[Oneiric-Foundations-Topic] networked client app updates

[John Rowland Lenton]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:29:22 -0400, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> 
> Go through the tech board (as Landscape did) and show your QA/updating process 
> is sufficiently robust to be able to ship needed feature updates in *-updates.  
> While this doesn't scale well and doesn't work at all for clients without 
> someone working on updating specifically for Ubuntu, for Ubuntu One it should 
> be doable.  The larger issue is updates to client libraries that have other 
> users.

A few problems with this idea (which I'd be glad to be wrong about):

* recently we had to upgrade couchdb in lucid for replication to work,
  and the upgrade broke replication with the old version (which was the
  reason we needed to upgrade), as well as potentially breaking couch
  apps that only worked with the older version. What we ended up doing
  was putting the fix in backports as the less onerous of the
  non-world-breaking options we had.

* if our projects switch to, say, python 4, then we'd be looking at
  shipping python 4 to all supported ubuntus, including LTS'es.

* it's easy to imagine scenarios where we'd want to ship updated
  versions of rhythmbox, banshee or nautilus (and/or any newer
  application that integrated with our apis). Much more commonly we'd
  want to update plugins to those apps.

the thing we need is to have as much feature parity as is possible
across all the platforms we support, and that includes across all
supported versions of ubuntu. So if this were already in place and we
were ship a completely new feature in three months time, we'd want lucid
users to be able to use it (without the unity bits, say).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 489 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20110421/e72186bb/attachment.sig>