Changes in Ubuntu releases decided by the Ubuntu Technical Board

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

Hi everyone,

The following announcement is from Stéphane Graber, on behalf of the
Ubuntu Technical Board, about changes to releases decided at the
Ubuntu Technical Board meeting.

It's also published on the fridge if you wish to share this news
directly: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/19/changes-in-ubuntu-releases-decided-by-the-ubuntu-technical-board/
and you can also read commentary from Rick Spencer, Vice President of
Ubuntu Engineering, on the importance and impact of these changes
here: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/19/ubuntu-technical-board-looks-at-shuttleworths-proposal-for-release-management-methodology/

In yesterday's meeting[0] we covered two of the topics from Mark's
proposal to the Technical Board:

== Reducing the length of support for our regular (non-LTS) releases ==

The rational here is that it's costing a lot of time to maintain all
those releases for 18 months. It's also causing a lot of load on the SRU
team and on developers to ensure that upgrading from one release to the
other won't cause regressions due to fixes being SRUed only to a few
releases.

The change in support length from 18 months to 9 months will reduce the
number of releases we need to support in parallel while still allowing
enough time for our users to upgrade to the next release.

This change will affect Ubuntu releases starting with 13.04, any older
regular release will still be supported for 18 months and LTS releases
will still be supported for 5 years.

This change was approved through two votes, the first about shortening
the support length to 9 months and the second about doing it starting
with 13.04. Both votes had all 3 attending Technical Board members'
approval and had general support by the other members from mailing-list
discussions.

== Enable users to continuously track the development focus of Ubuntu
without having to explicitly upgrade ==

This discussion was about making it easier for some of our users to keep
their machine always on the current development release.

This has nothing to do with Rolling Releases and is purely about setting
up some kind of meta-series on the archive mirrors that people can use
instead of having to manually upgrade from one development release to
the next.

There again, all 3 present members agreed with this proposal.

== Other discussions ==

Outside of those two items, we also briefly discussed some changes to
our update tool to allow our users to upgrade by more than a single
release at a time.

In the current state of things we allow for upgrades from a release to
the next or from an LTS release to the next LTS release.

The plan here is to change that, so that a user of Ubuntu 12.10 could
directly update to Ubuntu 13.10 or 14.04 LTS.

This change should make the life of our users much easier and will
ensure that we get to the next LTS with much more reliable and well
tested upgrades.

The Technical Board didn't feel that there would be anything to vote on
at this time and leaves the implementation and testing of this to the
various teams involved (Foundations, QA, Release).

The 3 items the Technical Board has voted on and accepted are considered
as final. We do not expect to have to vote again on any of this and are
just waiting on the implementation of those.

[0] http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2013/ubuntu-meeting.2013-03-18-21.01.moin.txt

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2