reflecting on first UDS session on "rolling releases"

[Rodney Dawes]

On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 17:06 -0800, Allison Randal wrote:
> On 03/05/2013 04:41 PM, Michael Hall wrote:
> > 
> > I think different segments of the community have different ideas of what
> > "stable" means:
> > 
> > Distro devs & power users: "stable" == "things don't break"
> > 
> > App devs, OEMS, NTEU: "stable" == "things don't change"
> > 
> > 
> > I think what we're going for in a rolling release is a release where
> > things change, but don't break.  While an LTS release is one where
> > things neither change nor break.
> 
> It wasn't stated as "you might prefer the LTS, many OEMs do". It was
> stated as "you shouldn't deliver the rolling release to customers". And,
> really, that does seem to fit the discussion threads. It doesn't sound
> like it's possible to deliver a user experience in the rolling scenario
> that would be high-enough quality for System76 to ship directly to
> customers (and many of theirs are power users). Even people who are
> totally on board with "rolling releases" are still calling it the
> "development release".

I think the problem is the use of the word "release" for the rolling
archive.
It's not a release. It's a constantly changing archive, where we have
some
automated testing to try to prevent things breaking. Also, there is a
history
of Ubuntu's 6-monthly releases being perceived as stable, when they
weren't
necessarily. After LTS was introduced, they started becoming more of the
"shake things up a bit in between LTS" releases that we have now, and
while
generally stable as in "things mostly don't break" they have had some
rather
large changes in them from the previous version.

OEMs wouldn't ship rawhide, Firefox nightlies, Windows beta, etc… to
their
users, so why would they do it with Ubuntu?

As far as what Ubuntu OEMs ship to users, System76 seems to be the
exception
more than the rule.

If I were building hardware and shipping it with an OS on it, I'd ship
the
LTS and/or LTS point releases with HWE stack, rather than interim
releases,
and certainly not the rolling archive. With the rolling archive, they
could
ship hardware that works fine one day, and a kernel regression or
something
could slip in unnoticed, and then all their customers with that hardware
might
have a system that won't boot after installing updates the next day.
It's
just a bad plan all around to go that route. I understand they want to
ship
the new shiny, as early and often as possible, but I don't think it's a
feasible plan to do so. If there are certain things they think must get
shipped
to customers, then maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to work more
with
the OEM team at Canonical to get things done, similar to how Dell and
other
OEMs do.