On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Priyanka Sarkar <[email protected]> wrote: > We thought of coming up a good story on the distro release time span. > Our question is 'With many distros going for a six-monthly release > cycle, do you think the release cycles of distros are too short? (And > users don't have to upgrade on a frequent basis?) ' > > What do you think on this? Would really appreciate if you share your > views elaborately.
While other distributions will have a documented rationale behind the release cycle, here's what The Fedora Project states "The Fedora Project releases a new version of Fedora approximately every 6 months and provides updated packages (maintenance) to these releases for approximately 13 months. This allows users to "skip a release" while still being able to always have a system that is still receiving updates." (from: <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle>) Further on, in the same link "Fedora generally develops new releases over a six month period to provide a regular and predictable release schedule. The bi-annual targeted release dates are May Day (May 1st) and Halloween (October 31) making them easy to remember and avoiding significant holiday breaks. Changes to this standard must be approved by the community-elected Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). A six month release schedule also follows the precedence of Red Hat Linux (precursor to Fedora). Former Red Hat software engineer Havoc Pennington offers a historical perspective here (<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.advisory-board/1475/>). GNOME started following a time based release based on the ideas and success of Red Hat Linux and other distributions following Fedora having adopted a similar release cycle. Several other major components, including the Linux kernel, Openoffice.org, Xorg, have started following a time based release schedule. While the exact release schedules vary between these components and other upstream projects, the interactions between these components and Fedora makes a six month time based release schedule a good balance." -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan> _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
