Public bug reported:
I've opened this bug to initiate a discussion about the release
schedule of Ubuntu-server. I believe this could be improved, but this
reflect only my single experience, and I'd therefore be very happy to
get feedback on it :)
Current situation: ubuntu-server has the same release schedule as
ubuntu-desktop. All the software in both branches have the same feature-
freeze time, release day, the two distributions are just putting
different packages together. They are both released every 6 months, with
a LTS every 2 years supported for 3 years and 5 years for the desktop
and server version, respectively.
I think 6 months is a great schedule for desktops; people want to get
the newest software, have a reasonable level of stability, support, and
won't mind spending three or fours hours every six months to upgrade.
However, I see the server world slightly differently. I think that if
someone is managing more than two or three servers, it is highly
unlikely that he will want to upgrade every 6 months. Someone may not
mind to take his laptop down for several hours, but taking an important
service down, and risking an upgrade, is very unlikely to be done on
such a regular basis.
It is also unlikely that someone will move to a platform which will get
supported only for 18 months. I *think* that people who may need non-LTS
versions would need those because they have an important feature that is
not in the LTS version; and that they would only move a few machines to
that version, not the entire parc.
On the other hand, I think that the requirements in terms of stability
are different for servers are different than the requirements for
desktops. Maybe we could find something between the debian "0 bug" goal,
and the 6 months release plan, with very short feature freezes.
My proposition: make only a release every year for ubuntu-server, synced
with the release of ubuntu, while keeping one release every 6 months for
ubuntu desktop. One release out of two would be labeled LTS and get the
5 years support, the other one would get only 18 months/(2 years?)
support.
This would:
- Increase the feature freeze and testing time (double or triple it?),
therefore hopefully increasing the reliability of the system
- Reduce the time spent backporting patches to older packages, as there would
be fewer versions to support; and my bet is that most of the sysadmins are
using LTS versions, or would be happy with one release per year.
- Challenge the "idée recue" (perceived fact) that you shouldn't deploy a LTS
server before it gets its first upgrade (8.04.1).
** Affects: ubuntu
Importance: Undecided
Status: Invalid
--
Change Ubuntu-server release schedule
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/332882
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