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Summary

With KDE moved to a 6 month release cycle, consider if Kubuntu should move to a cycle which matches KDE. This would mean releasing Kubuntu in February and August, shortly after the KDE release and 4 months after the Ubuntu release.

Discussion

The rationale to move the Kubuntu release schedule to be in line with the KDE release schedule is that we would ship with the latest and greatest KDE version. We always like to be first with the latest software in the Ubuntu world. It would give us credit within KDE contributers as being the distro who goes out of its way for KDE. It would mean less divergance from upstream KDE codebase because patches we make would not clash with upstream freezes. It would mean we would not be in the shadow of Ubuntu release publicity. Finally with releasing four months after Ubuntu we could catch up with feature parity, currently we often miss new features until the next release.

The largest disadvantage would be the extra work required in doing our own release management (ISO testing schedule, etc) and maintaining our own archive with KDE packages. We would have to decide what to do with KDE in the Ubuntu archive and it would likely mean maintaining two versions of KDE, one in Ubuntu and one in Kubuntu. Ubuntu summits would be in the middle of the Kubuntu cycle. We would lose four months of Canonical support on our product. And while there might be advantages of having our own publicity not lost in the Ubuntu release, we would also lose the massive publicity that is part of an Ubuntu release, including community events such as release parties.

Outcomes

From the discussion, we considered the advantages of syncing release schedule to KDE are not sufficiently great as to merit overcoming the disadvantages created.

We should make greater use of Backports for new KDE releases, now made much easier with it being possible to move packages from PPAs to Backports so there is an area to test and compile quickly. We will look into having community made remix CDs alongside KDE releases using these backports.

Finally we will discuss with upstream and other KDE distributions about moving the KDE release schedule to be more in line with other projects (Gnome, Red Hat and Ubuntu).

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