Stuart Bishop wrote:
Canonical (my employer) certainly believe in time based releases, and
that is one of the major reasons for the growth of Ubuntu and the
Ubuntu Community. We now use time based releases for almost all our
sponsored projects (some 6 monthly, some monthly), and are lobbying
various projects and other OS distributions to get into some sort of
cadence with releases so everyone benefits. It makes us happier
(especially when we are choosing what we can commit to providing
security updates for the 5 year releases), and our users happier, and
I think you happier with less support issues.
The release cycle is quite independent of the release lifetime.
In any case, I don't accept this analogy. The mechanics of a Linux
distribution are very different from the mechanics of a project like
PostgreSQL. The prominent OSS project that seems to me most like ours is
the Apache HTTP project. But they don't do timed releases AFAIK, and
theirs is arguably the most successful OSS project ever.
I'm especially resistant to suggestions that we should in some way
coordinate our releases with other projects' timings. Getting our own
developers organized is sufficiently like herding cats that I have no
confidence that anyone will successfully organize those of a plethora of
projects.
I am not saying timed releases are necessarily bad. But many of the
arguments that have been put forward to support them don't seem to me to
withstand critical analysis.
I would argue that it would be an major setback for us if we made
another release without having Hot Standby or whatever we are calling it
now. I would much rather slip one month or three than ship without it.
cheers
andrew
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