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newbie2
May 14th, 2008, 10:20 AM
Mark Shuttleworth, head of Canonical and founder of the Ubuntu project, has called on other Linux developers to synchronize releases of new versions of their distros. He also pledged to deliver the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu, version 10.4, in April 2010 - unless, of course, Red Hat, Novell and Debian decide to co-operate on a synchronized release at a different time.

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/102895/index.html
http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/27252/

bufsabre666
May 14th, 2008, 10:29 AM
honestly im iffy on the idea of distro synchronization, i love the idea of having everyone working together, but part of me likes how everything is differnt between distros, but i guess ill stay tuned for the resaults

jethro10
May 14th, 2008, 10:30 AM
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/102895/index.html
http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/27252/

It would be nice to see co-operation more in the linux OS world.

It would certainly beef things up and help penetration,

J

tdrusk
May 14th, 2008, 12:18 PM
Does this mean like combine with other distros?

If Ubuntu and Novell or Redhat combined we would have so many users.

Ub1476
May 14th, 2008, 12:32 PM
It means that everyone follows a special release schedule.

Say, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gnome, Kde, OpenOffice, ++, finish their next product in 2008, October.

Just see how well (I think) Ubuntu and Gnome works together, since Ubuntu follows Gnome release schedule. Had Firefox been following it too, we might have had a stable version shipping with 8.04 (or finished, since it's more stable than ff2 for me).

I think it would be great, but not to overdo it (I guess they figure it out).

hyper_ch
May 14th, 2008, 12:34 PM
It would be nice to see co-operation more in the linux OS world.
On can also say that too much co-operation hinders evolution/innovation ;)

ZarathustraDK
May 14th, 2008, 12:40 PM
If everyone acts the same way in a given aspect, and this way has a vulnerability, everyone will be vulnerable. That's pretty much the broadest possible way to express my concern.

Thirsty Ferret
May 14th, 2008, 12:55 PM
Surely it would be better to have staggered plans, so that for example an Open Office release, then a month later a Firefox release, then a month later a Debian release, then a month later an Ubuntu release - this would mean that for the Debian release there would be the new (and somewhat tested) versions of Open Office and Firefox, and Ubuntu would come in and take any Debian bug fixes too...

3rdalbum
May 14th, 2008, 01:34 PM
The best idea would be to have a set release schedule for all software that could be included in the base of a distribution, not necessarily for the distributions themselves.

jethro10
May 14th, 2008, 03:32 PM
On can also say that too much co-operation hinders evolution/innovation ;)

Yeah, I see your point but as linux is what 2% of the market even if it was unified, the other 98% is a big competitor, I don't see that as a hinderence.

J

hyper_ch
May 14th, 2008, 03:33 PM
Yeah, I see your point but as linux is what 2% of the market even if it was unified, the other 98% is a big competitor, I don't see that as a hinderence.

J
the 2% depends on what market you concentrate on... I tend to think there are more linux devices out there than microsoft ones...

Half-Left
May 14th, 2008, 03:46 PM
Yeah, I see your point but as linux is what 2% of the market even if it was unified, the other 98% is a big competitor, I don't see that as a hinderence.

J

I assume you talking about Microsoft, then they haven't got 98% of the market, it's more like 88-90% since Apple has supposedly hit double figures.

Maybe the big three can work out a deal to sell one Linux distro to the desktop OEM's but thats just a dream I think.

toupeiro
May 14th, 2008, 04:13 PM
I don't see any harm in synchronizing releases. Its not really taking anything away from any respective release, its just setting a level of expectation across the board on when a user can get their hands on the latest release of their distro. Such planning in a "mixed shop" of linux distributions could be very valuable.

AdamWill
May 14th, 2008, 06:18 PM
It means that everyone follows a special release schedule.

Say, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gnome, Kde, OpenOffice, ++, finish their next product in 2008, October.

Just see how well (I think) Ubuntu and Gnome works together, since Ubuntu follows Gnome release schedule. Had Firefox been following it too, we might have had a stable version shipping with 8.04 (or finished, since it's more stable than ff2 for me).

I think it would be great, but not to overdo it (I guess they figure it out).

As it happens, we (Mandriva) and Ubuntu already do follow very similar release schedules. Mandriva, back to the days of Mandrake, has always released around April and around October. Ubuntu happened to line up with this schedule a few years back, IIRC, when the last LTS release got delayed a few months, and since then most of our releases have been within a couple of weeks of each other.

jethro10
May 15th, 2008, 10:38 AM
the 2% depends on what market you concentrate on... I tend to think there are more linux devices out there than microsoft ones...

We seemed to be talking in contex to the traditional PC market, sorry if I was mistaken
J

jethro10
May 15th, 2008, 10:39 AM
I assume you talking about Microsoft, then they haven't got 98% of the market, it's more like 88-90% since Apple has supposedly hit double figures.

Maybe the big three can work out a deal to sell one Linux distro to the desktop OEM's but thats just a dream I think.

No I just meant generically, anything that's not linux can be seen as a competitor in this context.

maniacmusician
May 15th, 2008, 10:49 AM
Having every distro release on the same schedule has the disadvantage of every distro having the same version of every program (for the most part). In the current setup, if Ubuntu doesn't have the updated packages I need, I can find out what distro does, and boot it up in a VM. Depending on the amount of work I have to do with it and what kind of stability I need, this can be more useful than compiling, especially since VMs on modern systems can provide near-native performance nowadays.

You could argue that upstream will start shifting their release schedule to match the distros, but I think this is really a terrible inconvenience to place on upstream. A lot of developers have time constraints and many are just developing in their free time. They have lives and other things to deal with and a lot of them just can't commit to regular release schedules. They also might find a different release schedule more ideal.

