Canonical seriously thinking about abandoning semi-annual releases.

A month ago on Habré there was already a mention of this topic, but the day before yesterday Rick Spencer ( Engineering Director at Canonical ) opened up a more detailed discussion of this topic. In short, the community is encouraged to abandon the semi-annual releases, moving instead to the more frequent “rolling” releases, while maintaining, of course, the LTS releases.
According to Rick, the semi-annual releases have become obsolete because:

• Customers prefer LTS releases for their stability.
• For beginners, LTS releases are often recommended as the most stable and reliable.
• Six-month releases slow down the addition of new features ( this publication is mentioned).
• Due to the improvement in the quality of dev-releases, they can now be used and participated in the development of Ubuntu.
• Support for semi-annual releases is an expensive waste of time and attention, and does not allow focusing on the future development of the distribution.

The following points were noted as positive points of transition to floating releases:

• For users: those who prefer LTS releases will not be affected by current changes, and those who want to get new features will not wait six months. In addition, according to Rick, developers will not be under the pressure of timing and rush, making mistakes, which means that the quality of the software will improve.
• For the community: the community will get a simpler model. There will be a clear separation of users, and this will make it easier to recommend the distribution, and it will be easier for developers to maintain the software, because instead of the three versions, they will have to maintain only two types of releases: LTS and current dev-releases.
• For Core / MOTU developers, roughly the same advantages are highlighted: there will be no need to support old software, there will be no need to break between many versions, and new features will come out exactly when they are ready, not earlier and not later

Accordingly, if the decision to abandon semi-annual releases is made, users will be able to choose between the three distribution options:

• Lts
• Floating release, updated daily
• Floating release, updated once a month

An interesting thing was mentioned in the discussion that I allowed myself to bring to the end of the post: because Canonical released Ubuntu versions for smartphones and tablets, they write a lot of code, which, in fact, is “future” Ubuntu, but , however, will not be included in 13.04.
Perhaps this is the right decision, especially in the light of Ubuntu's access to new devices, and the community will really benefit from it. It remains unclear, however, when Canonical plans to switch to these floating releases, but judging by the discussions in the Ubuntu camp, many agree with such changes, which means that rejection of semi-annual releases is quite likely.
PS: it doesn’t draw even close to translation, so I designed it as a separate topic.