Compound Thinking

Understanding the Dapper Drake Development Process

My first day at the Ubuntu Developers Conference (UBZ) has been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

There are a few key decisions going into the next release cycle that inform everything else.

As I mentioned yesterday the next version of Ubuntu is going to be supported for a long time. In order to make that happen, the Ubuntu Distribution team is going to make a couple of minor changes to the release process. Most of these come under the basic theme of minimizing large scale changes.

Earlier on in the discussion of the Dapper process Jeff Waugh suggested the possibility of not syncing up to the latest stuff in Debian unstable on this cycle, and just moving forward from 5.11 base. The idea behind this suggestion was to limit the number of unknown bugs that would be added to the distribution. However, Matt Zimmerman pointed out that ” Debian and upstream fix more bugs than we do, hands down” so this idea has been rethought a bit.

That said, there is going to be an overall reduction in the number of new crazy things going into Ubuntu. But as of last night there will be one major exception — the LiveCD based installer.

This is making it in, not just because it will make the user experience better, but also because with a LiveCD installer Ubuntu will only have to ship one CD through ship-it. And that in turn means they will be able to support more than one flavor of Ubuntu. This means that they will be shipping Kubuntu cd’s for all the KDE centric folks out there.

But all of that comes from this morning’s first talk, and since then I have been participating mostly in talks about Ubuntu Server stuff, and I’ll try to blog about that more soon.

Dapper Drake

Dapper Drake is the code name for the next version of Ubuntu Linux. It will not just be supported for the standard 18 months, but for 5 years on the server, and 3 years on the desktop.

This is possible because we are looking at a confluence of upstream stability. GCC, x.org, the kernel, and other key components are now at, or are quickly approaching stable releases, so it only makes sense to capitalize on this to produce a long-term stable release.

This is not a move away from the 6 month release cycle that Ubuntu is now famous for. So, there will be 10 new Ubuntu versions before Dapper Drake is no longer supported.

It will be interesting to see what this does for Ubuntu in the enterprise. I’m sure that some large enterprises want this, but I’m also pretty sure that they are going to want a few other things too.

I will have more updates on stuff that was discussed today this evening.