Distributions
Planning for "openSUSE 2016"
The openSUSE project has hit a patch of slack time; 13.1 was recently released and 13.2 is roughly eight months out. That would be a good time for some long-term planning, at least according to Agustin Benito Bethencourt, the lead of the openSUSE team within SUSE. He put out two separate messages on the opensuse-project mailing list, both with subjects containing the phrase "openSUSE 2016"—clearly he is looking ahead a few years; he would like to see the rest of the project do the same. As might be guessed, there was a fair amount of discussion of Benito's ideas, but consensus seems a ways off.
Benito started with an overview of the current openSUSE "picture", consisting of the distribution's status vis a vis other distributions and its place in the Linux world. It is a picture of stability in terms of the number of users and contributors, and any signs of either growth or decline are fairly small. He posited that overall use of Linux on the server and desktop (separate from mobile and cloud) is growing, so that openSUSE's lack of growth could be seen as something of a wakeup call that something needs to change. He ended the lengthy note with three questions for participants about their "picture" as well as their perception of what others see when they look at openSUSE.
The argument Benito made was largely based on statistics gathered from various activities (downloads, updates, contributions, "social media", etc.). Some thread participants were not particularly moved by a statistical approach, with both Klaas Freitag and Togan Muftuoglu suggesting that focusing on the numbers is a waste of time. In addition, Muftuoglu suggested that the distribution should be a leader, rather than a follower, while Freitag thinks the problems stem from a lack of "do-ers":
There also is something of an "us vs. them" conflict at the heart of the discussion. Benito leads a team of SUSE employees who work on openSUSE and some other community members are concerned about SUSE dictating the direction for openSUSE. Benito, for his part, has tried to assure everyone that he is looking for a discussion, not to dictate anything, but his tone put some off. For example, Andrew Wafaa was not pleased by the tone, particularly in a follow-up post by Benito:
But the SUSE openSUSE team takes care of many of the pieces required to get a release out the door. In fact, Robert Schweikert wondered whether the community without the SUSE team would be able to put together a release on an eight-month schedule—if so, what would that release look like? The question of how both the responsibility and the governing is split between the non-SUSE and SUSE contingents is an important one, he said:
It's not just non-SUSE folks that are not completely happy with the
tone. OpenSUSE release manager Stephan "coolo" Kulow also expressed some dissatisfaction with Benito's
communication style, but noted that the idea of discussing the future was a
good one: "We can't just keep having release, party, release, party,
...
". He referred to SUSE Engineering VP Ralf Flaxa's keynote at the openSUSE conference in July;
that while "SUSE wants some things to happen
within openSUSE
", it also wants "openSUSE to be in openSUSE's
hands
" and not to dictate from on high.
Will Stephenson is concerned that creative distribution contributors have moved on to other pursuits, leaving the desktop and server distribution "scene" behind.
He wondered if openSUSE should simply be content with the status
quo or if it should try to "become an exciting and
relevant place to be once again
". In a follow-up message, he noted several areas
where openSUSE could perhaps make itself more useful to its users: cloud,
DevOps, and ARM. Those areas weren't chosen at random, but came from
what SUSE highlighted
in its press release for the 13.1 release. Focusing on those areas might
make openSUSE an
even more attractive
target for investment from SUSE, he said. There was general agreement with
that sentiment, but plenty of details to work out.
Meanwhile, in Benito's second "picture" message, he got more specific about some of his ideas. It was broken down into four areas: goals, an enhanced "Factory" release, targeting developers and every day end users with releases, and open governance. Each had a handful of bullet points to flesh them out, followed by five questions as a starting point for replies.
The goals he listed were largely agreeable to most, though there were quibbles. The most significant new pieces in Benito's message are the rolling, always installable Factory—a development release, like Fedora's Rawhide—and the target users, which is something openSUSE has long struggled with (not unlike other distributions). Targeting users and developers (e.g. non-open-source developers) was something that Per Jessen thought would mesh well with his company that has used openSUSE on the server and desktop for many years. Others seem less convinced of that particular focus, while still recognizing the need for one.
The tension between a rolling release and longer release cycles is one area that was brought up frequently. But it neatly solves the problem that some users need longer-term stability, while others are more interested in the latest applications and tools—often both are needed in the same companies, or even by the same users on different systems. Having both available in a single distribution would be attractive.
But, as Benito cautioned, it is important to distinguish between support and maintenance. The latter is what openSUSE provides, while support comes from an enterprise vendor (e.g. SUSE) for its distribution. Eventually, perhaps third-parties will provide support for community distributions as well, but "long-term support" is something of a misnomer for community distributions today.
The discussion continues, and has branched out to a separate development process proposal (with an accompanying interactive diagram) from Kulow on the opensuse-factory list. It is, essentially, an update to the "rings" idea from August, with newer ideas based on what has been learned in the interim.
While Benito's focus is a few years out (and what it takes to get there), Kulow's proposal is closer to hand, but they are still clearly related in some ways. To get to an always-usable Factory—thus a rolling release based on it—changes need to be made. Whether Kulow's specific ideas will prevail or not, most seem in favor of the goals. In fact, both the near and the far goals are gaining traction, though much is left to be fleshed out. The traditional Linux distribution model is under lots of pressures from multiple directions and it will be interesting to see where that leads for openSUSE and others as well.
Brief items
Distribution quotes of the week
...
*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun.
CentOS-6.5
CentOS 6.5 is available. "There are many fundamental changes in this release, compared with the past CentOS-6 releases, and we highly recommend everyone study the Release Notes as well as the upstream Techical Notes about the changes and how they might impact your installation." The release notes are here.
CyanogenMod 10.2.0
CyanogenMod 10.2.0 has been released. "With the release of CM 10.2.0 we end our foray into Android 4.3-land and planned releases based on that code. We will of course continue to provide hot-fixes, security patches and similar as needed. The device roster for this initial run includes all devices that received an RC1." The focus for CM11 is Android 4.4 "KitKat".
Oracle Linux Release 6 Update 5
Oracle Linux 6.5 is available. This release ships with three sets of kernel packages; Oracle's Enterprise kernel versions 2.6.39 and 3.8.13, and a Red Hat compatible kernel. Oracle's version 3 kernel has some major improvements listed in the announcement.
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
Keith Packard added to the Debian Technical Committee
Debian Project Leader Lucas Nussbaum has announced the appointment of Keith Packard to the project's Technical Committee. Keith will be getting off to a running start; one of the first things the committee has to do is to resolve the issue of which init system the Debian distribution will use by default. (See this message for a description of the process that led to Keith's nomination).Bits from ARM porters
The Debian-ARM team has a status report covering buildd and porterbox status, bootloader support, Debian installer support, arm64 Debian port support, cross toolchain in Debian, Debian-Ports integration, Emdebian.org server future, cross build-depends discussion for bootstrapping, enable multiarch in buildd software, Raspbian port support, and more.Bits from Debian Med team
The Debian Med team has a few bits to share. Topics include Andreas Tille's talk at FOSDEM and DebConf 13, an interview with Andreas Tille, an article about Free Software in medicine, the annual sprint, and more.Release sprint results - team changes, auto-rm and arch status
The Debian Release Team has an update covering team membership, auto-removal of non-leaf packages, release goals, architecture status, and several other topics.
Newsletters and articles of interest
Distribution newsletters
- Debian Project News (December 2)
- DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 536 (December 2)
- Gentoo Monthly Newsletter (November)
- Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 345 (December 1)
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