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

[Martin Pitt]

Loïc Minier [2013-02-28 18:18 +0100]:
> Trying to think in the spirit of rolling, let's try to keep things as
> releasable as possible every day!  :-) 

Indeed, I thought that was the whole point why we are doing a RR now.

> 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.

Yes, agreed. I understood it as "on day X, take the latest
known-working daily".

> >  * 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.)

Agreed about SRU/backports.

As for security, I think we need to make up our minds what that
monthly thing is -- merely a "known good installation media" from
which you keep upgrading, i. e. we only support a RR model, or a
complete "release" which is actually supported for a month. In that
case we basically haven't done anything fundamentally new, we just
shrank the 6 month release process to an one-month one.

> >  * 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

My point is, we should never even have bad installation media on
cdimage. If they fail smoketests, they should not even be published,
or at least not be pointed to with the /current symlink.

> 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.

OK, that seems to suggest that you actually want to do a full release,
not just a monthly installation image.

> 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 be interested in hearing about an actual demand from this,
too. that people can already decide today how often they upgrade
(every day or once per week).

> 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

Can this be made public? At least to me it appears as a nonexisting
page.

Thanks,

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)