THIS IS A DRAFT. It will be announced on ubuntu-devel-announce when finalized.
This document describes the development plan for FeistyFawn, to be released as Ubuntu 7.04 in April 2007.
Background and Concept
Ubuntu 7.04 will be maintained for a standard lifetime of 18 months after its release.
We will focus on the following major areas of development:
Hardware support - Enabling Ubuntu to be used on an ever wider range of computers and avoiding hardware-related problems when upgrading
Visual enhancements to the desktop - Making Ubuntu more visually appealing and easier to use by incorporating the latest desktop graphics technology
Developer-driven features - Innovative ideas from the development team and the user community, some of which have been building excitement for two or more release cycles and are now ready to be deployed
Mark Shuttleworth's original outlook for this release can be found at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-October/000212.html
Schedule
This will be a standard six-month development cycle like the first three Ubuntu releases, with the Ubuntu 6.10 cycle having been shortened to bring us back into our April/October alternating schedule.
The complete release schedule, including all deadlines, milestones and freeze dates, can be found at FeistyReleaseSchedule.
Procedural changes for Developers
A few adjustments have been made to the structure of the release schedule, which should be evident from FeistyReleaseSchedule.
The freeze exception process has been through some revision and is now documented in FreezeExceptionProcess.
Updates to stable, maintained releases now follow a process documented in StableReleaseUpdates.
Packages which have been modified in Ubuntu must now have their Maintainer field set to an @ubuntu.com email address, and the original Maintainer field renamed to Original-Maintainer, per DebianMaintainerField.
Feature goals
The list of feature goals is not yet finalized, but the latest version is always available from Launchpad: