What does LTS *actually* mean

[Harald Sitter]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 6:17 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
>
> What does support mean at all in respect to a Kubuntu release?  We
> don't spend time fixing bugs in old releases generally.  But if a fix
> is available and is requrested by a friendly user we should do the
> update.

How would a user request a fix though? Usually that is a bug report,
but we have a policy to move upstream reports upstream unless they are
of considerable importance to us. So really there is no forum for the
user to request a fix backport.
On a general note though... should we? Because as I see it, if the
user wants an update for an LTS release then we still need to SRU it
through one or two not-lts releases. So someone will have to invest
some time into verifying the SRU (assuming someone even could do it,
which may not be possible if special hardware is required etc) and I
am going to go out on a limb an say that this someone won't be the
user who wanted to stick with LTS to begin with. As explained in some
other mail, SRUs way too often go south because we are feeling
particularly irie one day and want to fix the world by doing 300000
SRUs and then later someone has to set aside time to do verfiication
in a VM, for releases probably no one cares about to begin with.

> Security fixes from KDE upstream and Qt upstream do get
> updated.

Perhaps that should be the core target? From an Ubuntu POV from what I
understand LTS means enterprise release with a very long time frame
where people can actively push fixes into the release (i.e. the
support time). I failed to find any policy regarding what goes into
LTS and what not or when or why. So at least for Ubuntu LTS seems to
be just that, a SRU target. And if given enough incentive a certain
fix may or may not get backported. Incentive could of course be
business reasons in case someone gets paid to do the SRU, or something
social like when a community member knows a guy who knows a guy who
has a problem with a specific bug in an LTS so that the community
member may be convinced to poke people into getting a SRU going.
Outside this informal incentivation there appars to be no difference
between an LTS release and the regular intermediate releases.
Basically you get security update for a bazillion years and perhaps
occasionally the odd additional bugfix if someone feels particularly
gracious.

>  And we tend to backport new bugfix and feature releases of
> KDE SC and other bits.

That's a general thing though isn't it. Again, LTS is only special in
that we keep doing this for longer than intermediate releases, they
still both get backports during their respective support time spans.

HS