Perhaps it would be wise to open #Ubuntu-LTS?

[Jason Ribeiro]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 5:06 PM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad
<joerlend.schinstad at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I have to disagree with this proposal mainly because there aren't too many
>>> release-specific issues that pop up in #ubuntu that aren't in the release
>>> notes.  #ubuntu+1 deals with issues specific to using an unstable version,
>
> Many more release-spesific issues are on the wiki and help, and on
> blogs and diverse ubuntu-related sites on the internet. What's your
> point; are we going to tell users to RTFM?

I just meant that questions answered in release notes are easy for any
helper to answer whether or not they have touched an LTS recently.  So
I don't count these as questions that require recent LTS usage and
knowledge.

> The desktop has changed rather dramatically over the last few
> releases, and will probably change even more in the releases to come.
> Applications are changed too. Hardy still used Pidgin as the default
> IM client, didn't it? I certainly don't remember the GUI of Pidgin by
> heart anymore, so I wouldn't be of much use. Ekiga? Permissions to
> shutdown the computer even if other people are logged in? There are so
> many things about hardy I can no longer remember. When 12.04 is
> released, we won't have statusbars and we'll have windicators,
> application transient notifications, etc. The panels, if they're still
> there, will have changed dramatically. I certainly won't remember the
> details of how the panels were setup in lucid. No way. Some very
> hardcore helpers run different versions of Ubuntu in virtual machines
> so that they can help people with old desktop installs, but they're
> few and far between.

But do these questions actually get asked?  And if they are, is the
wiki not capable of handling them?  Usually, someone asks how to do X
and I point them to the wiki page on doing X, which contains
instructions for all supported versions.

I'm trying to think of (or remember reading) questions that require
actual troubleshooting and lts-specific knowledge.  Not all of the
things you listed fit this category (certainly the permissions
question counts though) and the fact I'm having trouble coming up with
more is what makes me doubtful about the usefulness of a #ubuntu-lts
channel.