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

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 04:48:21PM +0200, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) wrote:
> On 01/03/2013 15:12, Stefano Rivera wrote:
> >And we have to ask the question of what advantage Ubuntu is providing
> >over Debian, without 6-monthly releases.
> 
> I think for the hacker. for the enthusiast, for the people who like
> to build their own stuff whether for fun or profit... not that much
> really.
> 
> But I've come to peace a long time ago that I'm not in the Ubuntu
> target market. I think what Ubuntu provides over Debian, for the
> users who would find it useful is:
> 
>  * Longer support cycle (Ubuntu LTS is supported for 5 years,
>                          Debian typically for around 3 years)
>  * Ability to purchase commercial support from Canonical
>  * Packages only in Ubuntu (Unity, etc) (fixable)
>  * Services tied in to Ubuntu using non-free products such as
>    Ubuntu One and Landscape. (not trivial to get for Debian)
>  * Access to a larger repository of non-free software that is
>    already properly packaged and integrated (in Debian we don't
>    particularly care about that)

Also there are some things where the ability to get broad changes into
Ubuntu more quickly is really useful.  Look at Wookey's recent Debian
arm64 port announcement, for example: built on Ubuntu because it has
just been taking too long to get some easy patches into Debian, and the
nature of the beast is that even one missing patch to a core package can
be a serious blocker.

For multiarch and cross-building, we're way ahead of Debian right now,
and not because we've been hoarding patches.  I'm sure there are other
examples like that.

> What bothers me more than user loss is developer loss. It's a fact
> that Ubuntu as a community project is currently completely
> unsustainable. The community is just a thin layer on the work that
> Canonical is doing and if Canonical would dissappear (completely
> hypothetically), then I can't see how the project would carry on for
> long.
> 
> Ubuntu is /much/ more of a commercial project that happens to have a
> community rather than a community project with commercial backing,
> as it is often marketed by Canonical. It actually hurts a lot that
> Canonical people in leadership positions completely refuse to
> acknowledge this at all.

I suspect that many folks in Canonical would find it unpalatable to make
such an argument, because it would be very hard to avoid it sounding
like a criticism or a dismissal of the Ubuntu community outside
Canonical.  That would certainly be a consideration for me in any such
discussion.

Loss of developers is certainly a concern for me.  Stefano does have a
point that there's a chance that a rolling release model might help.  At
the moment we often see confusion among new developers asking how they
can get some big change into 12.10, or submitting patches against stable
releases and then having to round-trip to get them to submit against the
development release instead (which they don't use), etc.  The message
would be clearer, and I think more likely to fit what distribution
developers (as opposed to application developers) often naturally
assume, if we had LTS and rolling.  (Debian doesn't have nearly the same
problem with new developers trying to submit patches against stable.)

> >Dare I ask what happens when we approach the next LTS? Does the rolling
> >release freeze? From our current plans, I'd guess so.
> >Isn't that exactly what people who like rolling releases want to avoid?
> >The "debian-testing is frozen" problem?
> 
> It would be interesting to see what happens to 13.04 users, they
> wouldn't have an upgrade path to 14.04 if there are no releases in
> between. I guess they'll either have to be told "sorry, too bad" or
> 14.04 would have to be upgradeable from 12.04 and 13.04 (yikes).

Supporting upgrades from 13.04 is not that much extra work in addition
to supporting upgrades from 12.04.  The other way round is what's hard.

As for users of 13.04 being catapulted onto a rolling release without
notice: well, if Canonical withdraws funding for a 13.04 release, I
don't see much alternative to "sorry, too bad".  But at least those
users are people who signed up to a development release in the first
place, and either they're developers who will just stay on the
development release almost all the time anyway, or a rolling release
might be an improvement.  I'm more worried about the message to 12.10
users.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]