Edgy Eft ... Edges Closer

[TheFridge]

<p><a class="glossary-term" href="glossary#term8"><acronym title="sabdfl: Mark Shuttleworth, the Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life">sabdfl</acronym></a> has <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-April/000064.html">declared</a> that the version of Ubuntu past 6.06 will be named “Edgy Eft”. Usually referred to as “Dapper+1”, edgy is expected to be a little more … edgy:</p>
<blockquote ><p>So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first flirt with multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager… and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly on the horizon.</p></blockquote>
<p>The release is still expected sometime in October in 2006. But don’t throw away those shiny Dapper servers just yet, the work invested so far will be around for a long time to come, so if you are concerned about being stuck in a release treadmill sabdfl goes on to say</p>
<blockquote ><p>We can afford to take some risks with Dapper+1, because Dapper has turned out so well. We have a great answer for people who need super-solid and super-predictable results: Dapper is still fresh, will continue to work on modern hardware for some time, and has plenty of legs in its support cycle left to run.</p></blockquote>


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[Jedeye]

good news... the Dapper development has been very exciting so far, cant wait to see Edgy!

[3rdalbum]

Edgy is going to be very exciting, but they've only got 4 months to put all this bleeding-edge technology together and make it work... it's likely to be buggy as hell, but at least Dapper will still be around. I bet after Edgy is released, Dapper will still be the version available through ShipIt.

[mmcmonster]

My guess is that Edgy will slip to 12/06 or even 1/07. Which is just fine. A six month development cycle is pretty tight, even if it's just packaging everything that is out there (which is *not* all that Ubuntu does).

Maybe extending out the development cycle to 9 months officially, with a 2-3 month feature freeze for bug fixes? As the number of Ubuntu users goes up, the releases are expected to maintain high (or even higher) quality.


Also, as the number of users go up, the higher the numbers you will leave behind with every release (Even with free releases, people become afraid of "breaking" something).

[tribaal]

I personally like the "frenetic" release cycles of 6 months... Even if Edgy turns out to be buggy, there still is dapper out there after all

- trib'

[Kilz]

mixed 32/64 bit sounds nice

[isotonic]

I would think that a year turnaround between major releases would be even better - allow for better project management, software development , testing and rollout.

6 months seems a bit too brutal a deadline for an O/S, unless the changes aren't that major anyway - in which case why make it a major release..?

My guess is that Edgy will slip to 12/06 or even 1/07. Which is just fine. A six month development cycle is pretty tight, even if it's just packaging everything that is out there (which is *not* all that Ubuntu does).

Maybe extending out the development cycle to 9 months officially, with a 2-3 month feature freeze for bug fixes? As the number of Ubuntu users goes up, the releases are expected to maintain high (or even higher) quality.


Also, as the number of users go up, the higher the numbers you will leave behind with every release (Even with free releases, people become afraid of "breaking" something).

[Lord Illidan]

I think 1 year is more reasonable.

[ubuntu_demon]

I think 1 year is more reasonable.

IMHO tracking gnome makes sense.

[prizrak]

I think Mark mentioned it, but the reason for the 6 months release cycle was to be able to work mostly on creating a new release as opposed to updating the current one indefinetly. Since the only patches we get are security ones not feature ones it is good that any release is only 6 months behind the times. A one year release schedule would force updates to software aside from security.