Remnant: A new release process for Ubuntu?

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