"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 11:35 UTC (Tue) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445)
In reply to: "technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own by jhoblitt
Parent article: OpenELA's first code drop

I would not characterize Ubuntu as a community distribution. How many non-canonical employees decide the direction of the distro, what is packaged in each release, and perform QA?

Each Ubuntu release is essentially a snapshot of Debian unstable at a particular point of time. Ubuntu may add a bit of sprinkling here and there, but much (if not the majority) of the direction setting and QA has already been "done" at the snapshot stage (via Debian processes and policies) by volunteers and organizations supporting Debian.

The additional QA for Ubuntu LTS releases is also mainly done by volunteers (i.e. the users). When LTS version (N).04.0 is released, users of LTS version (N-1).04.x are not automatically prompted to upgrade. Instead, Canonical waits until "enough" bugs have been reported and shaken out, then releases LTS version (N).04.1, and then finally allows upgrades from version (N-1).04.x. In other words, each Ubuntu (N).04.0 LTS release is in fact a public beta release, all while Canonical pretends it's not.