OpenSUSE 12.2 release delayed

The OpenSUSE community is engaged in an intense debate about the future of the project after the team announced that the 12.2 build won't be ready for release on 11 July, as scheduled, The Register reports.

"Pretty much every milestone of OpenSUSE 12.2 has been delayed or even cancelled," said OpenSUSE community manager Jos Poortvliet in a blog post. "Compared to the preliminary schedule, milestones one to three were only about one to two weeks late - but milestone four had to be cancelled and even Beta one was two weeks late. Release candidate one won't make it either - to get Factory close to a releasable state, we'd need to think about a serious delay."

Factory is the development project for the OpenSUSE distribution of Linux, which is the community counterpart to the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) product line, ITWorld reports.

Apparently, as individual packages are fixed or updated, the ripple effect of other packages being effected is wreaking havoc within the current development model.

This has caused a huge backlog of randomly broken packages that need to be fixed.

"Very fortunately, we have an increasing number of contributors that update versions or fix bugs in packages, but lately, the end result has been getting worse, not better. And [in my opinion], it's because we can't keep up in the current model," OpenSUSE release manager Stephan Kulow said.

ZDNet writes that one spokesman for the group said OpenSUSE has important assets including the Open Build Service and Tumbleweed updating system, but that recent delays are a “wake-up” call and “an opportunity to find new directions”.

Some had hoped that the development project affiliated with the number two distribution would attract more developers after Attachmate purchased SUSE from Novell and established it as an independent unit focused exclusively on Linux. “We've grown and our current way of working doesn't scale anymore,” one spokesman wrote about Kulow's announcement.