[Mageia-dev] Release cycles proposals, and discussion

[Samuel Verschelde]

Le dimanche 12 juin 2011 22:46:33, Michael Scherer a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> so , with a little bit delay due to various things ( like everybody
> asking stuff to us on irc on a hourly fashion ( people will I hope
> recognize themselves )), Anne and I have reviewed the various proposals
> made through years during the early period of the distribution, and
> before at Mandriva. We took in account the feedback of people on forum,
> on ml, nd those we have seen during events. We also discussed with
> others distributions developers we know from Opensuse, Fedora, Debian,
> Ubuntu about their release cycle, the choices they made and their
> reasons.

A restitution to us of this overview of the other distros release cycles and 
their choices, reasons, pros and cons would have been great, but I guess it 
would have required much more time to write it. It would have helped 
understand why the final decision you took was to keep the current model (not 
counting the discussion about cycle duration and LTS). I'm not saying that I 
want "rolling release", but beginning the discussion without saying much 
concerning what has been a big discussion some months ago (and still is in the 
forum) feels a bit weird to me. Especially when we kept telling people "wait, 
we will have time to discuss it after Release 1".

> To simplify the discussion, the proposals are all based on the fact that
> 2 or 3 releases could be supported at a time. We could have different
> schemes for that ( LTS every X release ( ubuntu ), different level of
> support ( mandriva )), but as this is a slightly different discussion,
> let's assume 2 supported releases for now, and let's discuss later for
> that ( ie next week, once this one is finished )

I can understand the reason for separating the discussions (simplification), 
but it's hard to give a final opinion concerning the release cycle without 
knowing whether there will be a LTS or not, when you care about the life cycle 
duration. The backports policy also has a great impact to the matter : if we 
manage to make using newer versions of popular software easy without much risk 
nor obligatory need to upgrade, extending the release cycle is easier (I could 
go with 12 months provided we find a way to improve hardware support as part of 
the maintenance).

To take an example concerning the impact of having an LTS release or not : 
- 6 months release cycle + 1 LTS every few releases => ok for me (ubuntu way, 
each intermediate release is an intermediate milestone to the LTS)
- 6 months release cycle, without a LTS => not ok for me, life cycle really 
too short

That said, as a choice has to be made, my vote goes to the compromise proposal 
: around 9 months release cycle (more or less 1 month depending on the amount 
of work to be done, adjustment to a given upstream release, KDE or GNOME for 
example, and marketing calendar considerations).

Best regards

Samuel Verschelde