Minutes from Technical Board meeting 2013-03-18

[Matt Zimmerman]

These minutes are also available at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TechnicalBoard/TeamReports/13/March

Meeting 2013-03-18:

 * Meeting chair: Matt Zimmerman
 * Other members in attendance: Colin Watson, Stéphane Graber
 * Apologies: Martin Pitt, Soren Hansen, Kees Cook

 * Full log:
   http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2013/ubuntu-meeting.2013-03-18-21.01.html

 * See also
   [[https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2013-March/001566.html|Stéphane Graber's more detailed summary]

 * Proposed changes to the release cycle

  * The board discussed a few recently proposed
  * [[https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2013-March/001527.html|changes]]
  * to the release cycle

  * Duration of maintenance/support

   * Currently, standard (non-LTS) releases include a commitment to 18
     months of maintenance
   * The original proposal called for reducing the maintenance period for
     standard releases from 18 months to 7 months
   * The development team representatives discussed the possibilities and
     reached a consensus on a new maintenance period of 9 months, which the
     board then voted to approve

  * Effective release for new maintenance period

   * The board voted to implement the 9-month maintenance period beginning
   * with Ubuntu 13.04

  * Providing a mechanism to easily track the development branch of Ubuntu
    continuously

   * Currently, users must explicitly upgrade their system to each new
     release
   * The proposal called for designating the current development focus as a
     "rolling release", intended to be tracked continuously rather than via
     discrete upgrades
   * The technical requirement for such a designation would be a mechanism
     to enable this behavior, since it is not currently supported by our
     current infrastructure
   * The board voted in support of the development of such a facility,
     without specifying a particular mechanism (TBD by the relevant
     development team(s))
  * There were further components to the proposal which could not be
    discussed in the time available for the meeting. Discussion will
    continue at the next meeting on 2013-04-01

-- 
 - mdz