The Art of Release
Monday, May 12th, 2008An update on the long term plans for Ubuntu release management. 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. To the best of my knowledge there has never been an “enterprise platform” release delivered exactly on schedule, to the day, in any proprietary or Linux OS. Not only did it prove that we could execute an LTS release in the standard 6-month timeframe, but it showed that we could commit to such an LTS the cycle beforehand. Kudos to the technical decision-makers, the release managers, and the whole community who aligned our efforts with that goal.
As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010.
This represents one of the most extraordinary, and to me somewhat unexpected, benefits of free software to those who deploy it. Most people would assume that precise release management would depend on having total control of all the moving parts – and hence only be possible in a proprietary setting. Microsoft writes (almost) every line of code in Windows, so you would think they would be able to set, and hit, a precise target date for delivery. But in fact the reverse is true – free software distributions or OSV’s can provide much better assurances with regard to delivery dates than proprietary OSV’s, because we can focus on the critical role of component selection, integration, testing, patch management and distribution rather than the pieces which upstream projects are better able to handle – core component feature development. This is in my mind a very compelling reason for distributions to focus on distribution – that’s the one thing they do which the upstreams don’t, so they need to invest heavily in that in order to serve as the most efficient conduit of upstream’s work.
We also committed, for the first time, to a regular set of point releases for 8.04 LTS. These will start three months after the LTS, and be repeated every six months until the next LTS is out. These point releases will include support for new hardware as well as rolling up all the updates published in that series to date. So a fresh install of a point release will work on newer hardware and will also not require a big download of additional updates.
Gerry Carr at Canonical put together this diagram which describes the release management plan very nicely:
The Ubuntu team does an amazing job of ensuring that one can update from release to release, and from LTS release to LTS release directly, too. I’m very proud to be part of this community! With the addition of some capability to support newer hardware in LTS releases, I think we are doing our part in the free software community – helping to deliver the excellent work of thousands of other teams, from kernel.org to GNOME and KDE, safely to a huge audience.
There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 am
[…] we see big-name software projects announcing how pleased they are to have met their planned release schedules. It’s something that Ubuntu did with its latest release, Hardy Heron, which has been met by a […]
June 7th, 2008 at 8:33 am
[…] The Art of Release – Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu release management. […]
June 8th, 2008 at 1:46 am
[…] to shake out bugs in the latest incarnation of GNOME. Maybe it will take a while to find the right pulse rate of software releases. If there’s a plan by Ubuntu/Canonical developers to improve this situation, I encourage them […]
June 11th, 2008 at 9:03 am
[…] more! Looks like they’ve won the high-end of the market. Also of note, Ubuntu has set a time schedule for LTS point releases (the first comes 3 months after a LTS release, followed every six months […]
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:55 am
[…] is Hardy with all the updates since 8.04 was released three months ago; the .2 release will be in six months (three months after 8.10 is […]
July 9th, 2008 at 7:26 am
[…] française de l’article “The Art of Release“. Auteur : Mark Shuttleworth – Traducteur : Bernard […]
July 27th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
[…] et à son marketing habituellement mieux huilés. Mais ses récentes déclarations, dont celle sur les cycles de développement des projets libres, tendent maintenant à provoquer des réactions assez vives, quoi que certainement démesurées et […]
August 19th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
[…] You can go to the blog (web log) of Mark Shuttleworth (the founder of Ubuntu Linux) and learn a more about the future release dates of Ubuntu Linux: […]
October 5th, 2008 at 8:04 am
[…] Hat, Novell y Debian decidan cooperar en un lanzamiento sincronizado en una fecha diferente. Mark apunta en su blog que un calendario de lanzamientos conjuntos beneficiaría tanto a usuarios como a distribuidores. […]
December 9th, 2008 at 7:14 am
[…] Mark Shuttleworth a publié aujourd’hui un billet sur son blog, intitulé “The Art of Release”. […]
January 13th, 2009 at 12:23 am
[…] por | Mark Shuttleworth – en inglés […]
April 28th, 2009 at 1:36 am
[…] Shuttleworth would like to go a step further. He has called for the major Linux distributions to synchronize their release schedules so that different flavors of Linux release new versions on a single, predictable timetable. That […]
May 15th, 2009 at 7:25 am
[…] Posted by d2globalinc So who knows if 10.04 will actually be an LTS. Somebody does: Mark Shuttleworth Blog Archive The Art of Release […]
May 16th, 2009 at 6:58 am
[…] : The Art of Release – Traduction : Bernard […]
September 1st, 2009 at 10:49 am
[…] The Art of Release (2008-05-12) […]
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
[…] markshuttleworth – the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS […]