request for review of Ubuntu 9.04 RC announcement

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:13:49PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> So part of the premise for the releases.u.c/cdimage.u.c split is that the
> high-profile, heavy-traffic images are published to releases, where they get
> widely mirrored; and the less-downloaded images, constituting a larger set,
> are published to cdimage.  Pointing at cdimage.u.c from the announcement
> seems to run counter to this, and will probably draw far more traffic than
> cdimage is prepared to handle.  Linking it from
> <http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.04/> would have less impact, but I fear it
> would still cripple the server.
> 
> I'm waiting for feedback from James to make sure we have room, but I expect
> we'll publish UNR from releases.u.c instead for the RC, in which case
> there's no need to link to cdimage for it.  Accomodating armel is more
> likely to be a problem, but I'd like to try to squeeze it in as well.

If space is the issue, what about replacing one of the less-downloaded
images on releases?  I expect UNR to be more popular than, say, kubuntu
alternate amd64.

I realize it's late in the day to be making such a change, though.

> The question is, which armel images are to be published?  Are we supporting
> both desktop and alternate images for armel?  Desktop only?  Prior to beta
> there had been no mention at all of images for ARM aside from netboot, and
> at beta we had only a single "custom" desktop disk image available, so I'm
> not sure what the intent is here.  The fewer images we care about
> publishing, of course, the easier it will be to accomodate them on
> releases.ubuntu.com.  But I need to know fairly quickly which images we want
> to highlight, so I can get them prepublished to the mirrors in preparation
> for the RC.  That probably also affects what we say about ARM in the
> announcement.

It should be desktop only (no alternate), and there is no need to try to fit
it on releases (cdimage is most appropriate).

> Assuming for the moment that we're only highlighting the desktop image for
> ARM, I've added the following text to the draft under 'desktop features'.
> This is really very rough, and I would appreciate some help refining it;
> I'm afraid I just don't know what the immediate use cases for the ARM port
> are expected to be, so don't know what we should be emphasizing here.
> 
>   ARM support:  this release of Ubuntu integrates support for the ARM
>   architecture, bringing the same high-quality desktop to an even wider
>   range of energy-efficient systems.

The key points, I think are:

 * Aimed at developers (there aren't actually any laptop form factor devices
   to run this on yet)

 * Community supported

 * List of reference boards which work (I think the Freescale Babbage board
   is the only one on that list at the moment)

 * Installation is complex and not for the faint of heart (there's a wiki
   page for this)

David is the authority on this, but maybe this will provide a head start
until he's awake.

-- 
 - mdz