[ubuntu-uk] Release Party for Gutsy?

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 06:45:15PM +0100, Alan Pope wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 22:00 +0100, Josh Blacker wrote:
> > What time is the final iso released? 
> 
> When they say so :)
> 
> When feisty released the ISO was on the site for a couple of days and
> didn't change when the release announcement was made.

There were two factors there, which are the same for every release. I
was kind of amazed at how much some people got upset that we were
telling them we hadn't released yet even though the ISO images were
available.

Firstly, obviously, you don't want to build the final ISO image ten
minutes before release (although we came pretty close with the Warty
preview ...); you want to have plenty of time to test it first. Ideally,
in fact, the release candidate would be identical to the release, though
this has never actually happened.

Secondly, one of the things on the critical path to release is always
getting the ISO images out to mirrors so that Canonical only gets mostly
swamped rather than entirely swamped; thus, we put it in a hidden
directory on releases.ubuntu.com for a while before the actual release
and just symlink it into place near the end. Even after it's symlinked
into place on the main site, we still need to get mirrors to rsync that
update before we can release. This whole strategy is stymied by people
getting excited and telling everyone to download early, before the
announcement goes out; we send out the announcement once we're satisfied
that enough mirrors have got it. So remember, if you tell everyone,
"hey, the images are up, go and download them!" before the announcement
goes out, chances are you're actually delaying the release!

> > Just thinking if you could install a new operating system on your
> > laptop over breakfast it would make good press.
> 
> Or just install feisty and then dist-upgrade to gutsy repeatedly until
> the night before or the morning of the release. 

Not so press-friendly though.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]