updates forecast for openSUSE (UFO) ...

Recommended updates frequency
for openSUSE 11.0, 11.1 and 11.2

Last Saturday I did a presentation in "la volcanica" event (http://www.volcanica.cat) . It was a short presentation summarizing our work done in the UFO project.

UFO is the shortname for Updates Forecast for Opensuse, and is a project that tries to get a prediction model for openSUSE updates, so that we can know how many updates will be in a period of time.

Our results until today are:

1- a big amount of the recommended updates are released during the next 3 months after releasing an openSUSE version.
2- security updates though are being released over the whole life of the openSUSE version
3- when the next openSUSE version is released, most of the recommended updates (>70%) have been published

So, when you make an appliance based on openSUSE, the best moment to release it is after 3 months, because, as long as you are including the updates on it, you'll be avoiding a big amount of updates to your clients, and when the next openSUSE is published (6-8 months) you will mostly be having security updates, so you can concentrate on working on the next version of your appliance.

I know the results may look obvious, but our goal is to put the numbers on it, so we can compare different versions, distributions, and calculate the amount of resources needed to maintain an appliance.