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● 03.07.09

●● SUSE is Slowing Down

Posted in GNU/Linux, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: OpenSUSE release cycle changed from 6 months to 8 months following layoffs

WITH the departure of some employees and concerns over the future, the OpenSUSE project will be run with less testers available. There are signs of trouble in fact, such as this horrifying experience caused by a bad update to OpenSUSE 11.1. It happened some days ago.

=> departure of some employees | concerns over the future | ↺ this horrifying experience

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.

SUSE will be slowing down a bit. It intends to pace its releases differently. But the project’s leader is spinning this as the release cycle being “fixed”, not longer. It’s just a case of putting lipstick on a pig though. Ars Technica reports:

=> ↺ reports

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.

OStatic, which writes favourably about Novell and OpenSUSE (well, Zonker writes there), also just echoed the story told by Novell.

=> ↺ echoed the story told by Novell

Yesterday, the openSUSE Project announced that it will move to a fixed release schedule after November’s release of openSUSE 11.2.

It was a similar storyline in Tectonic.

=> ↺ a similar storyline in Tectonic

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.

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.

Red Hat is looking to employ SUSE developers who were booted by Ron Hovsepian so that he can get bonuses for not-so-outstanding performance [1, 2, 3, 4]. Canonical might still be wooing them too, but we don’t know this for sure. █

=> 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | still be wooing them

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