Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu? [LWN.net]

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 17:55 UTC (Fri) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link]

If I got a penny every time someone proposed that Ubuntu turns into a rolling release distro, I would stop telling them to use a different distro instead.

(Yes, I realize this proposal isn't about rolling releases, but it's close enough)

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 18:05 UTC (Fri) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (34 responses)

Ubuntu probably does need a new release process, but it wouldn't be the only distro - Fedora desperately needs one too. There are many major issues each and every release, and it's only really suitable for use by Fedora developers - e.g. people who would put up with not being able to print in F15 (as an example). The non-release versions of Fedora are even worse, with people not batting an eyelid at releasing broken stuff. I don't know how many Fedora devs run the non-release versions, but you need the patience of an absolute saint when key features break with such frightening regularity. "Oh look, my machine doesn't boot again, shock".

I'm choosing a distro to install for a family member, who is IT literate but needs something stable that works. Ubuntu and Fedora are right out; they're just not usable. OpenSUSE I have no experience of, maybe it's better. RHEL/SLED is definitely in the running but $50/year is too steep (IMHO).

So at the moment it kind of looks like Debian, or CentOS/SL. Debian, at this point, is kind of "Ubuntu, done right", which is desperately ironic. It's releasing more regularly, but at extremely high quality, and I could say similar things about the RHEL derivatives.

In many ways, I agree with Scott: releasing regularly is definitely important. But, imho, most important is releasing something worth using - and both Ubuntu and Fedora fall down hard there, right now.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 18:35 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

OpenSUSE is very stable, even with tumbleweed enabled. So it might very well be worth it to give it a try, since for a non-expert but IT-literate person, it's also quite easy to administer.

Mageia is another alternative

Posted Sep 9, 2011 20:34 UTC (Fri) by tonyblackwell (guest, #43641) [Link]

Mageia (the fork of Mandriva) put out a very slick first release some months back and has a vibrant community updating it. Extremely usable for a non-IT person. http://www.mageia.org

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 19:00 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (28 responses)

Why you be badmouth'n my Fedora? It works for me.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 19:41 UTC (Fri) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (27 responses)

Because that's the distro I have direct experience of. My comments about F16, for example, are coloured by recent experience. I'm told that a current glib2 update breaks Gnome; I haven't suffered that yet, but I did have the entirety of /boot blown away last week and four times out of five Gnome doesn't log in anyway: I get the dead computer and no fall-back.

F15 lost parallel printer support almost completely it seems, and network printing is not much better: the Gnome system settings cappet for it simply does not work, and s-c-p works insofar as I can configure the printer and see toner levels (useful!) but not yet print.

I can name tonnes of other issues, like the fact pino made it into the default install despite not working in any obvious way, even though this was known before release. Of course, there are bugs in all software: what it comes down to, though, is "Are there sufficient numbers of bugs that they cut across most users' experience?" In the case of Fedora, that's almost certainly true: even if the "Gold" tested release works; hundreds of updates are released within a couple of days which will almost certainly break something crucial.

I use Fedora on all my machines, I try to help develop it. But it's busted beyond fixing right now, and I'd never let a "normal user" anywhere near it for any extended period of time.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:14 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (21 responses)

hmm I'm not having any issues using s-c-p in F15 printing to my network printers at home and at work. Same printers I've used for 2+ years now. 3 different updated F15 installs with intel video chipsets working fine with gnome3 logins. I will confirm that I can't make the Gnome3 printer capplet useful. But s-c-p printer support for configuring printers is working fine for me.

I've seen someone report that a 3rd party gtk theme they installed ended up breaking gtk based apps when trying to print. Uninstalling the gtk theme fixed the issue. Maybe you have something like that on your syetem?

I don't have a parallel printer anymore so I can't provide any feedback on that.

As for F16...well...its pre-release still...meh.

-jef

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:57 UTC (Fri) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (20 responses)

Nope, I don't have any fun Gtk+ setup. Just stock Fedora 15; and if you trawl through Bugzilla - as I have, as indeed I have bugs open (and unanswered) - you'll see there are a tonne of people with problems, and on the mailing lists, and on the forums.

I'd love to be able to tell you why my setup simply doesn't work and yours does (gnome capplet notwithstanding; I assume that doesn't work for anyone, but maybe there is a small group for whom it's awesome). I've no idea, and I've looked hard. I have a colord warning in CUPS but the printer is mono, maybe there's an issue there - but it's all chatting over dbus and I have no idea how to turn that off or whatever. I'll just keep waiting until the maintainer gives me some clue in the bug I opened months ago.

