Intention to drop Wubi from 13.04 release

[bcbc bcbc]

It's hard to make an informed decision without knowing the usage stats of
Wubi. If it's quite low then I expect there'd be little impact, but if it's
popular then it's taking a low-risk installation method away from users who
might otherwise not have tried Ubuntu. Does Canonical have any statistics
on this?

Re. the bugs. I had a look at "Wubi fails to detect 12.04.2 and 13.04 AMD64
ISO"  https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770 and found that the fix
is a one-liner configuration file change (in data/isolist.ini).

The fix for "13.04 installer doesn't create user account"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704 could be to simply remove the
disk-image installs from 13.04. This again is a two line removal from the
same configuration file.

I've patched and tested both 12.04.2 and 13.04 with these changes to
confirm they work.

Re. Windows 8: that may not be solvable right now, but I expect there are
still many more BIOS-based computers out there than UEFI. And the regular
dual boot for UEFI has many problems as well. Wubi could probably be
smarter about checking whether Windows is booting through UEFI and exit
gracefully prior to downloading the ISO/diskimage.

Regards,
bcbc


On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 5:00 AM, <ubuntu-devel-request at lists.ubuntu.com>wrote:

> Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 12:59:35 -0700
> From: Steve Langasek <steve.langasek at ubuntu.com>
> To: ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: Intention to drop Wubi from 13.04 release
> Message-ID: <20130401195935.GA8965 at virgil.dodds.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Dear developers,
>
> Recent bug reports suggest that the Ubuntu installer for Windows, Wubi, is
> not currently in very good shape for a release:
>
>   13.04 installer doesn't create user account
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704
>
>   Wubi fails to detect 12.04.2 and 13.04 AMD64 ISO
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770
>
>
> Combined with the fact that Wubi has not been updated to work with Windows
> 8
> (bug #1125604), and the focus on mobile client over desktop, the
> Foundations
> team does not expect Wubi to be in a releasable state for 13.04.
>
> I am therefore proposing to drop Wubi from the 13.04 release, starting
> immediately with the upcoming Beta.  This will save our testers from
> spending their time testing an image that will not have developers working
> on fixing the bugs they find, and spares our users from using an image for
> 13.04 that is not up to Ubuntu's standards of quality.
>
> If someone is interested in taking over the maintenance of Wubi so that it
> can be released with 13.04 (or if not with 13.04, then with a future
> release), I would encourage them to start by looking at the abovementioned
> bugs and preparing patches, then talking to the release team.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> 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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