Can we include HWE in the release version?

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 6 April 2016 at 21:35, Bryan Quigley <bryan.quigley at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The naming scheme of just  "Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS" is no longer
> meaningful when it comes to determining what kernel/mesa/xorg you are
> on.   It's also confusing to many users what 14.04.4 actually means
> and it makes determining if you are supported more difficult [1].
>
> I propose for 16.04 we change it so that the HWE# is included in the
> version, so it's trivial to determine the support level.
>
> So for example, if we had done this for 14.04 we would have releases like:
> Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS - Everyone up-to-date with stock kernel
> Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS HWE15.04 - Out of date with vivid kernel
> Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS HWE15.04 - Up-to-date with vivid kernel
> etc
>
> This does mean we could decide to provide downloads for both (we do
> have some demand for this):
> Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Stock kernel)
> Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS HWE1510 (Wily HWE)
>
> And now we can differentiate between them in the same way on the
> download site as in an installed system.
>

I am not sure what problem you are trying to fix.

First of all point releases are only installation media, and not the
packages archive.

We do provide installation media for past point releases, each one
with different HWE packs on them. These are all available for download
and installation from.

In general, we do not move people to next HWE stack, it's a manual
action until upgrade to next LTS. And from packages archive point of
view, they are all supported and available from the
archive.ubuntu.com.

We do not provide snapshot archives for point releases, thus it is
simply a matter off "did you dist-upgrade to everything that's
available in -security & -updates", regardless of the HWE stack one is
running.

All stacks are supported, and in theory, from any stack one should be
able to dist-upgrade to the next LTS and get the new stock kernel. I
do not believe we roll people from one HWE to the next within an LTS
release, so it is simply a mater of which installation media was used,
and/or which HWE packs one chose to install afterwords.

For trusty, the intermediate hwe stacks will go out of support, after
16.04.1 is released and thus LTS -> LTS upgrades enabled, and the
expectation there is for people to upgrade to 16.04.1, and most people
will / do.

--
Regards,

Dimitri.