One of the things that we want to do as a project is to have more community involvement in major decisions, like the release schedule. Right now, we’re discussing the proposed 11.2 release schedule on the openSUSE-Project mailing list. Yes, 11.1 is not out the door yet, and we’re already talking about the 11.2 release.

From Michael’s email on opensuse-project:

First we talked about July ‘09 release to come close to an 8 months release cycle. But KDE 4.3 is scheduled for release on June 30th and probably an OpenOffice.org release will be out end of June as well – both wouldn’t make it into a July openSUSE 11.2. Therfor we’re now thinking about a September release. Beside of getting the most current OpenOffice and KDE in this would even have one additional upside. It probably would be just in front of our openSUSE conference. So the conference could be used for very a focused openSUSE 11.3 planning. But it has its downside as well. Finalization of the release would happen during the summer holiday season. To address this we we added one Beta to stretch the development time a bit.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

2009-02-05 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 0
2009-03-05 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 1
2009-04-02 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 2
2009-04-30 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 3
2009-05-28 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 4
2009-06-25 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 1
2009-07-09 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 2
2009-07-24 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 3
2009-08-06 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 4
2009-08-20 openSUSE 11.2 RC1
2009-09-03 openSUSE 11.2 GM
2009-09-10 openSUSE 11.2 Public Release

The downside of this is that it would probably miss the GNOME release. But I’m not sure we can satisfy all schedules. (If anyone can persuade the GNOME & KDE folks to sync up their release schedules, that would be spiffy.)

If you’re interested in participating in the discussion, head over to openSUSE-project and chime in. If you’re not subscribed, now would be a great time to do so! (To subscribe to the project mailing list, just send an email to opensuse-project+subscribe@opensuse.org)

A question has come up a few times recently that I’d like to throw out for discussion: How can we show some of our outstanding contributors that we recognize and appreciate their efforts, without offending other contributors who are also doing outstanding work?

While I was in Nuremberg last week, I had several conversations (and a few online) about the fact that we have some really excellent community contributors and wouldn’t it be great if we could have awards or something to say “thanks!” and recognize those folks publicly.

I know of quite a few people who definitely deserve an award for all their hard work on openSUSE — both inside and outside of Novell’s walls. And that’s just the people I’ve noticed — which is to say, no matter how you slice it, we’d end up missing some people.

Thoughts and suggestions?

Looking around, I’m seeing a lot of great stuff going on in the openSUSE community — watching the openSUSE-marketing list, I’m seeing a lot of work being done on Sneak Peeks and publishing and translating openSUSE Weekly News.

And there’s more! The Contrib repo is moving forward, which should be a major step forward in terms of getting new packages in and maintained by community members and making those easy to access for openSUSE users.

There’s work being done to support ARM in the openSUSE Build Service. I had a chance to sit down with Martin Mohring in Munich to talk about ARM and openSUSE on new platforms while I was in Germany last week, and I’m really impressed and excited by all the work that’s going into supporting ARM with openSUSE, and the possibilities.

Oh, and I keep hearing something about a release next week, too… If you haven’t, make sure you grab one of the countdown banners and display them proudly on your Website! Like so:

I guess this is why Ars says that openSUSE is one of the best distros of the year:

OpenSUSE is one of the oldest Linux distributions, but it has gone through some significant changes since its original launch in 1994. Under Novell’s stewardship, OpenSUSE has become significantly more inclusive and community-driven. The distro announced its first community-elected board this year and has grown its base of contributors considerably. The distro has also made major technical advancements, including major improvements to its package management system and support for installation from a Live CD.

OpenSUSE delivers a powerful user experience and is one of the few distros that provides equally outstanding support for both GNOME and KDE. Its KDE 4 environment is the best out there, which is why OpenSUSE has become the reference distro for all of our KDE reviews. Its GNOME environment is also top-notch and provides the perfect selection of applications in the default installation.

I’m continually impressed and inspired by all the work that goes into openSUSE. As always, there’s always more work ahead. But, if you step back and look at the state of the project today compared to a year ago, or two years ago, there’s been clear progress on every front — and no signs of slowing down.

Martin already sent out an announcement about the upcoming hackfest for Monday, but I wanted to bring it up again.The details:

• We’ll meet in IRC on Freenode, in the #opensuse-project channel.
• Hours are 11:00 to 18:00 CET (that’s 05:00 to 12:00 EST)
• Everyone is welcome to participate!

We’ll be going through the wiki and organizing content for “beginners” to openSUSE so that on the launch day, we can point people to the best resources we have so new users can easily find what we have and benefit from the documentation that exists. Of course, people are welcome to contribute new info where we’re already missing info.

As we’re getting closer to 11.1 final release, it’s time to start giving the wider openSUSE audience (and, very importantly, potential new users) a sneak peek at what’s going to be in the new release.

So, we could use a few good openSUSE users to step up and write a “sneak peek” for their favorite new features — whether that’s the latest release of GNOME in openSUSE, Banshee, KDE 4.1, or whatever. There’s a list of ideas over on the wiki, but don’t feel constrained! If you have a passion for YaST and want to write about the new modules, knock it out and submit it. (Thanks to Kevin Dupuy for getting the ball rolling.)

Sneak peeks are published on openSUSE News, but if you don’t have an account — don’t worry. Someone with posting privileges will be happy to put it up.

