The openSUSE community has published the roadmap for the 11.2 release and unveiled the schedule for the next several releases, all the way out to 2011. The distro will be shifting towards a fixed time-based eight-month release cycle.

Ubuntu and Fedora have both converged on six-month release cycles that are loosely pinned to the GNOME development schedule. The openSUSE developers have rejected this approach and selected an eight-month cycle instead because they don't believe that six months provides an adequate time window for building a quality distribution.

The new schedule was proposed in a message posted to the openSUSE mailing list by release manager Stephan Kulow. In the e-mail, he lists the months when releases are expected to arrive and also provides some insight into the feature plan for 11.2, the next major release.

"To give us something to plan around, we would like to propose a fixed release schedule. As a six-month release schedule is not something we consider feasible to maintain high-quality standards, we are proposing a fixed eight-month schedule," Kulow wrote.

OpenSUSE 11.2, which is codenamed Fichte, is planned for November 2009. It will include GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3, a Web-based management interface for the YaST configuration system, improved support for Netbook hardware, and could potentially use Ext4 as the default filesystem. Subsequent releases will take place in July 2010, March 2011, and November 2011. Previous releases have generally been made at intervals of roughly 8 to 10 months, but a fixed cycle has never previously been enforced.

A strong commitment to a predetermined consistent release schedule makes it much easier for third-party developers and end-users to properly plan for releases. It also diminishes the risk of never-ending Duke Nukem Forever development cycles. The downside is that the pressure to ship on time can degrade release quality and also cause a distro to miss critical versions of important software components that are released too late for inclusion. The key is to be able to work within a schedule but make allowances for deviations where it is necessary and warranted.

The new openSUSE release strategy appears more structured than the previous approach, but still not as uncompromising as Ubuntu's rigid schedule commitment.

OpenSUSE's build service offers a cutting-edge package set called Factory that delivers the latest unstable versions; it seems likely that power users will have to use Factory to get more current software towards the end of the cycle. Several people responded to Kulow's schedule proposal by suggesting that it could be advantageous to have a "rolling" release package set that's more stable than Factory—sort of the same idea as Debian's "testing" channel.

OpenSUSE has evolved considerably over the past few years. It has adopted a more inclusive and participatory development model and is attracting a growing community of volunteer contributors. It has also benefited from significant technical improvements that are making it a more competitive choice for the desktop. Although openSUSE has made a lot of progress, it also recently suffered some setbacks and lost several fulltime developers during Novell's layoffs. The new schedule and the 11.2 roadmap both look like strong steps to keep development on the right track.

Listing image by Sebastian Bergmann