The "As for F16" attitude is exactly why Fedora doesn't get tested properly - because no-one gives a flying monkey about the prerelease. I know plenty of Fedora packagers who simply do not use it, because it's broken crap. So what happens is that people don't bother even trying it until alpha or beta at best.

I'm one of the few who persists in using F16 as a day-to-day system, because you cannot test stuff properly without running it more or less full time. And I get bitten on the ass regularly for my trouble. And let's be honest, there's no consensus within the project that *releases* are even suitable for anyone outside of hobbyist hackers anyway.

To finish this on a positive note: AdamW is probably one of the best value hires Red Hat has made in recent years, and the QA and test day stuff keeps getting better in a large part (it seems to me) due to him. It's not like progress isn't being made; it's just that stuff keeps being broken.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 23:33 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (17 responses)

I think you took the wrong thing away from my f16 comment.

I expect breakage to happen somewhere in the chosen distribution release model. I also understand that "time-release" models versus "when its ready" models will absolutely positively allow more breakages through into the distribution release due to the nature of complexity of the integration process and the existence of finite resources. We can beat on that reality with better tooling and better resource management, but I take it as a true fact that there are unsolvable conflicts of interest in aggressive time based releases and the needs of integration testing.

Holding up Debian as the gold standard that it is, they have experimental and unstable to do integration work in a more granular fashion...but they also "release" at a much longer timescale. They live with the same conflicts they have chosen a different point of the curve to live on.

For Fedora specifically I expect most (but not all breakage) to happen in the pre-release tree. I'm not going to get overtly upset when my pre-release F16 install falls over and dies due to an pre-release update mistake. Should I be mad when it happens? Should I spit bullets and rage at the sky? How does that help?

I also think your conjecture as to why few people are running pre-release is probably overly simplistic. The chosen release cycle and the lifetime cycle put additional constraints on package maintainers. But let's cycle back to Debian. Do you know what percentage of Debian users/maintainers run Experimental or Unstable on a day-to-day basis?

-jef

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 2:07 UTC (Sat) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link] (8 responses)

> Do you know what percentage of Debian users/maintainers run Experimental or Unstable on a day-to-day basis?

I don't have any statistics, but my guess is that mostly everyone not running a server is running Unstable. Experimental is rarely used as a whole, but people often install individual packages from Experimental in an Unstable system.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 9:43 UTC (Sat) by bobbytables (guest, #65908) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, but you are wrong.

I'm running stable - although I have some very few key packages (non-free firmware, virtualbox and wireless hacking tools) from stable-backports, testing and unstable.

I'm sure there are plenty people more as me. The simple fact that stable-backports exist can attest this, not to mention the bugs which are filed against desktop software by people who use stable. All bug reports done through the reportbug tool have a "apt prefers" section which tells which release they are using.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 20:32 UTC (Sat) by przemoc (guest, #67594) [Link]

Same here, i.e. stable with some changes.

Well, not exactly same, because over time not only key packages have been upgraded in my box (like tmux from backports, nvidia-* from testing/wheezy), but even less important ones. OTOH due to bumped versions of dependencies in testing+ (like in case of okular, it needed though lowering KDE4 ver requirement and removing some unsupported &jovie; in index.docbook) or lack of maintainership (like in case of pan), you're sometimes enforced to do your own builds. I also use external repos (for virtualbox or google-chrome).

I don't like adding repos of testing+ in stable explicitly, so I've crafted handy oneliner for getting all packages built from given source one.

PKG=git REL=wheezy ARCH=amd64 PKGHOST="http://packages.debian.org" MIRROR="ftp.pl.debian.org"; wget -q "$PKGHOST/source/$REL/$PKG" -O - | sed '/.*<dt><a href="/!d;s,,'"$PKGHOST"',;s,'"$REL"'/,&'"$ARCH"'/,;s,".*,/download,' | xargs wget -q -O - | sed '\,'"$MIRROR"',!d;s,[^"]*",,;s,".*,,' | xargs -n1 wget

It will surely break with next upgrade of debian sites look, but works for now (for me).

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 16:44 UTC (Sat) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

Nope, I've only run stable and testing myself, and currently all my Debian machines run stable (granted, one of them is server, and another one is phone).

