Not That Edgy
Now that Ubuntu 6.10 (”The Edgy Eft”) has been released, we’re starting to see reviews of it; while largely positive, one common theme is that Edgy isn’t quite as edgy as people were expecting.
Mark’s original announcement is certainly the likely reason for this expectation. In it he set the scene for a bold, brash, bleeding edge release to counter the boring dapper release.
Unfortunately, the simple truth is that reality set in. When planning the release schedule for edgy, we realised that if we wanted to get back to our original six-monthly release schedule, we were only going to have four months in which to develop it.
That’s still enough time to throw everything to the wind, and shove out a “release” at the last moment when the CD happens to be installable. It’d be edgy in the extreme sense.
Unfortunately while exciting, we felt that such a release would ruin Ubuntu’s reputation. It’d be a release that, for all intents and purposes, would only be interesting to Ubuntu developers.
Mark has already touched on this in his blog, citing a conversation he had with Matt (the Ubuntu CTO). Especially noteworthy is the mention that the kinds of itches that developers get are not the same as those users get. We get itches because the installer still relies on devfs-style paths, or because it’s not possible to boot the system without race-conditions. None of these things are noticeable to the end-user.
We’re drawing up the list of topics to be discussed at UDS Mountain View in two weeks time, this is as good a guide as any for what we’re thinking about for feisty, the next release. At the end of that summit, we’ll have a list of approved specifications, assigned to developers throughout the community for implementation in the feisty schedule.
Obviously some of those won’t make it due to time constraints, but the best thing about a six-monthly release cycle is that they’re not delayed for long.
