A Conservative Techie

In a wonderful email from Scott Remnant to the Kubuntu-Devel mailing list there are some great questions addressed about what exactly is happening with Kubuntu 8.04.

The decision was made by the company that provides the LTS, which is Canonical and not the community.

The Technical Board was not formally involved[0] in the decision whether
or not to release Kubuntu 8.04 as an LTS.  “LTS” is a commercial support
commitment provided by Canonical Ltd, who shoulder the financial and
administrative burden of doing so; as such, it is entirely their
decision as to whether or not they provide that support for a particular
release.

And here are some questions that were asked:

Will KDE 4 be stable enough to support for the term of the release?
I’ve not seen anybody who believes that this would be the case; a
long-term supported release would have to be based on the stable KDE 3.5
series.  This gives us the second question:

Will a bug in KDE 3.5 receive upstream attention in March 2011?
In order for Canonical to make a commercial commitment to their
customers, who have signed contracts and terms of service with them,
they need to be sure that they can honour the terms of their agreements.
The KDE upstream position appears clear, KDE 4 is the focus of
developer attention; KDE 3.5 will be supported as long as KDE 4 isn’t
suitable for support.
Given the attention being paid to KDE 4, it is difficult to believe
that this will not be the preferred release in three years time.  Thus
it is difficult to guarantee that upstream will still support the
current stable series for the timescale required.

Is the development community able to sufficiently test the new release?
Again, in order for the commercial commitment to be made, Canonical
has to believe that the development community (which includes its own
staff) are able to provide sufficient testing of both the new release
and upgrades between older releases and the newer one.
This judgement is both based on the number of active testers for the
previous release according to the ISO test tracker, and the relative
popularity of the available packages/seeds.
The number of Kubuntu developers testing releases and recording their
results is right now at an all-time low, this makes it difficult to
guarantee sufficient test coverage of installs and most importantly
upgrades.
Likewise the current download interest is entirely directed towards
KDE 4 packages and CD images.

Thanks again Scott for posting this email, it provides some great answers as to the direction of things.

There has been a lot of discussion in regards to what exactly going on with the next version of Kubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron.  I am a little disappointed to find out the 8.04 will not be a long term release for Kubuntu due to the nature of KDE4 being released.

I think this is a mistake, I think it only distances Kubuntu even further from Ubuntu and moves it further into the step-child role that so many people claim it already has.  I understand the fact we only have one paid full time developer.  (Something Mark once said would be resolved but now looks like that will never happen.)  I also know Jonathan Riddell is doing a great job and is already probably spending more working on Kubuntu then is probably healthy.  However I think it is a mistake to have been made by Canonical.

Everyone says it was a decision made by the technical board, the leadership of the Ubuntu Community, but I’m trying to find where that decision was made.  I’ve read the meeting logs that are posted on the wiki and see no reference to the change that was made on any of the discussions that are posted.  This would leave to point this once again to a decision made by Canonical and not by the community or the technical board.  Apparently this decision was made sometime between Jonathan’s recent announcement and UDS-Boston.

I want to state that I really enjoy Kubuntu/Ubuntu, the community and the leadership behind it, but have not the openness behind this discussion that most other decisions are made.  Is it because it is not there, or is it because this was not an open decision?  I will continue to work with Ubuntu/Kubuntu for Kubuntu adoption and with the Official Ubuntu Book, Ubuntu Documentation, Ubuntu QA, and all other teams and projects I have volunteered for.

The next Long Term Supported Version of Kubuntu will probably be closer to 2010 if there is ever another LTS version.  This is way to long to wait for a business or any other enterprise to wait to get on board the greatest desktop environment and have the stability they need. 

The 18-month support of 8.04 on the Kubuntu side will also lead to some confusion over support and also over people adopting Kubuntu 8.04.  This is already seen in the blogsphere based on reaction to the announcement.

I hope Kubuntu 8.04 will be a great rocking release and am looking forward to supporting it the best I can.