Kubuntu LTS

[Richard A. Johnson]

On Thursday 20 December 2007, Jonathan Jesse wrote:
[...]
| Ok confused on this.  Are we shipping a LTS version of Kubuntu and a
| non-LTS version of Kubuntu?  After reading Rich's (nixternal) blog I'm even
| more confused.

Kubuntu 8.04 will not be LTS, unless after all of this hoopla something 
changes. Honestly, I do not see why the KDE 3.5 release can't be LTS, but as 
Jonathan said, that is Canonical's calling.

[...]

| I think we are doing a disservice if we aren't doing a LTS version.  Can
| someone help me out?

If we were to continue to redirect 100% of our efforts to KDE 3.5, come this 
time next year, we will be so far behind the rest of the distributions 
pushing KDE 4. We, Kubuntu Development Team, do not have the resources to do 
both a KDE 3.5 LTS release as well as a KDE 4 release at the same time. We 
cannot afford to neglect KDE 4 as a distribution. If we were to neglect it 
now, we could never catch up to distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE, and 
others who are just swarming with developers.

The LTS release only means that for the next 3 years, there will be security 
updates, and I have a feeling that even if Kubuntu 8.04 didn't have an LTS 
release, we would support security issues in time.

Dropping the LTS tag could be a marketing ploy, which honestly wouldn't be a 
bad idea and something I would support. If we were to continue trying to bust 
our humps trying to produce both KDE 4 and KDE 3.5 side-by-side, there is 
that chance that due to limited resources we could produce a not-so-great 
release, and I am sure this could worry Canonical's best interest.

I am sure that if this was Canonical's decision, they did their homework and 
spoke with any clients and/or customers which currently hold a Kubuntu 
support contract, and they possibly have some further details about how much 
Kubuntu Dapper is currently being used.

No matter the decision we made, people weren't going to be happy. If we went 
and stayed the LTS course, not paying much attention to KDE 4, come time for 
a real KDE 4 release we would have been overwhelmed. At the same time more 
people are interested in KDE 4 more so than KDE 3.5 and LTS.

-- 
Richard A. Johnson
nixternal at kubuntu.org
GPG Key: 0x2E2C0124
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