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

Scott Kitterman ubuntu at kitterman.com
Tue Mar 20 16:43:15 UTC 2012


On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 09:37:06 AM Steve Langasek wrote:
> 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.

The major limiter in testing is the lack of people with Windows to run tests.  
It seems like based on this proposal there would still be some need for each 
ISO to have Windows based QA testing (although less than before).

Since, with the demise of shipit, the project has moved significantly away from 
pre-printed CDs, I don't see much value in shipping a Wubi variant in order to 
tell Windows users "This isn't the installation method you want."

Based on the discussion so far, I think removing it entirely makes more sense.

Scott K



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