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 16:45 UTC (Sat) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

(well, unstable in the development phone and in virtual machines)

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 18:28 UTC (Sat) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link] (2 responses)

We can estimate the percent of Debian users on Unstable from popularity contest. Out of 111870 reports 49936 (45%) were running Stable and 15655 (14%) were running Testing/Unstable. Contrast that with 33756 (30%) running Oldstable! (Submission of data to popcon is voluntary, so obviously that's a source of bias. Still, it's the best data we've got.)

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 19:56 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

Could you do some advanced data mining for me?

Historically, in the first 6 months after a stable debian release goes gold, is there a noticeable drop off in the number of people using unstable? Or conversely as stable becomes more stale does the unstable users population grow?

Or to ask a more general question, is the unstable population in debian popcon a somewhat constant percentage or does it have statistically significant seasonal variations related to the debian stable release process?

If there was a way to estimate the usage of testing and experimental I'd appreciate any effort along those lines as well.

-jef

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 23:01 UTC (Sat) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

The graphs on the popularity contest homepage hint at the answers to some of your questions. Unless the raw time-series data is posted somewhere, I can't provide you with anything better.

FTP/HTTP logs at one of the major download servers could also be used to answer your questions. But I don't have access to that.

Testing and stable

Posted Sep 14, 2011 15:02 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

A few years ago almost everyone used testing (not unstable) on their desktops, and stable on the servers. But the latest stable release was so good that people stuck to that; now it is more popular than testing. Perhaps if stable releases are delayed then people will again migrate to testing further down the road, but right now the hardware changes are not so significant that it seems necessary. Last I looked the popcon graphics told this exact story.

Now there is a compromise here: if nobody uses testing on their desktop then it will not get the exposure it needs to become a good stable release. But I am happy because I have two good releases for the desktop; and one (testing) is basically a rolling release.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 6:52 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (6 responses)

"I also understand that "time-release" models versus "when its ready" models will absolutely positively allow more breakages through into the distribution"

That simply isn't true: the nature of the release cycle makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. What makes the difference is people racing to a deadline to fit certain things in - there's no reason that the decision to release a package to a distribution for either cycles needs be different.

Sure, Debian has a ~24 month cycle compared to a ~6 for Fedora. That's not the comparison. Debian Testing is pretty much continuous/rolling (bar freezes and stuff), and is generally both a. more up-to-date than the released Fedora and b. more stable (obviously neither of those things are totally quantitative).

As for getting upset: I don't think it's right to get upset at other packagers for any reason, pretty much. But setting aside your prejudicial words: is this an ok situation?

You might be happy with F16 breaking continually, seeing it as a cost of the integration work. I'm not. F16 breaking stops other people getting work done. It's like someone submitting code into the trunk of a repository that doesn't compile. Yes, accidents happen. No, it's not a good situation. This is plain and obvious to me.

(BTW, comparing F16 with Debian Unstable is also clearly a false comparison. Unstable and Rawhide are more directly comparable; F16 is a release branch and more akin to Debian's testing - which large numbers of people use extremely happily).

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 7:45 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (5 responses)

Question is, what specific suggestions do you have and how can you contribute to helping improve that we got.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 10:03 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (4 responses)

Asking people what they would change is simply a tool for shutting down debate.

Fedora hasn't got to that point: the question isn't, how do we do it better? The question is vastly more fundamental than that: what is the end goal?

It's not clear to me that there's a broad consensus that Fedora is aimed at people beyond Fedora contributors and 'enthusiasts' (a code-word for 'people who know how to fix things when we break them').

Without coming to a consensus about whether or not Fedora should be useful to people who don't necessarily know how to fix everything, there's no point talking about "how to do it better".

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 15:22 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

Asking a open ended question is hardly shutting down debate. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me. Having said that, regardless of the high level goals, you can help in making the development releases more robust and I don't see anyone opposed to that at all. I think the nature of such problems are well understood. What I am trying to point out to you is that it requires people to participate more.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 16:43 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (2 responses)

Whether or not someone has specific suggestions for improvement is entirely orthogonal to a discussion about whether or not a specific release process implies more breakage. At best, it's a distraction to the discussion.

