long term support, multiple kernels, etc

Sorry, I've only now been following this. I'm just going to sumarrize my
input on two points:

- Should server kernel be a different version than desktop?

I don't really think so, but it's not because of the overhead in
maintaining things. My reasoning is that we will constantly see people
comparing stability and hardware support between these two. Last thing we
want is people always saying "The desktop kernel supports my server, but
the server kernel doesn't". Our main support of the server kernel will be
supporting newer hardware. We will constantly be backporting patches from
our desktop kernel, to the server kernel. We will always be working to
make an older kernel support the same hardware as our newer desktop
kernel.

This doesn't sound like a very good plan to me. I also don't think it will
make our users very happy, mainly because our server and desktop systems
will be a bit inconsistent.

For comparison, neither Microsoft nor Apple makes a distinction in their
kernel based on the OS being targeted at the user or the server.
WinXP-Pro/WinXP-Home, OSX and OSX Server. The only difference in these is
performance tuning, bundled software, and some UI changes. Not the kernel.


- Should we support the server for 5 years?

I'm a little leary of this, but I think it can be done. Question is, do we
support the same kernel for 5 years, or do incremental upgrades for 5
years? Almost 5 years ago, 2.2.17 was released. I can't think of that
being such a bad kernel to support. We certainly wouldn't be able to
support newer hardware with it (and generally, if people are still running
a 5 year old OS, they have it running on the same machine, so that isn't a
problem).

What we need though is to be able to pass off these kernels to helpers
once they become > 1 release old. Once the kernel becomes 3-4 years old,
security bugs in it wont be on the front page of slashdot anymore. So
these helpers will need to do quite a bit more research when security
issues are exposed, to see if it applies to these older kernels.

I think this topic needs more discussion at UBZ. The onyl thing I keep
thinking about is that if we release every 6 months, in 5 years, we'll
have 9-10 kernels to support at one time, just for the server.


-- 
   Ben Collins <ben.collins at ubuntu.com>
   Developer
   Ubuntu Linux