On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 11:00 -0400, Etienne Goyer wrote: > On 11-03-30 10:40 AM, Chuck Short wrote: > > I do not have the statistics in front of me, but I believe most of > > users are using LTS releases of Ubuntu. The policy of cherrypicking > > fixes from the development releases does not scale in my opinon. We > > should offer PPAs for users who want to use a new version of for > > example Apache. Or go through the list of packages we support and see > > if we can get it to qualify as a micro release update. > > Agreed. Some mechanism to "modularize" the distribution is in order. > From an end-user perspective, it does no make any sense that you need to > upgrade the OS to run a new version of Apache. I understand why we are > doing this from the distribution perspective, and I know a lot of people > are very attached to the way things are being done now, but it really > baffles people coming to Ubuntu from other platforms at time.
On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to break everyone's servers every month when we update the apache or php version and the config files/features/ABI change and their applications stop working. This is the type of thing that enterprises dread...and is why IE6 took so long to die... Most people in enterprise scenarios that I've seen who use stuff like Apache on other platforms tend to install the latest version once, and stick with that version for the life of the server once it goes into production...foregoing any security updates. In fact, the constant update of Apache to remain secure on Windows is one of the reasons I've seen listed in security audits that recommend either migrating to IIS, which remains at the same version throughout the life of the OS, but gets constant security updates, or switching to Linux to benefit from stable release security updates. Apache may be a bad example here for the type of application that should get updated instead of fixed, as it is not something that is stand-alone enough and updating it would have a great impact on Ubuntu use in enterprise environments. Besides backports, there is also a process to obtain micro-release exceptions. Unfortunately, upstream projects who don't change ABI/config files/features with new versions are the exception and the massive QA effort to test upgrading them in stable releases would be orders of magnitude bigger than backporting a patch to fix a specific issue with a specific test case. Marc. -- ubuntu-server mailing list ubuntu-server@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
