reflecting on first UDS session on "rolling releases"

Steve Magoun steve.magoun at canonical.com
Thu Mar 7 20:52:16 UTC 2013



On 03/07/2013 02:03 PM, Allison Randal wrote:
> On 03/07/2013 09:40 AM, Steve Magoun wrote:
>> > 
>> > Some observations from the big-OEM perspective:
>> > 1) The support lifecycle of the OS is important; an 18 month support
>> > lifecycle is too short for a product that may be manufactured for 3 years
>> > 2) Switching OSes in the factory is expensive and large OEMs like to do it
>> > infrequently
>> > 3) Stability is critical and the quality standards are high. Functionality
>> > like suspend/resume has to be rock-solid. To date, even the LTS releases
>> > need tweaks before they're stable enough to be delivered to OEMs.
>> > 
>> > From that point of view, standardizing on the LTS releases is a clear win,
>> > and large OEMs are already pretty well insulated from the interim releases -
>> > we treat the interim releases as a series of technology previews.
> Do you have a sense of what handset manufacturers will need, just in
> general terms? I know that phones/tablets were mentioned as a motivation
> for rolling releases. But, I haven't heard any mention so far of things
> like the FCC approval process. The certification requirements on what
> can be shipped as a phone are very, very different than those for
> laptops/desktops. It seems likely that the OEMs for phones will also
> prefer, or even be required by law, to stick to LTS + tightly controlled
> updates to a few specific packages.

I don't have much data about what the handset manufacturers need from the
Ubuntu cadence. I can speculate that they're far more interested in their
own dates than ours. By extension, any changes that (a) allow us to build
Ubuntu in a more efficient way and (b) increase the
quality/reliability/marketability of Ubuntu will improve the chances of
Ubuntu in the mobile marketplace.


Steve




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