Upgrading to 16.04 can render the system permanently broken

[teo teo]

> In fact right now the Software Updater will only ask you to upgrade if
you have enabled it to do so to any new Ubuntu release, but not if you have
chosen to do only for long support ones.

Wait a moment, isn't Xenial an LTS release?
Anyway, that's irrelevant. Non-LTS are not supposed to be some sort of
unstable alpha releases. Also, if one has Ubuntu 15.10 in the first place,
they must have chosen to get non-LTS releases (unless they have changed the
setting later), and one kind of "has to" (meaning is supposed to) upgrade
to 16.04, or they'll have an unsupported EOL release soon.

Or are you telling me that  when you choose to get non-LTS releases, you
also get LTS releases earlier? If that is the case, that's a pretty stupid
design. LTS vs non-LTS is not (or shouldn't be) stable vs beta. You are
supposed to choose to stick to LTS if you don't want to upgrade too often,
and you choose non-LTS if you don't mind being "forced" to upgrade every
six months (otherwise you loose "support") for the benefit of having more
up-to-date software. You are not supposed to be trading off stability for
that. Yes, as a side effect one might expect an LTS to be even more
rock-solid as it becomes old and outdated, but you don't expect a non-LTS
to be a minefield.

Sticking to LTSs only, by the way, means sticking to age-old (compared to
upstream) software, usually full of bugs that are already fixed upstream
but whose fixes will only land to Ubuntu in 5 years, and the version you
are using of any given package is likely to be considered obsolete and not
supported by the upstream maintainers. So the choice is between that
scenario on one side and terribly unstable software on the other? Cool! I
guess I should try some other distribution.


> Apart from that I cannot figure out a way we could prevent that error
from happening at present.

What about shutting down the servers? (I mean, if you cannot figure out how
to retire a release)

> We just require a few more people testing the operating system before
release

And while you don't have that, you need to test them a little more (no, a
LOT more) before release. And if it's not decent-stable by when it was
expected to be, then delay the damn release! You should abandon the
fixed-date release cycle if you actually give a damn about quality.



2016-04-30 1:16 GMT+02:00 Alberto Salvia Novella <es20490446e at gmail.com>:

> Teo Teo:
>
>> I mean, when my computer tells me that there is an upgrade available, it's
>> because it has asked some server, right? Even if it had already stored the
>> response, it still has to download the upgrade from somewhere. So, I don't
>> see the difficulty...
>>
>
> In fact right now the Software Updater will only ask you to upgrade if you
> have enabled it to do so to any new Ubuntu release, but not if you have
> chosen to do only for long support ones. So the malicious upgrade is not
> affecting novel users or large deployments.
>
> And if you have already upgraded to Xenial and found this bug, you can
> repair it by reinstalling the release using a live disk. It sucks a little
> bit, but is still fast and easy for most people.
>
> Apart from that I cannot figure out a way we could prevent that error from
> happening at present. We just require a few more people testing the
> operating system before release, so it is just a matter of good work and
> patience till Ubuntu is popular enough to have some more testers.
>
>
>