Meeting 2013-03-18:

• Meeting chair: Matt Zimmerman
• Other members in attendance: Colin Watson, Stéphane Graber
• Apologies: Martin Pitt, Soren Hansen, Kees Cook

• Full log: http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2013/ubuntu-meeting.2013-03-18-21.01.html

• See also Stéphane Graber's more detailed summary

• Proposed changes to the release cycle

  • The board discussed a few recently proposed changes to the release cycle

  • Duration of maintenance/support
    • Currently, standard (non-LTS) releases include a commitment to 18 months of maintenance
    • The original proposal called for reducing the maintenance period for standard releases from 18 months to 7 months
    • The development team representatives discussed the possibilities and reached a consensus on a new maintenance period of 9 months, which the board then voted to approve
  • Effective release for new maintenance period
    • The board voted to implement the 9-month maintenance period beginning with Ubuntu 13.04
  • Providing a mechanism to easily track the development branch of Ubuntu continuously
    • Currently, users must explicitly upgrade their system to each new release
    • The proposal called for designating the current development focus as a "rolling release", intended to be tracked continuously rather than via discrete upgrades
    • The technical requirement for such a designation would be a mechanism to enable this behavior, since it is not currently supported by our current infrastructure
    • The board voted in support of the development of such a facility, without specifying a particular mechanism (TBD by the relevant development team(s))
  • There were further components to the proposal which could not be discussed in the time available for the meeting. Discussion will continue at the next meeting on 2013-04-01