[Oneiric-Foundations-Topic] networked client app updates

[James Westby]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:23:52 +0100, John Rowland Lenton <john.lenton at canonical.com> wrote:
> * if our projects switch to, say, python 4, then we'd be looking at
>   shipping python 4 to all supported ubuntus, including LTS'es.

I can see why you would want to do this for ease of support, but it's
common for projects to support several versions to avoid this
requirement.

In addition, making a change like this would likely have effects far
beyond u1, in order to allow u1-on-lts to use a Python version that may
not have been available when it was released.

> * 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.

Why would you want to upgrade the apps themselves?

This seems to be getting away from what I thought was the original
question in the discussion, and in to the more general territory of
wanting to push new stuff in to released versions, and perhaps it is
worthwhile to separate those discussions if possible?

> the thing we need is to have as much feature parity as is possible
> across all the platforms we support,

This seems to be a core point of contention. Perhaps you could explain
why feature parity across versions of Ubuntu is important to your team.


As I understood the original question it was how to update client code
to keep it in sync with changes that the server makes. It would be
possible to do that in order to keep old features working and not enable
new features on the old releases. A desire to push new features in to
old releases is valid, but seems to be a different question to me, and
not one that has a lot to do with the code in question being a networked
service client.

Thanks,

James