Hi, (late -- and long -- reply, apologies) Le lundi 15 décembre 2008, à 14:43 +0100, Michael Loeffler a écrit :
Moin,
openSUSE 11.1 is almost out of the door and we (coolo, aj, zonker and myself) had some discussion about the release date for openSUSE 11.2.
So I read the whole thread -- that's quite interesting. I'm replying mainly from a desktop point of view, which I guess isn't that surprising ;-) First, a few facts: + as far as I understood, KDE 4.3 will have a 5 months development cycle so that 4.3 is released before Akademy + GNOME 2.28 will be released around September 23rd (+/- one week) and this is unlikely to change + there's a hard requirement of at least 4 weeks between the release of GNOME/KDE and the release of openSUSE => I'd be interested to know how we can reevaluate this decision (there's an idea below) + for the future: KDE releases are January/July and GNOME releases are March/September + (it would have been awesome to announce the next openSUSE during the GNOME/KDE co-located conference in July, but I guess that's a bad timing) It seems there's some clear consensus that people don't want a release schedule of less than 6 months (and looking at the feedback, quite some people find that 6 months is short), and I would guess that people wouldn't like too much a cycle that lasts more than 12 months. So that leaves us with a window of end of June - beginning of December. Looking at this window: + end of June: development cycle is too short for many, we miss KDE 4.3 => not a good option + July: only possible at the end of July if we want 4 weeks after the integration of KDE 4.3. But it's not the best time to announce stuff from a marketing point of view (although this could be an opportunity to be really visible since there won't be a lot of other things) + August: technically possible, but same issue from a marketing point of view. There might also be an issue with people being away in vacation. + September: good, except that we miss GNOME for only a few weeks. This could be bad if people compare with beta of other distros that will be released at the same time with the latest GNOME + October: only end of October possible if we want 4 weeks after the integration of GNOME 2.28 + November/December: ok. Development cycle a bit long, unfortunately. I'd argue that it's highly important to consider the marketing side of things when building the schedule. Building something which is excellent from a technical point of view is not enough to have a successful openSUSE project. Sooo. First, a question: would a release at the end of July or in August be possible? I think doing this would clearly mitigate the "we don't have the latest GNOME" issue. I'd also like to hear what Zonker thinks of promoting a new release during days that are usually really quiet from a news perspective (mainly because people are away). That would be my preferred option, to be honest. Then, we have the option with a release at the end of October or in November/December. This means releasing at the same time as Ubuntu/Mandriva/Fedora unless we aim at December. Not sure it's good (because it will likely mean less media coverage). And the cycle is a bit long. (not even talking about the SUSE conference that should occur in September) Or we keep the proposed schedule. And use Magnus' idea of creating an add-on, but in a different way: release openSUSE 11.2 with GNOME 2.26 and create an (semi-?)official add-on for 2.28 that we release in early October. Looking at this add-on could be interesting to see if it's possible to ship an updated and working GNOME after less than 4 weeks after the GNOME release. I don't know how the GNOME team (and more generally, the users) would like the idea, but I find the challenge of having the distro accept a big official update as an add-on quite interesting. (the mail is getting long, so I'll stop here, but JP is probably right to mention that it's worth considering the long-term and 11.3 in the decision) I feel the pain of the eyes that were able to reach the end of this mail, but I hope it was worth it ;-) Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org