu.  With that said, I
> would like the Technical Board's input on making the change, and whether
> or not it needs to be discussed on ubuntu-devel or at least at UDS
> before deciding.  I've created a 10.10 schedule[1] based on this
> proposal for an easier analysis of the impact of this change.
> 
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickReleaseScheduleProposal

This will cause us to be releasing well before the GNOME 3.0.1 stable
release, which I'm concerned will have a substantial negative effect on
quality.  In the past we've deliberately released after .1 because the
.0 is often a bit rough; my instinct is that this goes double for 3.0.x.

In general, this seems to mean that after spending substantial effort
going round the open source world trying to convince them to establish a
six-month cadence, we now break our cadence relative to our well-behaved
upstreams after they've already established their schedules just because
we want a cute marketing date.  I can't see how I can support this
technically.

On a personal note, I have objections to being required to work on a
Sunday, and so if we release on 10/10/10 I don't expect to be involved
in the end stages of the release process.  I wonder how many other
people this applies to.  A weekend release doesn't seem wise from a
personnel point of view.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]