On Thursday, April 21, 2011 01:23:52 PM John Rowland Lenton wrote: > On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:29:22 -0400, Scott Kitterman <ubu...@kitterman.com> wrote: > > Go through the tech board (as Landscape did) and show your QA/updating > > process is sufficiently robust to be able to ship needed feature updates > > in *-updates. While this doesn't scale well and doesn't work at all for > > clients without someone working on updating specifically for Ubuntu, for > > Ubuntu One it should be doable. The larger issue is updates to client > > libraries that have other users. > > A few problems with this idea (which I'd be glad to be wrong about): > > * recently we had to upgrade couchdb in lucid for replication to work, > and the upgrade broke replication with the old version (which was the > reason we needed to upgrade), as well as potentially breaking couch > apps that only worked with the older version. What we ended up doing > was putting the fix in backports as the less onerous of the > non-world-breaking options we had. > > * if our projects switch to, say, python 4, then we'd be looking at > shipping python 4 to all supported ubuntus, including LTS'es. > > * it's easy to imagine scenarios where we'd want to ship updated > versions of rhythmbox, banshee or nautilus (and/or any newer > application that integrated with our apis). Much more commonly we'd > want to update plugins to those apps. > > the thing we need is to have as much feature parity as is possible > across all the platforms we support, and that includes across all > supported versions of ubuntu. So if this were already in place and we > were ship a completely new feature in three months time, we'd want lucid > users to be able to use it (without the unity bits, say).
That's what I meant by "The larger issue is updates to client libraries that have other users." It's certainly an issue that needs to be addressed. I think it needs upfront design consideration to minimize the risks of needing to do such changes. If you need to ship such updated versions of multiple packages, -backports is the only in archive approach that I think might work. Due to some work that landed in Natty, I'm going to propose that's enabled by default in Oneiric and later releases. Scott K -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
