LTS and release methodology

[Pär Lidén]

2008/7/8 Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com>:

> There is a 'regression' tag, and we do try to prioritize these on an ad-hoc
> basis, but understand that with such incomplete information, it's difficult
> at best.


Ok, I haven't seen that tag, even on bug bugs where users explicitly say
that is has worked on a specific earlier distribution, such as bug #88746.
Maybe it could be encouraged to be much more widely used?



> This is already our policy; in fact, we delayed the first LTS release for
> that reason.  8.04 released with some regressions, but these were
> considered
> either a) not severe enough to warrant delaying the entire release, or b)
> planned to be fixed with 8.04.1.
>


Ok, I see. Well, then I suppose that I would like either a) the policy to be
enforced more strictly, or b) that it should be communicated in some way
much more clearly that the release is not really stable for production use
yet for many users. For example by calling the release "8.04 Early
Adopters", or something similar. And by the time of 8.04.1, or whenever it
is deemed stable for a sufficiently large user base, the "Early Adopters"
could be dropped.  When the software is released as stable, most people
expect it to be so, and will get disappointed and lose trust in the Ubuntu
releases over time. However, if it is clearly stated that it still contains
too many bugs, trust won't fall, as people get what they had expected. (See
my earlier post for more details.)

The important point is that a normal user should not need to hang out on
forums, mailing list, LP, and so on, to know if the release is stable enough
to use. IMHO, it should be enough to see from the name if the release is
ready-for-use. For me (and probably many others) the name 8.04 Long Term
Support communicates a message that it is so stable.

In short: either change the name of the release, or the release itself.

Regards
Pär
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