Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

Loïc Minier loic.minier at ubuntu.com
Thu Feb 28 17:18:06 UTC 2013


        Hey

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013, Martin Pitt wrote:
> This entails also dropping freezes for the non-LTS cycles, or would we
> still have freeze cycles during the monthly cadence?

Trying to think in the spirit of rolling, let's try to keep things as
releasable as possible every day!  :-)  If we really have a bad issue
the day we intend to take a snapshot, then we should:
a) fix it ASAP and
b) take the snapshot from the previous or next day.

>  * What does "support" mean for the monthly snapshots? Hopefully not
>    security updates, SRUs, and backports? That would ruin pretty much
>    all the savings that we do from dropping the interim releases.

Some basic level of security would seem to be needed, but I fear running
a SRU process would be way too heavy (and probably technically complex
too).  (Backports seem of course unjustified for a month.)

That said, if snapshots are monthly, some of the lowest priority
security fixes might not be needed for users of the monthly (they would
get them in the next monthly).  Also, security support between last
monthly and current rolling release is less backporting effort than for
multiple 6-months releases.

>  * What is the purpose of these snapshots, i. e. who would use them?
>    If all our published daily images are good enough to install, boot,
>    and get you into a desktop, and we wouldn't do significantly more
>    QA on the "monthly" ones anyway, what makes these images special?

We need to bless "good" installation media in some way; also I expect
the main difference is that people would update every month to a new
version with medium sized changes rather than every day to small changes
or every 6 months / 2 years to a version with insanely big changes.

I don't really know who would/should be sticking to the monthlies after
installation versus using the rolling release though.  I'd certainly use
the rolling release  :-)


I would think we should go over these questions at UDS next week;
Steve Langasek has kindly prepared a blueprint from some discussion we
had on this:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/release-r-monthly-snapshots

    Cheers,
-- 
Loïc Minier



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