Mandriva Community Planning Next Release

While waiting for the Mandriva management to decide the future direction of the distribution, the community is taking matters into their own hands and beginning the planning stages for the next release, assumed to be Mandriva Linux 2012.

In a posting on the Mandriva wiki, development community members stated that even though there is no official roadmap as of yet, "there is a Mandriva community effort around a new Mandriva release, in order to keep people stimulated to contribute." The community draft is not hosted or sponsored by Mandriva, so any plans are tentative on Mandriva's official position to come.

In the Development Community Draft, a few details are emerging. The first was the assumption that the next release will be dubbed Mandriva Linux 2012, "scheduled to be released in 2012."

Per Øyvind Karlsen will be acting as project leader with Bernhard Rosenkränzer & Matthew Dawkins serving as release managers. They figure the desktop edition will be released in "i586, x32, & x86_64 DVDs live and installable images." A technology preview is planned before the end of the month with an alpha to arrive in June. Beyond that is to come.

The draft points to a spec proposal and an idea list as possible features. Some of the spec proposals include things like Switch to eglibc, Switch to gcc 4.7.x, Adopt prelink by default, and Revive Aurora bootloader. The list of features will firm up in the weeks to come.

No mention was made on whether Mandriva will be staying with the ROSA desktop other than a reference to the "Mandriva Desktop," which almost sounds like Mandriva 2012 will be using ROSA or a ROSA-like desktop. Some were hoping to see a more default KDE return.

Of course, nothing is written in stone as of yet.