That aside, I disagree that this is an issue of man-power or participation, but even assuming that it is: why is it that enough people are not participating? I would venture that it's because the prerelease OS is just not generally usable, and that "testing" in this instance doesn't just mean using the stuff you usually would do and reporting the papercuts, it means "expect your system to break horribly". The canary in the coal mine form of testing.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 17:45 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

The current release process can imply some breakage and I don't think that is news to anyone. I assumed since you are pointing out a problem, you would have thought about some solutions or atleast interested in thinking about some and I wanted to hear those. That isn't orthogonal at all from my perspective. If you are not interested in that and this is just merely commentary, thats alright too.

You are guessing that pre-release breakage is turning off people from testing and that might well be the case but going a little bit further, have you thought about why there is pre-release breakage and what can be done to break out of that cycle? There is always a shortage of resources in people in quality assurance for distributions with a short release cycle. For instance, AutoQA could prevent a number of breakages and they have been repeatedly asking for help in writing tests. Certainly a resource shortage there.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 15, 2011 15:35 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

It's a bit of a stretch to say that if someone is pointing out a problem then they have to also point out the solution.

As a long time Fedora user myself, I constantly encounter problems (certain releases were worse than others, I'm running F14 and it's doing ok). I always worry when I sit down at my computer, 10 times in 8 days, and EACH TIME there are new updates to install. What is going to break this time? I know how to fix things but I'm not interested in trying something even more temperamental than the "stable" releases. And if the only solution to my problem is to become a fedora developer or QA person, then you're saying that Fedora is only for the people who make it.

Running development distributions

Posted Sep 10, 2011 10:44 UTC (Sat) by rleigh (guest, #14622) [Link]

As a Debian developer, I run unstable for day to day use, with stable/testing chroots for work that requires them, and run testing on my work laptop. I'm not alone in running unstable for daily work--it's most likely the norm among developers and a subset of our users, and that results in both a culture of "not breaking unstable", and in bugs being fixed fast because they will be found quickly. Breakage in unstable is the exception, rather than the norm.

Perhaps the main difference between unstable and Fedora is that unstable is used to package new versions of upstream stable releases; packaging unreleased or development releases of upstream software is not the norm, and that's not what unstable is for. Occasionally beta releases prior to release are uploaded (e.g. postgresql 9.1 recently), but this is generally only done when it's known good (it was tested in experimental for several months). Experimental exists to allow testing and integration/staging of bleeding edge stuff without breaking unstable, and I think it does a fairly good job in that regard.

Regards,
Roger

Fedora pre-releases

Posted Sep 10, 2011 0:32 UTC (Sat) by j1mc (subscriber, #56848) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I keep wanting to try Fedora pre-releases to better test and document GNOME stuff, but when a post-alpha update renders my system unbootable (a recent update dropped me to a grub prompt with no easily-researchable remedy), I'm not going to spend several more hours fixing my computer just so I can contribute.

Say what you will about Ubuntu, but their pre-releases post-alpha 3 are serviceable. They boot. There might be crashes, but they are application crashes, not things that will keep you out of your system.

To me, it seems like a negative cycle of sorts. Fedora pre-releases break, so they don't get the testing they need, so they don't get the attention and fixes they need, either.

Fedora pre-releases

Posted Sep 11, 2011 23:00 UTC (Sun) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

Ubuntu developers are mostly using the development release from (depending on their bravery and experience) somewhere between pre-alpha-1 and alpha-3 or so onward. Canonical staff in general are normally told to upgrade at beta unless they have a very good reason not to. From beta onwards, it's not unheard of for serious breaks-entire-world type bugs to invoke our internal crisis procedure (phone up management chain until you get hold of somebody, relevant experts full-time on the problem, must pass state to somebody else before leaving work, etc.); I've been on the hook for that a couple of times myself. There are definitely incentives to try to keep things working. The general attitude here is probably OK but we could execute it better and more broadly.

I guess the buzzword here is velocity: the better your development release works, the easier it is for people to work with it and land their own work based on it. While I don't agree with all of Scott's proposed solution, I generally agree with his problem statement and I think we can probably find common ground around things like using QA to gate the promotion of packages between channels. This certainly doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing discussion.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:24 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

I'm certainly not going to dispute your experience with Fedora. Mine has been mostly good. I haven't had any trouble with printing, I don't use GNOME or pino.

Pre-release versions are a completely different issue. They have to meet a certain set of criteria... which is basically they should be installable enough to allow for testing and bug reporting. They aren't really supposed to be usable. Of course it would be nice if there were never any bugs and nothing to report.

