Why Cadence Is Canon at Canonical

By Jack M. Germain
LinuxInsider
Part of the ECT News Network

Canonical's rigidly regular release schedule has been the subject of calls for change, but Mark Shuttleworth and plenty of others see no need. In fact, the regularity may be exactly what makes it work, satisfying the needs of both desktop and enterprise users, said Jay Lyman, senior analyst for enterprise software at The 451 Group.

The latest release of Canonical's innovative open source operating system, Ubuntu 12.10, maintains its twice-annual upgrade pattern. Even though the last few releases have generated a steady chorus of cries for longer release schedules, Canonical's leadership stands by the schedule and the rationale behind it.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth certainly does not think Ubuntu's every-six-month release schedule is part of any ill-perceived problem. During his recent Linuxcon keynote address, he praised that cycle for creating lots of excitement and keeping contributors motivated.

At least one of Canonical's board members favors longer release intervals. Meanwhile, Shuttleworth steadfastly adheres to the mantra: Many eyes make all bugs shallow, so make releases early and often.

Contrary to the criticism, Ubuntu's twice-yearly release cycle has a clear purpose for Canonical's success as a major OS developer. It forms a cadence with several upsteams and other distributions, according to Adam Conrad, Ubuntu Release Engineer at Canonical. That helps the development team keep its fingers on the pulse of current open source development.

"We've put robust mechanisms in place to ensure quality, both with our own products and with various upstream products that we rely heavily on. Our focus on quality permeates from the platform up to the code we write upstream, and our choices of upstream components too. We require tests and gated trunks for all Canonical code bases and prefer upstreams that share the same values," Conrad told LinuxInsider.

Stability Sells

That explanation makes considerable sense, noted Al Hilwa, program director for applications development software at IDC. Fundamentally, it is an execution and planning issue.

"What is important is putting out a predictable schedule and a road map for when projected functionality will be integrated," Hilwa told LinuxInsider.

Whether Ubuntu needs to adjust that cycle is the sticking point, however. The development team has to assess the nature of the code changes versus the intervals available to stabilize the code.

"In principle, most changes can be incrementalized to fit any cycle," Hilwa suggested.

Rigidity Required

Extending the release cycle would not necessarily lead to better overall quality. Rather, it would only give people a longer goal to land the new features they really want to see, in Conrad's view.

Another reason he disfavors a more relaxed release time is human nature. Ultimately, people will always try to get things in at the last minute.

"We do offer our LTS

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