Linux Magazine Criticizes Karmic

[Kevin Hunter]

At 6:35pm -0500 Fri, 06 Nov 2009, David Gerard wrote:
> 2009/11/6 Ari Torhamo <ari.torhamo at gmail.com>:
>> I wonder if the fixes made to Ubuntu after the final release in some
>> point of time will make their way into the ISO images available for
>> download. I tried to find answer for this for a while, but kept getting
>> flooded with unrelated search results.
> 
> As far as I know, the ISOs are *not* kept up to date - except LTS
> releases get a point-release every six months, e.g. 8.04.1 and so on,
> rolling up revisions till then (to save on immediate updates).

That is correct.  Last I read, the reasoning is because of the testing 
that an ISO gets.  It would apparently be *way* too much work to test a 
constantly updated ISO.  This is probably also indicative of a mainly 
human-powered set of test suites, as opposed to a mainly automated set 
of test suites.

The two pages that I'm immediately able to find on this subject:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Automation

One might conclude by the out-of-date nature of these pages that there 
is only so much manpower that a much-smaller-than-MS-company can throw 
at testing.

Tangentially, you'll note some of the comments in /etc/apt/sources.list 
mentioning that only some of the repos get Canonical-backed testing.

Kevin