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

[Micah Gersten]

On 02/28/2013 01:02 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 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. 

I think that people saw this coming as the idea was suggested a while
back in a blog post that I can't seem to find right now.  It was also
said back then that this wouldn't happen until after the 14.04 LTS,
which would have given people another 3 UDSs to sort out details on how
to continue and or migrate to the new way of doing things.  So, with
first the idea that UDS is no longer UDS (now virtual) and second with
what sounds like Canonical not wanting Raring to release as 13.04, I
think there's certainly room to be shocked.  While it seems like it
certainly makes sense for Canonical, the abrupt manner in which it's
being proposed seems most problematic of all, IMHO.

Thanks,
Micah