Lots of updates? There sure are. I like that. I do agree with you, I don't really recommend Fedora to a newbie. I recommend it to computer / Linux literate person who has already been using Linux for a while. It is an innovator's distro... where you can get your hands on the latest and greatest stuff. While they would like it to be for everyone even the newbie, their development model / cycle does not lend itself to that really.

Fedora is totally awesome for people who want to give back / contribute, not just in software development but in documentation, bug reporting, testing, etc. It reminds me for the good old days when someone sent out an email asking if you were tired of your computer just working and wanted some adventure and excitement. :)

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 3:57 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Pino is not the default in Fedora 15. You are just incorrect about that.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 7:20 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure, ok, looking back it seems that it was swiped at the last minute. I was already on F15 at that point so I got it by default; I'd raised the issue of pino on the devel list to seemingly no interest to I assumed it just stayed in.

However, I would note that it only got removed on the 10th May, which was the original Fedora 15 gold release date: so it was removed in time by virtue of the release being two weeks late. Arguably it would have blocked release, but it really should not have got to that point.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 7:43 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Bringing it up in the high traffic devel list is one thing but if you want to get it done, better to mark important bugs as blockers or file it with release engineering or FESCo as appropriate. If you haven't realized it already devel list posting aren't action times of any sort and probably won't get followed upon in many cases.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 17:39 UTC (Sat) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link]

Huh. I was thinking f16 was a very stable/boring release so far... but I am using Xfce, so I've missed out on gnome issues (which granted has had a lot of churn in the last few weeks).

/boot was blown away? By what?

Printing works fine here in f15 (although network, not parallel).

I'd suggest for f16, 'yum groupinstall xfce-desktop' (or kde, lxde, whatever), so when you run into gnome issues you have something you can at least use and debug from.

f15 has been perfectly usable for my Girlfriend day to day (though we did run into a issue with ipw2200 module a while back).

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 17:01 UTC (Sat) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

I choose Ubuntu LTS, and the half-yearly releases have taught me to stay recommending LTS to every new user despite their poorer hardware support.

LTS releases also have the good thing that Update Manager starts to mention upgrade possibility to LTS+1 only when the .1 release has been released. For 10.04 LTS users, this means that upgrade 12.04 LTS will start to be mentioned in July/August 2012, 3-4 months after actual well tested (compared to half-yearly) stable release.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 16, 2011 14:54 UTC (Fri) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I have used Ubuntu LTSs for some time, and they work well on servers. On a desktop using Intel graphics, I've had a really bad experience with 10.04 LTS - it was very painful to get installed at all, the recovery boot didn't work, and many other issues. Then after I delivered it to the end user, it started freezing several times a day, and I was advised on LWN that a later than 10.04 release would have been more stable for Intel.

This illustrates how broken some LTSs really are, for some users/hardware at least... Some more here: https://lwn.net/Articles/446264/

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 13, 2011 16:55 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

Although I have disagreed with you Alex on the Rawhide testing (in fedora-delve), I have to admit that my wife is currently on RHEL-6 with her notebook (yes, I have an employee subscription, but it would be CentOS 5/6 if I didn't). And no, I don't know what's the solution. Not sure that the rolling distro is the one though.

What about security updates?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 20:08 UTC (Fri) by osma (subscriber, #6912) [Link]

I find it a bit disturbing that the original article doesn't mention security updates at all, and there are dozens of comments before anyone first even mentions the word.

It took Debian quite a long time to decide that the testing distribution requires security updates independently of the unstable distribution and to find the resources to provide that.

I guess security updates could be provided on a separate channel for the newest (and only the newest) monthly release. Still, someone has to think the process though thoroughly taking into account security upgrades as well as new features.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 21:28 UTC (Fri) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link] (3 responses)

to me this rolling release idea is simply insane.
the LTS and half-year release cycle worked greatly so far, IMHO

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 9, 2011 22:08 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

I'll turn that comment on its head.

It worked great when Canonical was primarily an integrator and not trying to do active software development tied to the Ubuntu distribution.

But tying an upstream project's roadmap so tightly to Ubuntu release schedule (including freezes) instead of treating it as an independent distro neutral release process (that is synced loosely with Ubuntu release management) comes at a real development cost.

But things have been changing. Canonical has taken on more and more client-side software projects as in-house development instead of relying on external "upstream" projects. Unity, Ensemble, Software Center, Uone all are being driven and developed on an Ubuntu distribution release cadence internally in canonical.

