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

[Kaj Ailomaa]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:31:49 +0100, Rick Spencer  
<rick.spencer at canonical.com> wrote:

> = tl;dr =
> Ubuntu has an amazing opportunity in the next 7-8 months to deliver a  
> Phone
> OS that will be widely adopted by users and industry while also putting
> into place the foundation for a truly converged OS.
>
> To succeed at this we will need both velocity and agility. Therefore, I  
> am
> starting a discussion about dropping non-LTS releases and move to a  
> rolling
> release plus LTS releases right now.
>

I think what the community is concerned about (flavors, devs and users) is  
stability, and the ability to influence the quality of the releases. There  
aught to many ways to achieve this. Here are three points I'd like to make  
on behalf of Ubuntu Studio

  * Have more than one layer, repo-wise, making sure a non-devel rolling  
release is less agressively updated. Particularly some system critical  
packages can cause a lot of pain, if they present regressions/bugs, such  
as the kernel, core system libs and graphics related things. A more  
experimental repo could be used for the developers, and act as a buffer  
for the "stable" repo. This is not news, Debian does something like this,  
and I suppose it is just a smart way to go about things.
  * Flavors will want to have some influence in what is accepted into a  
"stable"-ish rolling release repo. That may actually not be a big amount  
of packages in the end, if they are fine to publish, but I can't speak for  
all the flavors, or other interest holders. Ubuntu Studio is dependant on  
Xubuntu for the desktop, while itself mostly focused on multimedia  
packages, and possibly most of those packages aren't important for anyone  
but Ubuntu Studio and their kind of user base - as an example.
  * I've yet to understand the benefit of monthly shapshots. If Ubuntu  
wants monthly's, I could imagine other flavors wants their own custom  
snapshots. The ability to make custom releases, which are quite useful,  
especially for a live media. And, as has been stated, a user could turn  
off anything but security updates, so a snapshot does fill a purpose. A  
snapshot would then be a planned mini-release.