Ubuntu Technical Board Looks at Shuttleworth’s Proposal for Release Management Methodology

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-19

In this article, the news team invited Rick Spencer, Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering, to comment on the decisions by the Ubuntu Technical Board and how they will impact users.

The Ubuntu Technical Board (TB) discussed Ubuntu Founder, Mark Shuttleworth’s proposal to tweak the release management methodology of Ubuntu releases in its 18 March meeting. Shuttleworth’s proposal was a follow up to Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering, Rick Spencer’s original proposal and also harvest the fruits of the discussion that followed.

The TB is now referring to the non-LTS releases as “standard” releases. This change is in response to feedback that the term “Interim Release” denotes an unimportant release, and recognizes that these releases are in fact, important to many people.

During this meeting the following votes occurred.

The first vote was very crisp: Reduce maintenance period for regular/standard (non-LTS) Ubuntu releases from 18 months to 9 months (starting with release TBD)

What does this mean for users?

This means that users of the standard/non-LTS releases will have three months after the *next* release to update. So, if you are a standard/non-LTS user expect to upgrade to the next release about every six months, with a three month grace period if you can’t upgrade for some reason.

Why is this change important?

This change is important to the Ubuntu Community because it means that there will be fewer stable/LTS releases being supported at any one time. These stable/LTS releases will be better supported and leave developers and other contributors with more energy to focus on designing and implementing the next big idea. As Ubuntu enters the age of convergent devices, its contributors will need all the energy they can get for that development.

The second vote was about the “when” and the TB was asked to vote on Implementation of the above change to the maintenance schedule effective in 13.04 release and later.

What does this mean for users?

This means that the TB voted that the 13.04 release will get nine months of support. There was discussion about applying the principle retroactively, back to the 12.10 release; however, the TB felt this was backing out a promise and they did not want to set such a precedent.

The third and final vote was about allowing users to easily “track the tip” of development.

What does this mean for users?

This is akin to providing what Rick Spencer had labelled a “rolling release”. The general idea being that a user could opt for continuous upgrades on what is essentially the development release. For example, if a user was running the development series and updating daily then when 13.04 became a standard/non-LTS release, that user wouldn’t have to to do anything to then start getting updates for the 13.10 release.

The TB voted to allow the development team to enable this capability of tracking the development release without intervention. However, the specific implementation questions yet to be determined include how to enable users to continuously track the development focus of Ubuntu without having to explicitly upgrade.

Summary

All votes were unanimous among all three members of the TB that were present.

Discussions that followed the vote was based on how to better support the LTS release with optional upgrades. For example, could someone backport Unity to the previous stable/LTS release so that LTS release users could get the improved experience, if they desired. This topic was moved to next TB meeting.

For more information on the Ubuntu TB Meetings please see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TechnicalBoard

Rick Spencer, Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering

Changes in Ubuntu releases decided by the Ubuntu Technical Board

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-19

In yesterday’s meeting we covered two of the topics from Mark’s proposal to the Technical Board:

Reducing the length of support for our regular (non-LTS) releases

The rationale here is that it’s costing a lot of time to maintain all those releases for 18 months. It’s also causing a lot of load on the SRU team and on developers to ensure that upgrading from one release to the other won’t cause regressions due to fixes being SRUed only to a few releases.

The change in support length from 18 months to 9 months will reduce the number of releases we need to support in parallel while still allowing enough time for our users to upgrade to the next release.

This change will affect Ubuntu releases starting with 13.04, any older regular release will still be supported for 18 months and LTS releases will still be supported for 5 years.

This change was approved through two votes, the first about shortening the support length to 9 months and the second about doing it starting with 13.04. Both votes had all 3 attending Technical Board members’ approval and had general support by the other members from mailing-list discussions.

Enable users to continuously track the development focus of Ubuntu
without having to explicitly upgrade

This discussion was about making it easier for some of our users to keep their machine always on the current development release.

This has nothing to do with Rolling Releases and is purely about setting up some kind of meta-series on the archive mirrors that people can use instead of having to manually upgrade from one development release to the next.

There again, all 3 present members agreed with this proposal.

Other discussions

Outside of those two items, we also briefly discussed some changes to our update tool to allow our users to upgrade by more than a single release at a time.

In the current state of things we allow for upgrades from a release to the next or from an LTS release to the next LTS release.

The plan here is to change that, so that a user of Ubuntu 12.10 could directly update to Ubuntu 13.10 or 14.04 LTS.

This change should make the life of our users much easier and will ensure that we get to the next LTS with much more reliable and well tested upgrades.

The Technical Board didn’t feel that there would be anything to vote on at this time and leaves the implementation and testing of this to the various teams involved (Foundations, QA, Release).

The 3 items the Technical Board has voted on and accepted are considered as final. We do not expect to have to vote again on any of this and are just waiting on the implementation of those.

Stéphane Graber, on behalf of the Ubuntu Technical Board

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 308

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-18

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #308 for the week March 11 – 17, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • Vibhav Pant
  • David Morfin
  • Caleb Majeski
  • Javier Lopez
  • Matt Rudge
  • And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Ubuntu SDK Days: Day 2 is just around the corner

By dholbach | Published: 2013-03-15

Ubuntu SDK

 

We had a spectacular response to the Ubuntu SDK Days yesterday. Lots of people showed up, asked their questions and found out how their app for Ubuntu might work best. Today, Friday 15th March, is Day 2 of the event and we have a great set of speakers lined up for today:

It’s all very simple. Head to http://ubuntuonair.com to watch the action live, get involved, ask your questions and get to know everybody else.

Also, if you want to demo what you’ve been working on, add yourself to the bottom of the wiki page and we’ll bring you into the last session, our lightning talks / project demos.

13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Beta 1 Released!

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-03-14

Welcome to the Raring Ringtail Beta 1 release, which will in time become the 13.04 release.

This alpha features images for Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Studio and Xubuntu.

At the end of the 12.10 development cycle, the Ubuntu desktop and server flavours decided that they would reduce the number of milestone images going forward and the focus would concentrate on daily quality and fortnightly testing rounds known as cadence testing. Based on that change, the Ubuntu products themselves will not have a Beta 1 release. Its first milestone release will be the FinalBetaRelease on the 28th of March 2013. Other Ubuntu flavours have the option to release using the usual milestone schedule.

Pre-releases of Raring Ringtail are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.

Beta 1 is the third in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Raring development cycle, in addition to our daily development images. The Beta images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Raring. You can download
them here:

Beta 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. For a more detailed description of the changes in the Beta 1 release and the known bugs (which can save you the effort of reporting a duplicate bug, or help you find proven workarounds), please see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Raring, we suggest that you subscribe initially to the ubuntu-devel-announce list. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other interesting events.

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce

Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list on Thu Mar 14 20:40:34 UTC 2013 by Stéphane Graber, on behalf of the release team