Distributions
Debian and time-based freezes
On July 29, a surprise announcement heralded a significant change in the way the Debian release process works. Rather than freezing the distribution when it was "ready," the release team will start to impose a scheduled freeze in December of every odd-numbered year, starting with December, 2009. There still will be no scheduled release dates, but the plan is to start the final phase of the development cycle in a scheduled manner.It would appear that much of the Debian development community was as surprised as anybody else; there had been no discussion of this change on any of the project's mailing lists. The press release states:
Many developers did not attend DebConf (which concludes on July 30), and those who were there disagree somewhat with the above description. It seems that some DebConf attendees, at least, feel that all they got was a few hours advance notice; the change was announced to them as something which had already been decided.
It should not be surprising that there is a fair amount of dissent in the ranks. This is Debian, after all. But there seem to be more than the usual number of complaints this time around. The key themes seem to be:
- The change may or may not be good, but the way in which it was done
was wrong. Debian developers should not learn about a major process
change from a press release.
- There is no reason to do a short development period to freeze this
December when a freeze in 2010 would fit the two-year period
perfectly. Shortening the "squeeze" development cycle halfway through
will create havoc with many developers' plans and endanger a number of
the objectives for the squeeze release. A lot of work will have to
be crammed into the remaining time; some minor components,
like the kernel, have not yet been updated.
- Freezing in December will guarantee that Debian will ship obsolete versions of KDE, which releases in January.
The biggest grumble, though, appears to come from a feeling that the Debian project is being asked to change its ways and, arguably, compromise the quality of its releases for the sole purpose of accommodating the Ubuntu release schedule. One might dismiss this idea as overly conspiratorial, but it's worth reading this interview with Mark Shuttleworth, published on July 12:
In other words, Mark Shuttleworth knew about this change before the Debian developers - who are expected to implement it - knew. Given that Debian is supposed to be an open project, something which gives this kind of smoke-filled-room-decision feeling is guaranteed to be received poorly.
There are answers to some of these complaints, of course. Luk Claes, a member of the release team, said:
Even without the dark talk of "consequences," this statement will not have helped the situation; the press release says "Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes," which is not the normal language used for a proposal. But it is true that the Debian release team is empowered by the project to make decisions like this. Meanwhile, the Debian press team claims that the abrupt announcement was required to keep journalists from mangling the news.
The short cycle is justified this way:
The release team has also promised to talk with the Debian KDE maintainers to see what sort of solution can be worked out there.
But the release team has said nothing about Ubuntu and has not responded to the charges which have been made in that regard. It seems that a good case could be made for closer cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu - in fact, Debian developers have been asking for that for some time. Ubuntu has become a major (if not the major) distribution channel for Debian, increasing Debian's relevance in the process. If the combined distribution channel could be made to work better for everybody involved, the results should be good for both Ubuntu and Debian. It is hard to fault the release team for exploring ways to make Debian's release cycle work better for Ubuntu; one could, indeed, argue that it would be irresponsible for them to do anything else.
So the real question has to be: why has this conversation with Ubuntu been swept under the rug in the release team's communications with the Debian development community? It creates a strong impression of hidden agendas. The Debian project may now head into an extended period of more-than-usually acrimonious debate, dueling general resolutions, and more. An open discussion would not have skipped the acrimonious debate (we're still talking about Debian here), but it may well have led to something very close to what the release team is aiming for with strong buy-in from the development community. What the project will decide to do now is rather less clear; what we may be seeing here is the loss of a great opportunity.
New Releases
Omega (Pug) Release - Fedora Remix
Omega Pug has been released. "Omega is a completely free and open source Linux based operating system and a Fedora remix suitable for desktop and laptop users. It is a installable Live CD for regular PC (i686 architecture) systems. It has all the features of Fedora and number of additional software including multimedia players and codecs by default. Omega plays any multimedia content (including MP3) or commercial DVD's out of the box."
openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 4 Released
The openSUSE team has released openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 4. "Lots of changes since the M3 release! The live CDs can now be deployed using USB sticks -- which is particularly important for netbook computers without CD or DVD drives. The live CDs now contain mc, and the KDE live CDs include YaKuake. And YaST has a new Qt-based Control Center." See the call for testing and consider joining the core test team.
Tin Hat 20090727 is out
A new release of Tin Hat has been announced. "Tin Hat is a fully featured Linux desktop based on Hardened Gentoo which runs purely in RAM. It aims to be very secure, stable, and fast. This release continues the work of hardening the system libraries and binaries begun in the previous release with little changes to the kernel."
Ubuntu Karmic Koala alpha 3 released
The Alpha 3 release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been announced. "Alpha 3 includes a number of software updates that are ready for large-scale testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs."
Distribution News
Fedora
Brainstorming Session for Fedora Community 2.0
A brainstorming session for Fedora Community 2.0 will be held on Monday, August 3, 2009 at 1500 UTC. "For those of you who haven't no idea what "Fedora Community" is, its our newest Fedora web application, providing a window into the Fedora distribution, and leveraging the power of Fedora's Account System, Bodhi, Bugzilla, Koji, and PackageDB into a single user-friendly website. It is built entirely with Free Software, such as Moksha and Turbogears 2. Fedora Community is designed to simplify Fedora workflows and bring transparency to Fedora processes."
