On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 4:05 AM, Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> wrote: > +++ Clark, Rob [2012-04-05 21:10 -0500]: >> just some random thoughts on our release model, etc.. I've been >> meaning to write up for a while but haven't had time >> >> There has been some feedback, for example on #pandaboard, that the >> monthly release cycle is confusing and detrimental for folks looking >> for something working and stable, and not necessarily bleeding edge, > > You make some good points. > > The fundamental question really is 'are we a distro or not'? If linaro > is not a distro then no-one should be expecting stable releases - we > are a technology showcase, and developer quick-start mechanism, and > the existing process seems reasonably appropriate for that, but if we > are expecting people to actually base real work off our outputs, then > he's right and we ought to change some things.
yeah, I think this is actually a very good way to describe the problem.. Currently, people *think* we are a distro, and I guess you could say this is the source of the confusion. Someone new to arm world gets their shiny new xyz-board and isn't sure whether to use an ubuntu 11.10 release, or linaro 12.01 release, etc. Maybe the solution, to put it in management buzzword-speak, is the need for some "crisp messaging about what our builds are". > The original model was that we just sent things upstream and people > who wanted a stable platform used whatever distro they wanted. But by > putting out images and encouraging people to use them we seem to be > increasingly viewed as a distro and so users will expect distro levels > of integration testing and stability. > > I think we should continue to resists 'distroness', concentrate on > upstreaming and discourage the use of our releases for anything other > than development, but it seems to me that things are headed in exactly > the opposite direction at the moment. I certainly don't want to distract from the upstream aspect of what we do. (And to be honest, I am more on the upstreaming side of things.. the distro side of things is certainly outside my area of expertise so it's quite possible that everything I say on the subject is complete and utter BS.. I just saw that it was causing confusion so thought I needed to start the discussion) > There is a fundamental problem of timing - it takes several months > longer, sometimes years, for people to get what we are doing via a > distro, and that's too long for many of them, which is where the > pressure comes from. We are all aware of that tension. This is part of the problem.. even a 6 month cycle for ubuntu is forever in arm-years. This was partly why I was thinking of a 3(ish) month cycle. Maybe not necessarily only doing a build every 3 months, but having the focus of every 3rd month build be something that is more stable, and something we wouldn't be afraid to give new users. So if joe-new-user wants something a bit more enabled than 11.10, we could tell them, here, go use ubuntu 12.q1. But maybe I speak complete crack ;-) But if we should only do technology showcases, I'm not even sure the approach of popping out one build every month really works for everything there. At least not for some of the larger topics. Maybe we should be thinking more along the lines of builds for different work topics.. Well, the one I'm familiar with is UMM/dmabuf, but that is touching many areas and takes much more than a month to get all the pieces (display, gles, multimedia, etc) in place, as well as cooperation from member companies for the evil binary blob bits. If we'd pulled that into a monthly release a month or two ago, you would have completely lost gfx and multimedia accel. Well, from TI side, I know they are busily trying to pull all the bits into a 3.3 kernel and TI PPA to enable this for ubuntu/linaro 12.04 (well, still a few bits missing to have all the multimedia, eglImage xbmc/ubuntu-tv stuff, so it won't immediately have feature parity with the old stuff).. I suppose Rome wasn't built in a day (or month). But on the other hand, doing N*M build for N different topics and M different member boards perhaps doesn't really scale well. So I'm not really sure what the best solution is. BR, -R > So are we a distro now or not? > > Wookey > -- > Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM > http://wookware.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > linaro-dev mailing list > linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org > http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