Look closely at what Scott is talking about. Look past the proposed solution and look at his problem statement..about how Canonical is choosing to organize manpower. What should be 6 months of development time for an upstream project is compressed into 13 weeks of usable development time because the "upstream" project development road map is tightly constrained by the distribution release needs.

I don't think you can say that approach to running "upstream" projects is working great for Canonical's business interest or for Ubuntu's project interests.

I'd propose a completely different solution. Canonical should divorce upstream project development from distribution release management as firmly as possible. Every single Canonical led upstream project should make it a goal to equally support Debian Experimental and Ubuntu as release targets in their project roadmap work. If they find that the internal Canonical project managers are pressuring employees to land features specifically for the Ubuntu target...that is a red flag for project health.

How a project does that, is an implementation detail. Some very well might want to use the rolling trunk model Scott suggests. Some might not. The point is is to let the upstream projects actually be upstream projects and not do their development _in_ ubuntu's compressed 13 weeks of usable pre-release out of every 6 months.

And as a counterpoint to this, Canonical's Launchpad team already understands the development cycle Scott is trying to layout. Look at how they have restructured their feature development and deployment model to be more responsive to stakeholders inside Canonical. They've been given more leeway to set their own cadence which is not tied to Ubuntu's release model even though as a service they are crucial to the Ubuntu release process that all the stakeholders are tied to. Fascinating bit of cadence management there.

-jef

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 11, 2011 23:29 UTC (Sun) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link] (1 responses)

I probably wouldn't have said this a few years ago, and I think the Launchpad leads would agree that there are still problems with their pace of landing changes, but I think there's quite a bit we could learn in Ubuntu from looking at LP at this point and it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it used to be. In particular, they have really rather good integration of QA and development, with very good processes and tools for deciding when it's safe to deploy, and a culture of doing something about deployment blockers promptly.

We've been talking with Launchpad people about using a common crash database implementation; they can do automatic daily analysis of the crashers people are currently hitting, whereas we have to wade through a bug swamp. I think that will make a nice difference when it happens.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 12, 2011 1:31 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

My Fedora has been reporting kernel oopses for quite some time, and the (rare) crashed application gets reported automatically in bugzilla for a year or so at least.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 10, 2011 23:30 UTC (Sat) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] (2 responses)

I find it encouraging that a senior guy like Scott is very seriously focusing on how to do QA properly in Ubuntu. The declining stability issue is crucial to me and it was good to see that the central reason was identified namely the fact that a developer only has 13 weeks to get a new feature going and that really isn't long enough to ensure stability. Bottomline is that the development timeline results in (excuse my language) a half assed distro release. It also results in pissed off users for two reasons. One is the obvious instability but a second is because if a bug is reported it will not get the attention required because the developers are stressed out getting their 13 week projects under control. Bug reports by users are important feedbacks to the developers so pissing them off does not help community cohesion.

Anyway great to see Scott initiating sensible and thoughtful debate. First encouraging thing I've heard from Ubuntu in a while.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 11, 2011 12:56 UTC (Sun) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] (1 responses)

Scott moved from Canonical to Google earlier this year. I assume he's still working on Ubuntu but he doesn't have the official position he used to.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 11, 2011 15:04 UTC (Sun) by andrewsomething (guest, #53527) [Link]

Yep. He no longer works for Canonical, but he is still a member of the Ubuntu Technical Board.

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 12, 2011 10:11 UTC (Mon) by etienne (guest, #25256) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe there is a case for both rolling release and full distribution release from the toolchain point of view:
With a rolling release, you keep a compiled package untouched if it is working, indefinitely.
With a full release, you regenerate all packages at release time.

The problem with keeping a package untouched is that when you want to make an insignificant change, you get the source but that does not compile/work with the current toolchain (changes in make, gcc, binutils,...), probably because the source was not "conforming" and was using undocumented behaviour.
You always have the solution to get the initial toolchain, but it is not The Right Way(tm).

The problem with full release is that you will change the source of working packages to get them to compile with the distribution updated toolchain, or the GCC new optimisations will trigger some unintended behaviour, and you get more bugs to your costumers.
But at least everything is generated with the same compiler, and all source is "up to date".

Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

Posted Sep 12, 2011 15:08 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Fedora has semi-regular "mass rebuilds" for new compiler or glibc versions, or new policies that affect everything, like random placement of shared libraries, shiping position independent executables, or new default architecture (don't optimize for i386, optimize for i686). "Keep the same binary package indefinitely" doesn't really work, even when the source doesn't get updated.