I love watching the patch stream for Ubuntu’s upcoming releases. I mean, I only know what maybe 10% of them actually do, but it’s fun to see. Most of the year, for instance, there’s just the occasional maintenance patch, with maintainers releasing new versions, and of course security patches. Then you get to the Debian Import Freeze where, iirc, there’s a flurry of patches and modifications.

But the real storm comes at Upstream Version Freeze, and Feature Freeze. After that patches and package revisions come flooding down the pipe. I think I remember something like 50 a day for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes with my small simian mind.

So yeah, this is what I do for fun, eh. I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, whatever the case, as I hear there’s a good chance that desktop effects will finally be integrated into the system. Nice, because the bolt-on and backports don’t always work very well, and I fondly remember running Beryl in all its buggy glory. And while Compiz Fusion is nice, the packages I’ve used are backports and don’t necessarily always work that well.

Tags: geekery, technology, Ubuntu