[ubuntu-art] Proposal for additional QA and localisation time on Dapper

Hi all I'm writing to propose a six week delay in the release date of Dapper, in order to do additional validation, certification, localisation, and polish. I would like to call for a community "town hall" meeting on Tuesday 14th March - once at 09:00 UTC (for the Aussies and Asian communities) and then again at 18:00 UTC (for Europe and the Americas). The meetings will be in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net. Based on feedback at those meetings, we will ask the Tech Board and the Community Council to take a view on the proposal, and announce the decision by the end of the week. Work towards our feature goals for Dapper is very much on target: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+specs Having good tools to track our evolution has made Dapper our best-managed release so far. We have deferred very few goals since our Montreal planning summit, and have been able to land some unexpected but very nice extra features. The new installer is looking good, so we could in fact make our target date of April 20 if we decide that is the most important thing. We have a very good track record of meeting our six monthly release dates, and that reputation is not something I want to compromise. However, in some senses Dapper is a "first" for us, in that it is the first "enterprise quality" release of Ubuntu, for which we plan to offer support for a very long time. I, and others, would very much like Dapper to stand proud amongst the traditional enterprise linux releases from Red Hat, Debian and SUSE as an equal match on quality, support and presentation. We would like Ubuntu Dapper to be a release that companies can deploy with confidence, which will be the focus of certification work from ISV's and IHV's, and which will bring the benefits of Debian to a whole new group of users. That's certainly a new set of challenges, and I would like to give us a few more weeks of work on Dapper in order to make absolutely sure that we are, for a period at least (until Etch lands :-)), the very best enterprise desktop and server release in the world. I would like the Tech Board to determine, if we delay the final release, what the optimal beta, release candidate and target final release dates should be, based on the feedback that comes in during this discussion. Here are the concrete things I think we can gain from a delay: 1. Testing The Dapper user will likely be new to Linux, and working in a more corporate environment than previous Ubuntu release adopters. They will likely also be given Dapper to use, rather than choosing it for themselves, as Dapper is deployed in larger-scale environments. Additional testing time will shake out more bugs and give us a more robust codebase to support. 2. Certification There are a number of ISV's and IHV's who are in the process of certifying Dapper as part of their solution, and the delay will give us an opportunity to ensure that those are ready for the release. I am happy to say that we are working towards LSB 3.0 certification of Dapper, and the delay greatly reduces any risk of failure to achieve that certification. 3. Localisation After the Asia business tour I realised that we need to improve our support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian fonts, translations, input methods and supporting tools. We are pulling together a crack team to work on that next week, and I would like to land their changes in Dapper. These countries are growing their adoption of technology at a very high speed and it would be great to offer them a compelling alternative to the traditional route of proprietary software. I missed the importance of this in Montreal, I confess, and so did not prioritise the work early on in our cycle. I would like to remedy that now, rather than waiting two or three years for another enterprise-class Ubuntu release. In addition, the extra time will help us ensure that all languages have better translations available, for the installer and the whole desktop environment. We have just done the import of Dapper into Rosetta, so those of you with a talent for languages will appreciate the extra time to add depth to your language packs. 4. Polish You may have noticed this weeks theming and polish changes. No, we are not newly sponsored by Orange :-). Of course, there is a lot still to be done, and with some extra time I think Dapper can look beautiful for Kubuntu, Ubuntu and Xubuntu users. Speaking of Xubuntu, there is a main inclusion report under discussion to make Xubuntu part of main, and to publish ISO's of Xubuntu. The extra time makes this a more reasonable proposition. There are many groups that are working towards Dapper's release or dependent on it in one way or another. For example, folks who are writing books with planned release dates, or folks doing work on derivative distributions and hardware that needs Dapper to be available. I would like to hear from anyone who will be impacted by this potential change to see if we can find a way that gives the best result for the broad community. Please send me email, and join in on the meetings at whichever time suits you best. We would like to be able to announce 24x7 global technical support for Dapper, both from Canonical and from the fantastic ecosystem of companies that is growing up around Ubuntu. We would like to show that a Debian-based distribution can deliver the same world class desktop punch that you might traditionally expect from Novell or Red Hat. We will live with Dapper for five years - so let's give it a few extra weeks now so that it can be a real asset to the Ubuntu project for the full duration of its lifespan. Mark