On 9 May 2015 at 15:14, Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@gmail.com> wrote:
Torsdag den 7. maj 2015 10:23:58 skrev Richard Brown:
But technical contributions to the Regular Release are in decline. Building 13.2 fell on the shoulders of a few people. We had something like 14 bugs found during the 13.2 Beta phase.
You can't make too many conclusions on the basis of the 13.2 release process.
It was the first release ever based on the new Tumbleweed. It was always clear it was going to be a bit bumpy. You had SLE12 coming out around the same time, the testing phase was excessively short, the roadmap wasn't known until the last moment, iirc a "13.2" product wasn't created in bugzilla, so a lot of factory/tumbleweed bugreports will have been actual 13.2 bug reports. The whole situation was chaotic.
If you dismiss the model of Tumbleweed based openSUSE releases on this background, you never gave the model a fair chance.
This is a fallacy. While we did rename Factory to Tumbleweed, we didn't revolutionise the development model for the Regular Release In fact, we didn't change a thing Things went into Factory, Factory had a snapshot, the release process kicked into gear, we pumped out a release The model for 13.2 was no different than the development model for every release I've ever been involved in, so I think I can make conclusions based on the 13.2 release process and those conclusions really boil down to a few things 1. The quality of Factory/Tumbleweed snapshots are awesome 2. The vast majority of our contributors interest is in Tumbleweed, not the Regular Release. 3. Despite every effort to remedy the situation, the amount of people working on openSUSE Regular Releases has continued it's decline which we already saw over the last few releases (just look at https://progress.opensuse.org/projects/opensuse-13-2-release vs https://progress.opensuse.org/projects/opensuse-13-1-release for a really stark illustration of how bad it is) We need a new Regular Release which either a) appeals to a new breed of contributors who will invigorate the Regular Releases or b) reduces the amount of work required so we can sustain producing regular releases alongside Tumbleweed as a rolling release - because frankly, right now, the status quo is not sustainable Luckily, the availabilty of the SLE Sources, in my opinion, gives us an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. By taking the Regular Release in a direction that favours stability, we can use the SLE Sources to make the work required to do that way easier. We get to shape it based on what we, the community, are able and willing to do, as brought up by the debate so far. Some bits will move faster, some bits wont, the bits that move faster will be on the communities shoulders to maintain, the bits that wont, we get to benefit from SUSE's work in this area and not compromise on the quality of what we actually provide our users. A specific stable distribution for a specific type of audience that is significantly different from our Tumbleweed user base -> Invigorated contributors working on a targeted project -> awesome, a) is handled A whole pile of SLE sources and maintenance updates meaning openSUSE won't have to worry about parts of the stack which, frankly, right now we really dont have many people maintaining heavily (eg. Kernel, GCC, etc) -> Reduced work for the openSUSE community -> awesome b) is handled Let me give you an example which illustrates my why I think our current model just doesn't work, from both a contributors and users standpoint. For this example, I'm going to use a topical example of KDE which has been also discussed heavily lately. openSUSE 13.2 has at least another 20 months of life in it, based on our Support Lifecycle, assuming we do the next openSUSE release in November 2015 and another in November 2016 It has KDE 4 KDE 4 will be effectively end-of-life in the eyes of Upstream before November 2015. That means no more maintenance, no security updates, nothing from upstream. We're on our own. In the minds of our contributors (the awesome openSUSE KDE team), this is a very uncomfortable position. In Tumbleweed, they see it as impossible to maintain KDE 4 any more, and so they are putting in Plasma 5. And I think they're right, for Tumbleweed. But look at how noisy our mailinglists have been because of it.. Quoting Raymond from the other thread "Why otherwise to upgrade from 13.2, if you get nothing newer in return." - This mindset "we must ship the latest of everything, because that's what's awesome" is a very prevalent mindset in our community. It could practically be the Tumbleweed development motto. It's why a lot of us get up every day and do stuff for openSUSE, there's this wonderful ecosystem of open source stuff and we want to package it up in a distro so we and other people can enjoy it. And there are certainly a good pile of users who feel the same way. And so, I think I've just described the driving force behind Tumbleweed But again look at how noisy our mailinglists have been because of this mindset We have other users who crave stability. Who pick openSUSE because we build stuff that works, not because we build stuff that changes all the time (and also works). These are the 'long tail' of people we know who are still using openSUSE 12.x, or openSUSE 13.1 and looking forward to an Evergreen release in the future. We've seen this come up time, after time, after time. Every major flamewar the openSUSE community has gone through, often ends up coming back to this topic, one group wanting stuff faster, one group wanting stuff slower. We had it with the release schedule discussions years ago, version numbering, systemd, moving from KDE 3->4, GNOME 2->3, and now KDE 4->5 And every time we've ended up with compromise solutions. Compromises are great, but ultimately they're agreements which piss off both sides equally. Using the desktop transitions I mentioned above, this often meant the actual contributors, actually working on the new stuff, reduced their speed of change, held themselves back, in order to try and satisfy the concerns of others who felt things was changing too fast. And, frankly, I dont think that's cool. It's demotivating for the contributors, it doesn't help upstream projects, in some cases it actually means more work for everyone involved. It's not ideal. I like the idea of an openSUSE Project that can keep up, and in fact lead, the open source world by having a distribution that works, but uses everything new as soon as it's possible. This is one of the things that really excites me about Tumbleweed, we're there already and we're able to take it to the next level now. So, if we're not compromising on speed because we have Tumbleweed, why should we compromise on Stability for our Regular Release? Why not have a Regular Release that, in November 2015, has KDE 4 still as an option? Users will be happy. Maintaining it shouldn't be hard if upstream aren't changing anything. The promise of 'you always get the newest of everything' might be broken, but this is a promise that is now fulfilled by Tumbleweed. Maybe we also are able to ship KDE 5 *as well*, because, with a more stable base, and an expectation from users that the openSUSE release will move less dramatically, less often, teams like our KDE team should be able to make sensible choices about what versions of awesome-upstream-stuff they want to keep in the Regular Release for a while The only 'flaw' in this plan, that I totally accept exists, is that for anyone who feels the current openSUSE regular release is 'perfect', then things might be changing for you in a negative way However, I'd ask those people, deep down, to identify the key reason they like the current openSUSE regular release. If you're primarily motivated because "every release I get all the new stuff", then please, use Tumbleweed, and if it's not perfect for you, help us make it better. If you're motivated to use openSUSE because "I want a Linux distribution that just works", then please, help us with this new Regular Release, in order to make it perfect for you use cases. my 2c -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org