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

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 06:26:08PM +0000, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 09:53:12AM -0800, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> >    I'm excited about this announcement!

> I remember when Canonical did discussions in Ubuntu not just announcements
> to it.

The subject of this thread is "Let's discuss".  You might know that Scott
does not speak for Canonical, so him referring to it as an announcement does
not make it one. ;-)

Of course, there are some elements of this that are entirely for Canonical
to decide.  For instance, it's Canonical's decision whether or not it's
going to fund security support for 6-monthly releases.  As ScottK mentions
up-thread, it's doubtful whether anything can be called a "supported"
release without security support; so if Canonical isn't going to provide
that 18-month security support for interim releases, does it make sense to
have those releases?  The latter is certainly something for the Ubuntu
community to decide; for my part I think the "correct" answer is obvious,
but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to discuss it.

And for the avoidance of doubt, the calculus here is that providing security
support for monthly snapshots, which will at any given time have no more
than 1 month's delta from the devel release, will require substantially less
manpower than providing security support for the interim releases.  So this
isn't a matter of Canonical trying to say "we're willing to do the work this
way but not that way" in order to force the community to take the decision
that Canonical wants, it's a real question of reducing maintenance costs.
If it turns out that monthly snapshots aren't the right way to support the
community (of both developers and users), there's room for discussion of
what the right way is.

-- 
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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