The Ubuntu 13.04 development cycle will not offer alpha builds for testing, per a discussion at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, which is taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark this week.
Although the outcome is subject to change, the plan suggests discontinuing alpha builds for Ubuntu 13.04 (‘Raring Ringtail’), with public testing instead focused on a single beta build.
The change will address what developers see as a form of ‘testing fatigue’ caused by asking the community to download and review six different milestone ISOs every cycle.
Developers at the summit also argued that the alpha model slows down progress. The archive has to be frozen and packages locked down for several days for an official alpha image to be produced.
Furthermore, the QA team notes that frozen milestone images lead to obsolete bug reports, as users spend time reporting issues in the frozen alpha builds, when fixes have already landed in newer daily builds.
Official Ubuntu flavours like Lubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu would not be affected this change. They will be allowed to continue to release alpha builds if they want to.
Ubuntu 13.04 may see ‘monthly milestones’ issued instead of alphas. Less formal than an alpha, these would take the form of a daily build ISO with more greater QA levelled on it.
Such ‘milestones’ would allow developers to target bugs and features at specific deadlines – which is useful for motivation – but would permit greater flexibility and opportunity to land updates and fixes without the stop-start deadlines the formal alpha model requires.
Under the proposed schedule, the regular version of Ubuntu 13.04 will drop to one formal development release: a single ‘final beta’ a week or so ahead of the planned stable release.
For more news on what’s planned for Ubuntu 13.04, keep your eyes affixed to this blog!