On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 12:32 -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
I think this all started when a release was so late that the community decided to shift from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle. We moved the goalposts. Now we're on an eight-month cycle and are about to move the goalposts again.
Discussion of moving goalposts may be warranted, but I'll leave that for the List to discuss it. For me, I'm only attempting to re-define the definition of support here. Because support says "18-months" it clearly puts us out of sync with any delays or changes in the release-goalpost. By removing "18-months" and replacing it with "2 months+", we simply create a very flexible scenario that automatically reacts to actual releases. Regardless of whether we go six months, 8 months, or 50 years, support of N-2 will always be 2 months+. I think this is the safest approach and will eliminate any support discussions similarly if future releases get delayed again. The only potential future discussions would be if someone wanted to propose changing "2 months" to some other number of months/years. But that's an entirely different discussion that involves not only ideal support cycles, but also whether resources exist to support it. Bryen
The unfortunate fact of software project management is that stuff happens. openSUSE took some hard disk crashes recently, Fedora slipped Beefy Miracle three times for show-stopper bugs, and I'm sure Ubuntu has had some recent slips as well.
Now that we have Tumbleweed, we could presumably do what Debian/Mint and Gentoo do - ship a "stable" release when everything is stable, provide bug fixes and security updates against stable in "Updates" and provide new features in Tumbleweed. "Factory" would be the equivalent of Debian "testing" and OBS the equivalent of "sid".
Or we could go back to six-month release cycles, tighten our discipline up to work within that and take occasional slips for show-stopper bugs like Beefy Miracle did. As a user I don't have a strong preference - I run things out of OBS and even a few developers' home repositories. My openSUSE partitions typically use over a dozen repositories. When I need stability there's Windows 7 on my laptop. ;-) But I think we do have to do one or the other - ship stable only when we have stable or bite the bullet and go back to a six-month cycle like Fedora and Ubuntu.
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