A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 04:45:24PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> 2009/3/9 Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>:
> > On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 01:45:34PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> >> I recently had to disrecommend Ubuntu on servers at work because the
> >> desktop dist-upgrade just isn't up to scratch IME, and that just
> >> doesn't bode well enough for servers.
> 
> > FWIW server upgrades actually tend to be rather simpler in terms of the
> > dependency structures involved, which is the main variable.
> 
> Certainly, but I hope you can understand that a severe lack of
> coherence at the higher levels leads to no confidence in the lower
> ones.
> 
> Read this:
> 
> http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=29888#p29888
> 
> Known brokenness in VirtualBox, that's a Sun employee saying "yeah,
> it's broken. But you're not paying us, so bugger off."
> 
> Guess what? That's why we're going with VMware, as proprietary as it
> is, because VirtualBox may be free but (a) it's shoddy (b) the company
> behind it treats prospective customers with contempt.
> 
> If Canonical wants to sell server support, Ubuntu on the desktop has
> to be visibly more robust in the aspects important to server admins.
> I'm surprised this is disputed to any degree at all.

Sure, I don't dispute it, and it is a real problem that's
well-recognised in Ubuntu that we've been investing in improving.
Nevertheless, I always feel that it's better to offer more information
than the lowest common denominator, as that in itself usually builds
confidence eventually.

I'd expect that people doing serious production server upgrades would
normally try it out on a test server first, which usually helps a bit,
though I realise that it's *much* better for it to just work.

(We've been kicking around some slightly crazy ideas about using
something like aufs to make the "test upgrade and rollback if it goes
wrong" approach as easy as possible ...)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]