Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

Dmitrijs Ledkovs dmitrij.ledkov at ubuntu.com
Thu Feb 28 18:38:41 UTC 2013


On 28 February 2013 17:16, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, February 28, 2013 12:07:02 PM Jeremy Bicha wrote:
>> On 28 February 2013 16:31, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>> > This may be true for Canonical and the Ubuntu desktop, but I strongly
>> > believe it's not the case for Kubuntu.  For me, a Kubuntu release means
>> > the most current KDE.  I generally run the latest regular release and I
>> > think that most of our user base does too.
>> >
>> > KDE releases on a regular 6 month cadence, just like Ubuntu has, so this
>> > has worked very well.
>>
>> On the other hand, Kubuntu makes the latest KDE available to the
>> current stable release through their official PPAs. People that use
>> that PPA already are effectively running a rolling Kubuntu release. If
>> the rolling release happens then y'all won't need to maintain that PPA
>> any more.
>
> Not at all.
>
> While those PPAs are very popular, they are popular because they are new KDE
> on a stable release.  We probably need more PPAs, not fewer.
>
> For rolling to have consistent quality, that means no more KDE betas in
> rolling.  So new development work would all have to be done in a PPA.
>
> We'd also need per KDE release PPAs for at least some transitional period for
> LTS + KDE version.
>
> What that never gets us, however, is a release with the current KDE release
> more often than every two years.  That's a significant issue that I don't know
> how to solve without building ISOs from PPAs.
>
> I expect we can manage, but it will almost certainly be more complex, not
> less, if we are to maintain Kubuntu in a manner that's recognizable.
>

I don't think KDE releases aligned perfectly with Ubuntu release, such
that unlike before one can expect KDE full release to land much sooner
in the rolling release (straight away) and with more general
availability within one month. Instead of up-to 6 months (well
something like 4-5).
If I am not mistaken there has been in the past cases of shipping -rc
stacks of gtk/kde and doing 0-day / 1st-week SRUs of the final
releases. This is, in a way, "on-time" but defeats stability criteria
for the users.
KDE stacks have nightly builds and depending on how stable they are,
one can start uploading them into rolling release at beta phase for
example (or earlier / later). Thus giving full flexibility for Kubuntu
to align as best as you choose to the KDE release cycles.

Similarly for other Desktop Environments (XFCE, Fluxbox, MythTV etc).
You can been as bleeding-edge or as stable as majority of your users
expect you to.

Regards,

Dmitrijs.



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