Follow Up from "Let's Discuss Interim Releases"

[Rick Spencer]

Hi all,

There has been a lot of discussion and impact around the strawman
proposal for changing our release cadence that I sent last Thursday.
There was a misconception that the proposal was a decision that I was
masking as a call for discussion. I want to reassure everyone that I
really did mean it as a discussion. I feel passionately that we need
to change and innovate in this area, but a change like this cannot
succeed, or in fact be made, without discussion in the community and
proper governance.

Discussion of this topic on the mailing list and at UDS this week was
wide ranging. There were a lot of divergent opinions and ideas. The
discussion seems to have resulted in roughly three different forms of
proposals.

1. Move to a rolling release similar to what I proposed in the
original straw man.
2. Continue to release interim releases but only support them until
roughly the next interim release 6 months later.
3. Dramatically increase the rate of our releases to, say, once per month.

I've attempted to capture the essence of these proposals (and
associated sub-proposals) along with a structure for points and
counterpoints in wiki format to support honing and organizing. They
are currently stubs, so will need detailed content and continued
honing, but the wiki format invites collaboration on that honing.

See:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseCadence
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseCadence/RollingRelease
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseCadence/SixMonthInterimRelease
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseCadence/TrueMonthlyReleases

I'd like to invite everyone who is interested to get their input into
these pages by March 18th (or thereabouts). Then I'd like to work with
interested people to select what we consider the best proposal to take
to the technical board for guidance.

Part of the straw man proposal was to convert 13.04 into a Rolling
Release in order to allow us to go faster on the converged OS starting
immediately. Given the work that is left to achieve a proper proposal
for the tech board, I don't foresee such a proposal being completed in
time to make such a radical change to 13.04.

Cheers, Rick