On Monday evening, just before calling it a night, I decided to attend to that little 'updates available my OpenSUSE 11.1 notebook. There were half a dozen updates, one of them being a kernel update, which doesn't happen too often. A few minutes later, I rebooted, and got nothing but a text login. Couldn't start X or even reconfigure it. Then I noticed that there was no networking, and only a small handful of modules loaded -- I looked at loaded modules to try to figure out why I wasn't getting networking, even via my wired Ethernet port. Something had gone wrong with the update, a process that normally causes me no grief at all.
The new schedule was proposed in a message posted to the openSUSE mailing list by release manager Stephan Kulow. In the e-mail, he lists the months when releases are expected to arrive and also provides some insight into the feature plan for 11.2, the next major release.
"To give us something to plan around, we would like to propose a fixed release schedule. As a six-month release schedule is not something we consider feasible to maintain high-quality standards, we are proposing a fixed eight-month schedule," Kulow wrote.
Yesterday, the openSUSE Project announced that it will move to a fixed release schedule after November's release of openSUSE 11.2.
The OpenSuse development team has announced it will now follow a fixed release schedule, much like distributions such as Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu. In an emailed announcement yesterday, Stephan Kulow said that the community had decided to adopt an eight-month rotating cycle with the first release being OpenSuse 11.2 in November.
Comments
David Gerard
2009-03-07 15:35:26
The cause of upgrades failing like this is a lack of testing. Note how Debian dist-upgrades are legendarily flawless, but Ubuntu ones fail more often than not (IME).
Roy Schestowitz
2009-03-07 15:39:42
Also, Mac OS X had similar issues, leaving some of its users stranded in the command line.
Roy Schestowitz
2009-03-07 15:41:46
Anonymous
2009-03-07 15:55:00
David Gerard
2009-03-07 15:56:26
Yes - the point is that this stuff isn't easy even with good underpinnings. Ubuntu needs to somehow make this aspect as well work as well as Debian without Debian's looooong release cycles.
Roy Schestowitz
2009-03-07 16:01:56
Looking further back, I am not sure this is true.
Chris
2009-03-08 17:41:49
As usual you are talking out of your arse (and surely will say that you didn't have time to verify your claims cause you had to pursue some other stuff / aka spread some more FUD & libel / make false claims). But hey, don't shoot the messanger ...
So please feel free to point out the fixed 6 months release cycle openSUSE / SuSE has been following from 2003 till now:
11.1: 2008-12-11 11.0: 2008-06-19 10.3: 2007-10-04 10.2: 2006-12-07 10.1: 2006-05-11 10.0: 2005-10-06 9.3: 2005-03-10 9.2: 2004-10-06 9.1: 2004-03-18 9.0: 2003-10-18 8.2: 2003-03-12
Then I got bored ...
Roy Schestowitz
2009-03-08 17:46:24
Chris
2009-03-08 18:06:23
Still it's far from a fixed 6 month release cycle which you seem to claim with:
The real news here is not a “fixed” release cycle. The real news is that OpenSUSE will be re-released (version bump) once in 8 months rather than just 6.
And now please tell me that "bi-annual" = "fixed 6 months" ...
Roy Schestowitz
2009-03-08 19:52:02