news
Supercharging Ubuntu Releases: Monthly Snapshots & Automation
Quoting: Supercharging Ubuntu Releases: Monthly Snapshots & Automation - Project Discussion - Ubuntu Community Hub —
Ubuntu has shipped on a predictable, six-month cadence for two decades. Twenty years ago, the idea of releasing an entire distribution every six months was considered forward looking, bold and even difficult. Things have changed since then: software engineering has evolved as a practice, and the advent of both rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux, and more recently image-based immutable distributions such as Universal Blue have meant that other projects with similar goals have adopted vastly different release models with some desirable properties.
My goal over the coming months is to build a release process that takes advantage of modern release engineering practices, while retaining the resilience and stability of our six-monthly releases. We’ll introduce significantly more automated testing, and ensure that the release process is transparent, repeatable and executable in a much shorter and well-known timeframe with little to no human intervention.
Also:
-
Ubuntu now includes monthly development snapshots from today - Neowin
Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu Linux, has announced that it will be introducing monthly snapshot development builds in addition to the beta, release candidate, and final release. The company is beginning to use these snapshot releases starting today, May 29. There will be four snapshots in total during the Ubuntu 25.10 development cycle with snapshot 2 arriving on June 10, snapshot 3 arriving July 15, and snapshot 4 arriving on August 19.
The reasons for the change are to do with the underlying release processes that go on behind the scenes. The company said that over the last 20 years, it has developed a release process with various safeguards, but it’s mostly a manual process that requires the input of seasoned Ubuntu veterans.
Canonical has recently put together the Canonical Ubuntu Release Management Team which will work with the Ubuntu Release Team, composed of the veterans, to develop a new process for releasing Ubuntu versions. The snapshot releases are designed to give the new team a better understanding of the existing processes.
Original also:
-
Supercharging Ubuntu Releases: Monthly Snapshots & Automation
My goal over the coming months is to build a release process that takes advantage of modern release engineering practices, while retaining the resilience and stability of our six-monthly releases. We’ll introduce significantly more automated testing, and ensure that the release process is transparent, repeatable and executable in a much shorter and well-known timeframe with little to no human intervention.
This journey will also create space for better system-wide testing, earlier detection of regressions, and a more productive collaboration with our community.
-
One more
-
OMG Ubuntu ☛ First Ubuntu Monthly Snapshot Now Available to Download
Ubuntu's announced new monthly snapshot releases. The development builds use new automated release processes, but won't replace stable releases.
-
GoL:
-
Ubuntu gets monthly snapshot testing releases
Ubuntu is not “moving to monthly releases” or adopting a rolling release model; we’re committed to our six-monthly releases with a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years. That doesn’t mean that our release process should be exempt from the same scrutiny that the rest of our engineering processes are subject to."
As part of this, they've also recently formed a new 'Canonical Ubuntu Release Management Team' to help develop the process for all this to work alongside the main Ubuntu Release Team. Part of it is to help the team get away from "deep institutional knowledge, and toward clean well-documented automated workflows that are transparent, repeatable and testable". With their current model "failure modes are not detected until they’re urgent and blocking an imminent release" so this gives more opportunities to avoid that.