Distribution quotes of the week

Maybe it’s too much to ask that we look over every little decision we make where there’s disagreement and attempt to find every last bit of common ground that we can (There were certainly times when it seemed to take forever to make a decision) but what about decisions that are close votes? What about decisions that have days-long threads as part of their backstory? In these cases, consider the proposal that the majority agrees on to be a strawman. A starting point from which to start chipping away to see what changes can be made that are still acceptable to the majority while addressing many of the issues that the minority has. Remember that the goal is to craft a compromise that addresses as many concerns as possible.

12.04 being an LTS we’ve been minding our P’s and Q’s, but many of our quality-oriented practices from 12.04 LTS will continue into Q territory. We’ll keep the platform usable throughout the cycle, because that helped hugely to encourage daily use of the release, which in turn gives us much better feedback on questions of quality. And we’ll ratchet up the continuous integration, smoke testing and automated benchmarking of the release, since we can do it all in the cloud. We have, so to speak, stacks and stacks of cloud to use. So quality is quotidian rather than quarterly. And it is both qualitative and quantitative, with user research and testing continuing to shape our design decisions. The effort we put into polishing Unity and the rest of the platform in 12.04 seem to have paid off handsomely, with many quondam quarrelsome suddenly quiescent in the face of a surge in support for the work.