[RFC] Proposal to disable Wubi Installs from 12.04 (but maintain the separate .exe)

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Kees,

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 09:27:41AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 05:15:02PM +0100, Rick Spencer wrote:
> > Separating the wubi.exe experience from the ISOs will give us the following
> > important benefits:

> >  1. We will be able to do maintenance and enhancements to wubi outside of
> > the Ubuntu development cycle.
> >  2. Significant reduciton of QA work for an already over-streched QA team.
> >  3. Better overall 12.04 quality, and less stress at release time.
> >  4. We won't get stuck with a poor (or worse) user experience on the CD
> > since is a good chance that wubi will not work properly with Windows 8.

> > I am proposing these changes to the plan because:

> >  1. The key use case for wubi is being able to download and run the
> > installer on Windows, not installing from the ISO.
> >  2. Wubi is difficult to test, so has been difficult to assure that it will
> > meet the quality standards we have set for 12.04.
> >  3. There are no developers treating wubi as their top priorities. This
> > combined with the QA difficulties has historically caused late breaking
> > changes that add stress at release time and frequentily invalidate already
> > executed ISO testing.
> >  4. Most significantly, Windows is changing it's boot system with Windows
> > 8, and it's not clear how wubi will work with Windows 8, if at all.

> How much space is reclaimed on the ISO with the removal of Wubi?

From Rick's mail:

  3. We disable the ability to do a wubi installation from the Ubuntu 12.04
  ISOs. (wubi will remain on the images for the purpose of providing Windows
  users some feedback and functionality if they put a Ubuntu CD into a
  running Windows computer, but won't offer to install).

At this time, we don't expect to be able to reclaim any space on the ISO
with this change.  In the future we may consider splitting the autorun menu
out of wubi.exe to save some space (this is how it was structured
originally), but it's very late in the cycle to attempt such a refactoring
for 12.04.  It's safer to simply disable the "install" option when run from
the CD.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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