[PROPOSAL] lock juju down to using charms from LTS and latest release only

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Robbie Williamson <robbie at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>  Plus, for the 14.04 LTS release we would keep
> 12.04 supported for 6 months until 14.10, allowing time for updates.

I'd actually like to be less committed to interim releases.

Every time I bring this up people throw things at me so I might as
well get it out of the way now. :) Charms extend the life of the LTS
by allowing people to build up to date stacks on top of a small,
stable, well supported core. This is a great feature and we should
leverage it by "shoring up" the amount of newly deployable technology
that can run on the LTS.

Therefore I think doing LTS-only support for charms with a "best
effort" on the latest release is the way to go, and continually
improving the charm store for the latest LTS release. Public cloud
providers use the LTS, and as far as OpenStack we have the cloud
archive with full support for the LTS.  From my experience people use
a non-LTS release on servers if

a) Their hardware isn't supported.
b) They have some weird bug with the kernel or something that they
can't sort and moving to a new kernel fixes them.

The HWE stack in 12.04 handles a.), and the backported kernels can
help with b.) So if we take what would be support effort for interim
releases and instead put that into enabling and updating the charms
for that LTS instead we'd allow people to stick to the stable stuff
but play with the latest Rails, Node, Django, whatever.

-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://juju.ubuntu.com