reflecting on first UDS session on "rolling releases"

[Allison Randal]

On 03/05/2013 07:47 PM, Robert Bruce Park wrote:
> 
> That's how I've been interpreting this all along... 2-year release
> cadence, and the current dev release is simply declared "rolling"
> without any real changes. I don't see any issues with this: it's a
> huge reduction in SRU burden while allowing more developer time to be
> spent developing things.

I don't have a problem with a 2-year cadence either. It's a sound
engineering plan.

The risk comes in building up a lot of hoopla about rolling releases
being a stable replacement for the 6-month cadence, not investing the
resources required to really develop/support rolling releases "right
now", and then failing to deliver anything remotely close to the
stability of the prior 6-month releases. It's better to under-promise
and succeed beyond expectations, than to over-promise and appear to fail.

It's easy enough to declare a 2-year cadence, and say that rolling
releases are an idea we'll be working on and plan to have solid after
the 14.04 release. That leaves time and space to do things right, and
only announce they're ready when they really are ready.


This still leaves the question of how best to support OEMs like
System76, and the Flavors. But I think jonathan is on the right track
with LTS + key package sets (or 13.04 + key package sets, if that's
declared the "final" 6-month release).

Allison