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The Linux distillery Forget the Heron; what's new in Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex?
The Linux distillery Forget the Heron; what's new in Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex? | Forget the Heron; what's new in Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex? |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 29 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 To hammer out the shape and schedule for Intrepid Ibex, Ubuntu held a developer summit just last week from May 19 to 23. This was in lovely Prague and was open to any interested member of the Ubuntu community as well as developers and other distributions. The purpose of the summit was to establish blueprints and outline strategies for assembling the technologies to be included.A feature freeze will be imposed on August 28th, followed by alpha 5 on September 4; a user interface freeze on September 11 with alpha on September 18, and then a beta freeze on September 25th. The first beta release will be available on October 2nd, a kernel freeze on October 16 and final release on October 30th. Let’s clarify these terms and milestones. Prior to the Debian import freeze any new package released in the Debian unstable package repository will be automatically included in Ubuntu – that is, packages where the current Ubuntu development branch does not contain the substring “ubuntu” and there is a newer version in Debian. Entirely new packages – which are simply not in Ubuntu at all – will also be automatically imported. This import is achieved by simply copying the source package verbatim from Debian and building fresh binary packages. After the Debian import freeze is imposed any changes to Debian will only be imported if a developer explicitly requests. The feature freeze is when new features, packages and APIs stop being included, and the focus becomes bug fixing. There are some exceptions; if a new package or feature contributes to a high priority goal of the project (such as ubiquitous Internet) or it is a reasonable fix for an important bug or meets some other exceptional circumstance then it may be included. This said, some microreleases of applications will still be accepted provided the only new functionality they offer is bug fixes. Additionally, because new packages can take days to weeks to properly wend their way through the Ubuntu approval pipeline it is most likely packages will still be in the queue for processing at the time of the freeze; these packages will all still be processed and accepted. The user interface freeze stabilises what the appearance and interaction will be and how it will work. This is important because documentation writers and translators need to work with a fixed target that doesn’t contain obsolete screenshots or wording. At this time there are certain things which are no longer permitted to change without approval and notification, particularly, the user interface of all the individual applications installed by default, the appearance of the desktop, distribution-specific artwork and all user-visible strings (ie the text of menus, displays, etc.) in applications and the desktop. CONTINUED |
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