Freezing Maverick – behind the scenes on Ubuntu 10.10

The interesting freezes yet to come start with the ‘Feature Freeze’, currently planned for 12 August. This is one of the more crucial milestones. This is the time when new features are introduced, including new features to packages and the focus changes to try to stabilise what we already have, finding and fixing bugs. It is possible to apply for an exception, which is generally quite reasonable – providing its likelihood of affecting other packages is low.

Next there is the ‘User Interface Freeze’, scheduled for 26 August. This is the point highlighted where the artwork and design for the Maverick desktop will really be made pretty stable. While it does freeze the UI of the whole distribution, it tends to focus more on the user interface and design of the actual desktop design. In the Lucid cycle, it was this day that the new themes were initially uploaded. This is something that tends to come purely from Canonical. They did receive some criticism for introducing changes so late in the process, which many felt were crucial (such as buttons moving to the left) and that were essentially locked after this date due to the freeze.

The next major freeze coincides with the UI Freeze and is ‘Beta Freeze’. It is at this point the main focus switches to increasing stability. Developers do not have direct upload access to the archive; instead they are held in a queue and manually approved by the Ubuntu Release Team. Once the beta ships, the archive reverts back to the stipulations of the Feature Freeze.

As Ubuntu has a great focus on making the operating system as translational as possible, there is a ‘Document String Freeze’, which means that developers are discouraged from changing strings, or text, in documentation. This allows the massive translator community to have a pretty stable base for knowing that translations can commence, and text won’t be changed without them knowing – anyone wishing to change a string from this point onwards has to communicate it publicly.

‘Final Freeze’ is the main deadline that causes a scurry of activity. Whilst it’s discouraged to try to change too much in a tight window, there does tend to be many uploads on the days (even hours) approaching Final Freeze. This, for most, is the last point that uploads should be considered. The only new uploads to the archive are fixes for bugs that would otherwise block the release, security fixes and other crucial changes. Fixes that do not fit into this category are normally deferred to be ‘Stable Release Updates’ (SRU), or essentially post-release updates. If the fixes are not suitable for SRU, they are simply deferred until the next release of Ubuntu (which is only six months away!).

The current schedule suggests that the release candidate (RC) will be released on 30 September 2010. This is extremely close to the final deliverable version, but should still be treated as pre-release and so with the caveats that go with that.

While the process might sound a little complicated, it is easier than it sounds and community contributors of all levels are encouraged – such as bug triaging, CD image (alpha) testing, translations, merging from Debian and fixing Ubuntu-specific bugs. Further information regarding the dates, can be found here. It is fun and easy to get involved in the project, and it has always given me some pride in knowing that when people run Ubuntu, I was part of its creation!

Interested in Ubuntu? You can read more of Dave’s columns and other Ubuntu coverage here.
Dave Walker Image courtesy Tony Whitmore