Fedora updates pushing: Behind the scenes
Josh Boyer takes a behind the scenes look at recent problems with Fedora updates. "Just before F11 release, we enabled deltarpms for updates. There were some bumps in the first few days, but we got through it and the people rejoiced. Everyone was happy and the Fedora updates world had a victory in terms of end user gains. Then time went by. Updates kept getting submitted by maintainers, and they noticed they were pushed to users less and less frequently. Some asked on the list, and rel-eng (mostly me) blamed deltarpms. This was not an untruth. Generating deltarpms is a pretty intensive task, and the larger the RPMs in question, the longer it takes to actually generate them. So our illustrious Infrastructure team took note and increase the DRAM and number of CPUs the releng box had. This has proved to be most helpful, and our box no longer gets kernel OOMs if the rawhide and updates mashes happen to be going at the same time. However I still didn't think something was right."
Fedora Board Recap
Click below for a brief recap of the July 23, 2009 meeting of the Fedora Advisory Board. Topics include Russian Fedora Initiative, Extended Life Cycle, Spin Trademarks, and Move to fp.o email.
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo Council meeting summary
A summary of the July 20, 2009 meeting of the Gentoo Council is available. Topics include the meeting format and GLEP 39. The full log is also available.
Mandriva Linux
Code of Conduct and Manifesto
Mandriva has two new wiki documents. There's a Code of Conduct for forums, mailing lists, irc, etc. The Manifesto explains the goals of Mandriva and should help explain the project to new users.
SUSE Linux and openSUSE
openSUSE Board Meeting Minutes, July 1 + July 14
The minutes for two openSUSE board meetings are available. Topics for the July 1 meeting include membership approval, creation of an openSUSE foundation, ambassador program, opening of factory and hack week. Topics for the July 14 meeting include membership approval and openSUSE Foundation.
Ubuntu family
Minutes from the Ubuntu Technical Board meeting
Click below for the minutes of the July meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board. Topics include a review of outstanding actions, Technical Board nominations, Developer Membership Board, Patent policy, and Governance review.
Distribution Newsletters
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 313
The DistroWatch Weekly for July 27, 2009 is out. "When you buy a new computer, how do you go about choosing an operating system for it? With today's powerful hardware and specific user requirements, combined with ever-increasing number of excellent free distributions, it is not unusual for many of us to spend weeks on testing and evaluating before we find the ideal match. Read this week's feature story which describes a typical journey of a geek after getting a brand-new, powerful machine. In the news section, Gentoo celebrates its 10th birthday, Rahul Sundaram presents a new release of Omega - a custom Fedora with built-in multimedia support, Linux Mint chooses the newly open-sourced Launchpad for bug tracking, and FreeBSD publishes a paper on its release engineering process. Finally, don't miss any of the regular sections, which include summaries of the five new distributions submitted to DistroWatch last week."
Fedora Weekly News 186
The Fedora Weekly News for July 26, 2009 is out. "In this week's issue, we begin with news from the Fedora Planet, including tips on running Fedora 11 on an Intel Mac, tethering Fedora 11 to an iPhone, and another in the series of XI2 Recipes. Quality Assurance reports on last week's Fit and Finish test day on power management and suspend/resume, as well as much detail on QA-related weekly meetings. Translation brings us detail of the Fedora 12 Translation Schedule, a new Translation Quick Start Guide, as well as new Publican version of some Fedora documentation In Artwork/Design news, testing details of the new gallery and an update on Fedora 12 theming, amongst other topics. This issue rounds out with Fedora virtualization goodness, including details on new versions of libguestfs, virt-what and redesigns of the virt-manager UI, as well as details on how to cluster libvirt hosts."
The Mint Newsletter - issue 89
The Mint Newsletter for July 23, 2009 covers the release of Linux Mint 7 XFCE RC1 and Mint to use Launchpad for translations, bugs, blueprints and github for code hosting and version control.OpenSUSE Weekly News/81
This issue of the openSUSE Weekly covers Call for openSUSE Core Test Team, Hackweek IV, Linux.com/Rob Day: The Kernel Newbie Corner: Building and Running a New Kernel, openSUSE Forums: How to Recover Home Partition?, Ubuntuforums.org/Leif Sandvik: Howto; Firefox profile in RAM for increased speed and stability, and more.Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #152
The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for July 25, 2009 is out. "In this issue we cover: Karmic Alpha 3 released, Launchpad is now open source, Ubuntu-US-NY is now an approved Ubuntu LoCo team, Launchpad 2.2.7: translation sharing, release file, automation and more, Focusing on the Launchpad UI, Ubuntu Forums tutorial of the week, Kubuntu Translation Days, Ubuntu Podcast #31, and much, much more!"
Distribution reviews
Reviewed: Fedora 11 (Tux Radar)
Tux Radar has a review of Fedora 11. "Post-install, things get more interesting, and the first changes appear before you even log in. The boot-up routine is now so smooth that there is no need to hide it from your Mac-appreciating friends. A smooth transition from the PC POST screen takes you to the login screen in 25 seconds or less. Well, it does on our test machine (which takes 31 seconds to get to the same spot in Ubuntu). When you get there you may be confused by the addition of a new widget above the list of login names. That's because Fedora 11 supports fingerprint logins with supported hardware."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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