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

[Mark Mims]

Yes, support LTS(es) and leave current as experimental.  I.e., the only
official charms are for LTS.

I'd actually like to go further and take all mention of series out of
the charm name and url.  People care about services, not services wrt
series... it's noise for a large class of users.

Mixed-series environments work well (except on local)... I'll frequently
go to a known-good series/charm combo to mix into a stack no matter what
my default series is for that env.

I'd _ideally_ like to put any series-specific behavior into the charm
itself... perhaps extend metadata to include 'supported-series:'
(implying LTS releases only)... and most importantly, publish test
results for all our official charms against LTS(es).  We should
additionally test those official charms against current/tip release for
charm development even though that's not an officially supported option.


On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 02:37:36PM -0400, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
> 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
> 
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-- 
Mark Mims, Ph.D.
Ubuntu Server Team
Canonical Ltd.
mark.mims at canonical.com
+1(512)981-6467