What does LTS *actually* mean

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 12:38:45PM +0100, Harald Sitter wrote:
> 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.

We should evaluate any bugs to check if they are of considerable
importance to us before moving upstream.  In reality someone is more
likely to ping on the mailing list or irc.

> 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.

Generally they should be kept to a minimum except in the current stable release.

> > Security fixes from KDE upstream and Qt upstream do get
> > updated.
> 
> Perhaps that should be the core target?

Yep

Jonathan