Debian to adopt time-based releases

Debian to adopt time-based releases

I still don't see that it's going to help Debian.

Debian has been using time-based release schedules for at least a couple releases now. That is not actually new. E.g. here (2007-06-16) is the annoucement of the schedule for lenny, including dates when it would freeze. Which happened right on time. Now, obviously, the release slipped a bit: it took longer to stabilize than people hoped for, but this plan can't (and doesn't propose to) nail down the timing of the release, only the freeze. To say that now users have a more dependable schedule than before is not actually true.

Okay, so what does Debian get out of the deal? The hope is certainly that it will get cooperation from the Ubuntu developers, who could work on everything upstream in Debian and flow that into Ubuntu, rather than working on Ubuntu-specific improvements. Which would of course result in both the Debian and Ubuntu releases being higher quality with less effort. If that actually does happen, it will indeed be good for everyone...although I don't believe Debian should have messed up their release timeline so drastically in order to make this happen.

But, my feeling is that's unlikely. What I expect to happen is that Canonical devs will be busy with their own distinctive release features instead and not help much with the Debian bugs -- especially since many Debian bugs are in packages Ubuntu doesn't officially support. Furthermore, they will be able to diverge even further from Debian due to Debian being in essentially an already releasable state at the time of Ubuntu's release.

Then there are some unavoidable downsides for Debian:
1) Their security team has more work to do (need to support 3 versions simultaneously instead of 2 this time)
2) More work to ensure upgrading skipping a version works this time
3) Unexpectedly little time to finish the current release
4) Increased time-between-releases from previously-chosen 18-month target.

And upsides for Ubuntu:
1) Better quality release of the essentially-untested-in-Ubuntu "universe" components, by basing it off a almost-stable debian packages instead of unstable debian packages.
2) There will never be a point in time where a Debian release is shinier/newer than an Ubuntu release, and people who like shiny might be tempted to try Debian for the first time and stay.