If you have questions or aren’t sure where to start, feel free to ping the openSUSE marketing list with questions. (If you’re not subscribed, sign up!) We have a very friendly bunch of people on the -marketing list, everyone is welcome to join and pitch in.

Let’s get those sneak peeks rolling! We have a slew of interesting new features in 11.1, and it’s time to start telling the world about them.

If all goes as planned, we’ll be releasing openSUSE 11.1 beta 5 tomorrow. (We were expecting to release 11.1 RC1, but it was decided there were too many blocker and P1 bugs to call it RC1.)

I’ve put up a draft of the release announcement on GitHub here:  http://gist.github.com/24232 Any feedback or additions would be welcome. If you don’t have a GitHub account (and don’t feel like signing up for one…) feel free to send me a diff or just send me an email with comments. Thanks!

openSUSE 11.1 isn’t even out, but YaST is already getting some positive reviews over on OStatic. Imagine what kind of reviews YaST would get if it were released separately from openSUSE? Which brings me to the topic at hand… Stanislav Visnovsky is asking the question: Should YaST be released independently from openSUSE?

But in principle, YaST is a tool that can be used across distributions and there are people interested in this to happen. There are technical barriers to do releases independent of openSUSE (e.g. a lot of openSUSE-specific knowledge and behavior coded in YaST) as well as procedural. During past years, a lot of these non-technical issues has been addressed as we opened up the YaST development (re-licensing the code under GPL, opening up source control system and mailing lists, etc).

But still, there is one big thing left: YaST packages are released in concert with openSUSE. Yes, it is very convenient for openSUSE, but it makes it almost impossible to track the development during for people outside of our great distribution.

YaST is, for me, one of openSUSE’s major strengths, and I think it’d be beneficial for other distros and projects to use and extend.

Linux, after all these years, still lacks a good, comprehensive, and cross-distro system management tool that’s suitable for use at the console or from the desktop. (YaST qualifies as good and comprehensive, in my book, but falls down on the “cross-distro” part.)

I’d really like to see YaST development visible to the community at large as a separate process, for several reasons:

• Provide more attention to YaST releases — currently, YaST releases are announced concurrently with openSUSE releases and I don’t think they get the same attention they would separately.
• Provide more visibility into YaST development — which might help involve more projects with YaST.
• Assuming there’s more adoption of YaST outside of openSUSE, it would help provide additional testing and (presumably) improve YaST all around. Not that YaST isn’t perfect already, of course…

If you have thoughts around this, I’d encourage discussion over on Stano’s blog.

Spending some time in #opensuse-testing and working through the features list on the wiki.

We’ve got a few people in channel and getting a few tests knocked out. We can always use more testers, of course. We’ll have people in channel until 13:00 Eastern (19:00 CET).

Since we’re testing on a workday, I know that makes it a bit difficult for some people to join in — but testers are always welcome, and there are usually people around on #opensuse-factory.

Also, suggestions for improving our testing procedures are always welcome. Right now, I don’t think we have quite as much directed and organized testing as would be optimal. I know we have a lot of people from the community who report bugs as found, but we could probably do with additional directed testing.

openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 was released earlier this week, and we need to work out the bugs before 11.1 final. Tomorrow we’re having a testing meeting in IRC to try some directed testing of new features in 11.1.

We’ll be meeting in IRC on Freenode, in the #opensuse-testing channel on Thursday, November 6 from 11:00 to 19:00 CET. (That’s 5:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern, and 7:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Tokyo time…) We may go later in the day depending on how successful the testing is going — but the participants from our Nuremberg office will probably be ready to check out by 19:00 CET.

We’ll be working off the 11.1 Feature Test list here: http://en.opensuse.org/Testing:Features_11.1 It’s crucial that we get these features tested for the 11.1 release, as they’re new to 11.1 and we want to shake out any bugs we can. Unfortunately, not a lot of testing has been done for this list (at least, if the features have been tested, very little has been reported back…)

The workflow will look like this:

1. Connect to the #opensuse-testing channel, and the topic should have the numbers of the ongoing tests.
2. Look on the wiki page for a feature that isn’t tested. It should show:
   Status: ready to test
   Test Result: idle
3. Announce the number in channel so everyone knows that it’s being worked on.
4. Announce the results once the test has finished
5. One of the openSUSE team will enter the results of the test in the wiki and in the internal feature db.

All you need is a beta 4 install (or possibly just a system running the live CDs) and some time.

We want 11.1 to be the best release possible — which means that it needs to be well-tested before the release. If you want a bug-free (or as close as possible) release, then you can help get there by taking the time to help test. If not tomorrow — and we’re happy to have testers any ‘ol time — then any time is fine. Just grab the feature test page and go. Or, if you happen to encounter bugs in the release that don’t relate to features on the list, fire up bugzilla and let us know about those too.

If you have questions, sign up for the openSUSE testing mailing list, or feel free to ask in the #opensuse-factory channel on Freenode.

Robert Lihm posted the following to the openSUSE-marketing mailing list:

Today we started a openSUSE Build Service Webclient online survey.
We want to get more informations about the OBS-Webclient users, the
used hard and software and (potential) use cases.

If you use, used or want to use the OBS, please participate on the
survey and help us to make a solid Webclient 2.

If you’re a Webclient user, please help ‘em out! Take a few minutes to complete the survey and the results will help improve the openSUSE Build Service Webclient.