I'd be fine with a handful of distros synchronizing, but I think that to do so on a large scale would be detrimental.

hellomoto
May 16th, 2008, 06:42 PM
On Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:03am, the mark shuttleworth website had a new and rather interesting post "The Art of Release".


http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146 (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146)

Basically the post informed people that Ubuntu is very proud of being able to release its OS to date (and when we say to date -- we mean literally to the day).

It rightly states on the post that it would be very unlikely MS would ever be able to do the same with there OS (vista being a great example of this).


However it goes on to say that:

"There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that."


Obviously this would be great for Ubuntu and other distros but my question is..

how lightly do u think this going to happen?

When is this going to happen?

Oldsoldier2003
May 16th, 2008, 06:47 PM
On Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:03am, the mark shuttleworth website had a new and rather interesting post "The Art of Release".


http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146 (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146)

Basically the post informed people that Ubuntu is very proud of being able to release its OS to date (and when we say to date -- we mean literally to the day).

It rightly states on the post that it would be very unlikely MS would ever be able to do the same with there OS (vista being a great example of this).


However it goes on to say that:

"There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that."


Obviously this would be great for Ubuntu and other distros but my question is..

how lightly do u think this going to happen?

When is this going to happen?

my money is on "when hell freezes over"

hellomoto
May 16th, 2008, 06:49 PM
would it not benefit all the distros evolved though?

disagreeing and squabbling over something like this between distros would seam stupid and ever so slight MS. lol

.nedberg
May 16th, 2008, 06:53 PM
I think it is a good idea. And I think it will happen. Maybe not becase everybody wants it and plans it that way, but just because it will work that way.

"Gotta get version X.X ready before distro Y is released"

dca
May 16th, 2008, 06:53 PM
my money is on "when hell freezes over"

+1

Oldsoldier2003
May 16th, 2008, 06:54 PM
would it not benefit all the distros evolved though?

disagreeing and squabbling over something like this between distros would seam stupid and ever so slight MS. lol
Consider the bad blood between the oldtimers over various insults/slights in ancient history, toss in a bit of jealousy and bitterness and shake well.
It's only Human nature that they won't agree.


edit: you do realize that Shuttleworth scored a huge PR coup with no commitment or effort. Its all a game and he sucker punched them

hellomoto
May 16th, 2008, 06:57 PM
Consider the bad blood between the oldtimers over various insults/slights in ancient history, toss in a bit of jealousy and bitterness and shake well.
It's only Human nature that they won't agree.

hmmm add a touch of PMT hormone and u have your self a disaster! :lolflag:

dca
May 16th, 2008, 06:57 PM
You know, although RH, Novell, & Canonical have similar business plans that's where the similarities end. RH has Fedora to use as a testbed because I'm sorry it's barely usable any other way, Novell has openSuSE which in Novell's own words is not designed for production use, only for hobbyists. Well heck, why would I even use that, then... Ubuntu on the other hand is completely free. The same vers downloaded for free, installed for free, etc, is the same vers Canonical will support. When those issues get sorted out, then discussions can be made on: "is a 6 month cycle better", etc, etc, etc.

Oldsoldier2003
May 16th, 2008, 07:04 PM
You know, although RH, Novell, & Canonical have similar business plans that's where the similarities end. RH has Fedora to use as a testbed because I'm sorry it's barely usable any other way, Novell has openSuSE which in Novell's own words is not designed for production use, only for hobbyists. Well heck, why would I even use that, then... Ubuntu on the other hand is completely free. The same vers downloaded for free, installed for free, etc, is the same vers Canonical will support. When those issues get sorted out, then discussions can be made on: "is a 6 month cycle better", etc, etc, etc.

Don't forget that Ubuntu is a Debian derivative therefore a lot of Ubuntu's position on it will be related to the state of Debian sid in this whole PR stunt of a declaration.

hellomoto
May 16th, 2008, 07:30 PM
do u think this is just a PR stunt and "all talk" so to speak?

Oldsoldier2003
May 16th, 2008, 07:32 PM
do u think this is just a PR stunt and "all talk" so to speak?

Absolutely. It's a win win situation for Shuttleworth. If they agree it makes life easier. If they don't he can say "hey we tried but noone wanted to play along".

hellomoto
May 16th, 2008, 08:05 PM
i guess your right but i think it would be within other distros best interest to join in... however

i think that if 3 or more distros came out at the same time this could be a bad thing for the new linux users.

1. Ubuntu may loose new users to other distros because they see all these distros coming out at the same time and just think "i may as well try that one" - which may or may not be ubuntu.

2. ubuntu may loose new users that try a new release of ubuntu and because it doesn't work straight away go off and try the other new distro.

3. ubuntu may loose current users that convert to the latest new release and because they loose some settings or initially has an adverse effect, go and try the other latest release from another distro as they "don't want to go back to windows but want linux to just work"


what u think?

lazyart
May 16th, 2008, 08:19 PM
I've felt for a while that the releases come too quick. I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing-- you don't have to upgrade just because it's available. I just moved to Gusty a week before Hardy was released! (for that alone the developers should be congratulated-- stuff just works!)

I do like the idea of the point releases for LTS.

Kinst
May 16th, 2008, 09:03 PM
Debian agreeing to a 6-month release cycle? That's fundamentally against debian philosophy and Mark knows it. It's one of the reasons ubuntu exists at all.

Debian releases a new version when the position of Jupiter is in alignment and each package has been individually blessed by tiny obsessive-compulsive monks and then flown to its maintainer on the wings of doves.