openSUSE 12.2 delayed again, project looks to reorganize

OpenSUSE's version 12.2 will once again be delayed and top developers are planning a reorg of the open source development project -- but it may not be a bad thing.

In a critique of the current state of affairs, openSUSE release manager Stephen "Coolo" Kulow issued an email today noting that RC1 will be delayed and he called for a community-wide discussion on how to move forward with what appears to be a growing community.

“Many people have noticed that the milestones and the beta for this openSUSE release have been delayed or even canceled like Milestone 4. Now the RC is planned to go out Thursday – but that unlikely “to happen as Factory, our development project, is still far too unstable,” Kulow wrote. “One thing is certain: the openSUSE 12.2 release won’t see the light of day on July 11th.”

“Pretty much every milestone of openSUSE 12.2 has been delayed or even canceled,” he noted. “ Compared to the preliminary schedule, milestones 1 to 3 were only about one to two weeks late – but milestone 4 had to be canceled and even Beta 1 was 2 weeks late. Release candidate 1 won’t make it either – to get Factory close to a releasable state we’d need to think about a serious delay.”

openSuse is to SUSE what Fedora is to Red Hat. Version 12.1 -- the first update since SUSE was spun off from Novell -- debuted last November.

openSUSE has had other problems in 2012.

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 No. 2 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, which went out today.