The Kubuntu project now has a couple of new release managers, and this was necessary after Jonathan Riddell left the project a few weeks ago.

The discussions and tensions between Jonathan Riddell and Canonical have culminated with the departure of the Kubuntu release manager. He was more than just a manager for the distro. He's one of the big contributors to the KDE project as well, and he was a powerful link between the two projects.

His departure from the project left the position of release manager open, and that really needs to be filled in as quickly as possible. The person or persons to take on this role will have a lot to say, but given the fact that the people who are going to occupy the position are already known to the team, the transition is not going to be a difficult one.

New Kubuntu Release Managers

There are now two release managers for Kubuntu instead of one, and that is probably a good thing. People were wondering how the project was going to fair after Jonathan had left, and we'll have a good idea about their efficiency with the new Kubuntu 16.04 LTS.

"Hi everyone, with Jonathan standing down as Release Manager for Kubuntu, me (yofel) and Scarlett Clark (sgclark) as substitute will be acting as Kubuntu Release Managers from now on. From what I gathered on IRC the only thing we should eventually apply to is for a position on the release team, but as neither of us is a core-dev yet this will have to wait. We'll work on fixing that over the next months. If there's anything we need/should be doing other than being on IRC, subscribing to ubuntu-release and helping with the milestone management please tell us," wrote Philip Muskovac on the official mailing list.

A new Kubuntu LTS is in the works, 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), and it's expected to land in April 2016.